The Salesforce Chrome Extension is an Addin for Gmail and is available for Free with your Sales Cloud License.
Salesforce Inbox is an additional charge and commonly referred to as Salesforce Inbox Premium.
Both of these solutions from Salesforce are designed as a Productivity Assistant for Salesreps. Which include things like Salesforce Account/Contact lookup, Search, and also the ability to push Events and Emails to Salesforce. Both are also Client Side Plugins which has its own issues. Client side plugins are inherently more prone to problems than Server side integrations.
All that said we believe there is value to a Rep by installing these Plugins to GMail, they give you access to Salesforce data where you work most. We would encourage every rep install this Addin.
If you are looking to get 100% consistency around Contact, Email and Calendar logging into Salesforce you really need a Server to Server Connection that applies smart logic to all your communications. This is where SalesDirector.ai’s Autoscribe Product comes into play.
Autoscribe is a pure Background Service, without any interface that works with Gmail, Office 365 or Exchange, scans all the mailboxes for activity and creates new contacts, updates existing ones, logs incoming and outgoing emails to the right Accounts, Contacts AND Opportunities / Opportunity Contact Roles.
Get a Demo today and see how Autoscribe works in harmony with Salesforce and other Salesforce Addins.