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Salesforce pricing starts at $25 per user, per month for its Sales Cloud and Service Cloud platforms, as well as the small business Starter Suite plan that offers marketing, sales, service, and commerce in on service. The Marketing Cloud, on the other hand, starts at $1,250 per month. The dramatic difference between the two is typical of most CRM pricing structures, so don’t let it put you off.
That said, Salesforce pricing is so expansive and sometimes confusing, but we’re here to help. We’ll explain how much Salesforce costs in this guide, but you can also get a direct price quote from Salesforce to see the price for your exact business needs.
The most popular Salesforce platform is the Sales Cloud, which is why we’ve outlined its pricing in the table below, but you can keep scrolling to learn about all the other Salesforce pricing options for your business.
| Plan | Price Billed annually | Best for | Users | Storage | Lead scoring | API | Custom reports | Advanced forecasting | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| BEST FOR SMB  | | | | | |||||
| Starter Suite | Professional | Enterprise | Unlimited | Einstein 1 Sales | |||||
| Small businesses | Sales forecasting | Customizability | Generative AI features | Third party integrations | |||||
| 325 max. | Unlimited | Unlimited | Unlimited | Unlimited | |||||
| File storage: 1GB | File storage: 10GB + 2GB per license | File storage: 10GB + 2GB per license | File storage: 10GB + 2GB per license | File storage: 10GB + 2GB per license | |||||
| | | | | | |||||
| | $15/user/month | | | | |||||
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When it comes to determining the best price your business can get for Salesforce, or any software, the most important thing is to understand which pricing plan is sufficient for your exact business needs so you’re not overpaying for features you won’t use.
That’s why we’ve created our unique quote matching tool – it takes seconds to fill out but can save your business time and money. Last year, we helped thousands of businesses like yourself find the right services and products. Fill in a few quick questions about your business and we’ll match you to the best solution.
Salesforce CRM Pricing Plans: At a Glance
Sales, Marketing, and Service are the primary clouds Salesforce offers. Beyond that, the company has a variety of other services, including a development platform for building Salesforce-powered apps, online forums connected to CRM data, and more. Here’s a simple breakdown of each service’s features and costs:
- Salesforce Sales Cloud – is the company’s basic CRM system; it includes all the basics you need for client management, including client records, lead tracking, deals, notes, and more. Its prices start from $25 per month
- Salesforce Service Cloud – allows for online customer service on any device, and the ability to integrate customer service data with client records in other Salesforce clouds. Its prices also start from $25 per month.
- Salesforce Marketing Cloud Engagement – allows you to create one-to-one marketing campaigns, and its prices starts from $1,250 per month.
- Salesforce Marketing Cloud Account Engagement (Formerly Pardot) – is a marketing automation platform can streamline a lot of your marketing. Prices for the service start from $1,250 per month.
- Salesforce Quip – is a collaboration platform that helps ease the transition to remote work. Its prices start from $100 per month.
To help you fully understand all this pricing, we at Tech.co tested out the Starter Suite, which includes core tools included in all of the Salesforce plans, including the updated interface that took effect in July 2024.
Keep scrolling to work out for yourself which Salesforce price plan might best meet your needs. We’ll look at Salesforce’s costs for each tier and product. Plus, help you decide if this Salesforce is the right CRM system for your company, or if an alternative might offer you better value.
Which Salesforce Plan Is Right For Me?
For those just starting out, however, Sales Cloud is the place to start.
For pricing, Salesforce offers a wide variety of pricing levels. Essentials is for teams of five or less and applies only to the Sales and Service clouds. As you go up in pricing tiers, Salesforce becomes more customizable and adds higher levels of support.
There’s also Lightning Professional, Lightning Enterprise, and Lightning Unlimited. The Lightning suite of services all use a different user interface than the classic versions of these plan tiers but offer the basically same features (albeit with a few new productivity tools – it also just looks nicer, in our opinion).
We’ve got a full guide to Salesforce Lightning if you want, but ultimately, while the “Lightning” name can be a little confusing, the services it offers are just a mildly revamped version of the services we discuss here and come with the same benefits and price tags.
Salesforce Pricing Plans: In Depth
Salesforce divides its various services into what it calls “clouds.” Unsure about what service your business might need? Tired of the ambiguous pricing models of business software? We get it – comparing the different pricing plans is confusing and it can be extremely costly should you get it wrong.
To learn the ins and outs of Salesforce pricing plans – and their respective features – read on, or jump to different plans using the links below:
| Plan | Price Billed annually | Users | |||||||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Sales Cloud | Sales Cloud | Sales Cloud | Sales Cloud | Service Cloud | Service Cloud | Service Cloud | Service Cloud | Service Cloud | Marketing Cloud - Engagement | Marketing Cloud - Engagement | Marketing Cloud - Engagement | Marketing Cloud - Account Engagement | Marketing Cloud - Account Engagement | Marketing Cloud - Account Engagement | Marketing Cloud - Account Engagement |
| Starter Suite | Professional | Enterprise | Unlimited | Starter Suite | Professional | Enterprise | Unlimited | Einstein 1 Service | Pro | Corporate | Enterprise | Growth | Plus | Advanced | Premium |
| 325 max. | Unlimited | Unlimited | Unlimited | 325 max. | Unlimited | Unlimited | Unlimited | Unlimited | 15 | 45 | 100 | Unlimited | Unlimited | Unlimited | Unlimited |
If you want to save time, you can join the dozens of other businesses that have used our quote-finding form and get matched to a pricing plan much quicker this way.
How much does Salesforce Sales Cloud cost?
Salesforce Sales Cloud offering four different pricing plans, with each offering more features and functionality than the last. Sales Essentials costs $25 per user, per month; Lightning Professional is $80 per user, per month; Lightning Enterprise is $165 per user, per month; Lightning Unlimited is $330 per user, per month; and Lightning Unlimited+ is $500 per user, per month.
The Essentials plan is definitely reserved for smaller companies that don’t need a lot of advanced functionality, but still want to take advantage of Salesforce analytics, which are available at every price point.
We were able to create and thoroughly customize sales dashboards in the analytics tab of Salesforce. Source: Tech.co testing
As is often the case, the closest competitor to Salesforce Sales Cloud is the HubSpot Sales Hub, which offers many of the same features at a slightly lower price (starting at $23 per user per month). You are required to have at least two users though, so starting price is actually a minimum of $45 per month.
Salesforce is a good option, but it isn’t the best CRM for sales, according to our research. That honor goes to Zoho CRM, which offers lots of features but at a reasonable price point that won’t scare off smaller businesses. Salesforce does, however, offer some of the most robust sales dashboards on the market.
| Plan | Price Billed annually | Best for | Users | Storage | Lead scoring | API | Custom reports | Advanced forecasting | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| BEST FOR SMB | | | | | |||||
| Starter Suite | Professional | Enterprise | Unlimited | Einstein 1 Sales | |||||
| Small businesses | Sales forecasting | Customizability | Generative AI features | Third party integrations | |||||
| 325 max. | Unlimited | Unlimited | Unlimited | Unlimited | |||||
| File storage: 1GB | File storage: 10GB + 2GB per license | File storage: 10GB + 2GB per license | File storage: 10GB + 2GB per license | File storage: 10GB + 2GB per license | |||||
| | | | | | |||||
| | $15/user/month | | | | |||||
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Salesforce Sales Cloud features
The Sales Cloud is the most popular Salesforce software. The main features will allow every employee in a company to easily manage their accounts, contacts, leads, and opportunities, all from a single interface. These basic features are available in the Essentials plan, but you won’t get much else when it comes to advanced features.
To unlock sales forecasting, for example, you’ll have to pay a bit more with the Professional plan. Additionally, this plan allows users to access the Salesforce mobile app while offline, so you can still perform tasks and stay up-to-date, even without a connection.
Since our last update...
Salesforce is known for frequently updating its platform in response to customer complaints and basic bugs. In its Summer ’24 update, for example, the CRM made it possible to draft personalized sales emails with Einstein, the AI service from the platform. The new feature uses sales data to provide unique insights for specific contacts, so you can draft emails that really reach them in a personalized way.
If you’re looking for a CRM that can automate workflows and processes, the Enterprise plan is going to be your best bet, as these features are unlocked at this tier. You also get advanced pipeline management, allowing you to track more key metrics, recognize changes, and de-risk deals for your sales business. AI Einstein features are also available with this plan, but only as add-ons, so you’ll have to pay a bit extra.
The Unlimited plan is where you can unlock the built-in AI features for free, which provide in-depth lead and opportunity scoring, as well as insights into customer interactions and deal health at your business.
Finally, the Unlimited+ plan is really only designed for larger businesses, as it unlocks the Slack integration with Salesforce for no additional cost, as well as additional knowledge and FAQ guides to help with customer support.
Check out our Salesforce review for more information
The costs for Service Cloud are the same as for the Sales Cloud. Essentials is $25 per user, per month, Lightning Professional starts at $80 per user, per month, Lightning Enterprise costs $165 per user, per month, Lightning Unlimited starts at $330 per user, per month, and Lightning Unlimited+ costs $500 per user, per month.
Like the Sales Cloud, the Essentials plan is aimed at smaller businesses interested in getting started with Salesforce but not financially equipped to utilize the advanced features. Fortunately, Salesforce allows for easy scaling, with each plan providing more features that build your service business up.
While Salesforce Service Cloud is a respectable option when it comes to customer support platforms, our research showed that Zendesk is actually the better option, depending on your needs. It’s more affordable, easier to use, and allows support across virtually every channel you can imagine, whereas Salesforce is missing some, like phone support.
Read our full Salesforce vs Zendesk comparison for more information
Salesforce offers great service functionality too, with each case providing us with plenty of information to help a customer. Source: Tech.co testing
| Plan | Price Billed annually | Best for | Users | Email Comms Channel | Phone Comms Channel | Website Live Chat Comms Channel | Social Media Channels | Generative AI features | Team Management Features | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| | | | | | ||||||
| Starter Suite | Professional | Enterprise | Unlimited | Einstein 1 Service | ||||||
| Small businesses | Team collaboration | Advanced reporting | Service personalization | Slack integration | ||||||
| 325 max. | Unlimited | Unlimited | Unlimited | Unlimited | ||||||
| | | | | | ||||||
| Requires Telephony Integration | Requires Telephony integration | Requires Telephony Integration or Service Cloud Voice Add-on | | | ||||||
| Yes – but limited to 1 license | | Additional cost | | | ||||||
| Yes (Maximum of 2). | Yes (maximum of 2) | Yes (maxium of 2) | Yes (maximum of 2) | Yes (maximum of 2) | ||||||
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Salesforce Service Cloud features
Service Cloud is a key part of Salesforce’s products. It’s a fully functional customer service platform that integrates seamlessly with Salesforce, putting your customer data at the fingertips of all those in your company that need it. Essentially, Service Cloud allows you to reach any customer on any device to meet their needs as they arise.
The Starter plan is quite basic for Service Cloud, allowing only for basic case, tasks, and knowledge management features, along with opportunity tracking and customizable reporting. For omni-channel routing, which can help teams with customers across the online spectrum, you’ll have to pay more with the Professional plan.
The availability of Einstein AI features is relegated to the Enterprise, Unlimited, and Unlimited+ plans only. Additionally, the functionality will cost extra, running businesses an additional $50 per month for advanced analytics and smart service features.
Salesforce Marketing Cloud
Salesforce also offers a Marketing Cloud, which is made up of a wide range of different platforms, each with their own set of pricing plans. For the average business, there are two platforms that our research shows are the best fit for you: the Marketing Cloud Engagement platform and the Marketing Cloud Account Engagement platform.
As for the difference between the two platforms, Marketing Cloud Engagement is intended for B2C businesses whereas Marketing Cloud Account Engagement is intended for B2B businesses. The difference in the max number of contacts per plan is the key indicator here because Marketing Cloud Account Engagement has a lot less contacts allocated to customers as B2B businesses have less need for a huge library of customer details.
Read on for the pricing information about each of these two Marketing Cloud platforms.
Since our last update...
Salesforce updates its platform regularly, and not just the Sales Cloud. The Marketing Cloud also got a little love in the Summer ’24 update, adding AI-based recommendations and personalized content to customers via the Einstein Personalization. It will help you to create a more custom-built experience for your users in real time.
| Plan | Type | Price Billed annually | Free Trial | Best for | Users | Storage | Email marketing | Content marketing | Contact limit | Custom automation builder | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| | | | |||||||||
| Pro | Corporate | Enterprise | |||||||||
| Marketing | Marketing | Marketing | |||||||||
| 30 days | 30 days | 30 days | |||||||||
| Email marketing | Cross-channel marketing | Running multiple marketing businesses | |||||||||
| 15 | 45 | 100 | |||||||||
| 10 GB | 45 GB | 100 GB | |||||||||
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| 15,000 | 45,000 | 500,000 | |||||||||
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Marketing Cloud Engagement pricing is a little more expensive than the Sales and Service Clouds. It offers three distinct plans: Professional, Corporate, and Enterprise. The Pro plan costs $1,250 per month, and the Corporate plan rounds it out at $4,200 per month. The Enterprise plan requires you to contact Salesforce to get a quote.
In our research, we found that Salesforce Marketing Cloud Engagement platform isn’t the best CRM for marketing, particularly if you’re worried about price. It’s very expensive and outside of extensive data visualizations, doesn’t offer as much as our top pick, HubSpot Marketing Hub. With this robust option, you’ll be able to take care of all your marketing needs from a single hub, including email, social, content, and paid. It’s also quite expensive, but at least you’re getting a lot of bang for your buck.
Salesforce allowed us to customize the platform with custom fields to add to each category. Source: Tech.co testing
Marketing Cloud Engagement features
The Marketing Cloud Engagement platform is Salesforce’s one-to-one marketing platform, which integrates with other Salesforce “clouds” for a more complete understanding of your customers’ history.
The idea with Marketing Cloud Engagement is to meet your customers wherever they are. You can use Salesforce’s platform to send out marketing emails, advertise to them online, send them mobile alerts, and encourage them to land on your e-commerce pages.
Salesforce says this can all happen at scale, giving your customers a more personalized experience without handcrafting every single message that goes out the proverbial door.
For the best AI-powered results, you’ll need to subscribe to the Corporate or Enterprise plans, as the Pro plan does not have AI functionality built in. With these features, you can supercharge your marketing campaign with smart insights to reach and convert customers.
Salesforce Marketing Cloud Account Engagement comes in four plans — Growth, starting at $1,250 per month; Plus, starting at $2,500 per month; Advanced, starting at $4,000 per month; and Premium, starting at $15,000 per month. All four plans cover up to 10,000 contacts at this base price — except for Premium which allows for 75,000 and are differentiated mainly by the features each offers.
If Salesforce Marketing Cloud Account Engagement sounds right for you, or you just want to check out whether it will work for your specific business needs, then you can join the thousands other businesses we helped to get set up with the platform.
You can check out the pricing table below to see a few main differences, though you’ll need to head over to our dedicated Salesforce Marketing Cloud Account Engagement pricing guide to get the full breakdown.
The Salesforce Guidance Center was available at a single click, providing us with helpful tips and full-on guides directly in the platform. Source: Tech.co testing
| Plan | Price Billed annually | Best for | Email marketing | Social marketing | Content marketing | Paid marketing | Omnichannel features | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| | | | | |||||
| Starter Suite | Pro Suite | Growth | Advanced | |||||
| Small businesses | Customization | Email automation | AI-powered features | |||||
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Salesforce Marketing Cloud Account Engagement features
Formerly known as Salesforce Pardot and now referred to as the Marketing Cloud Account Engagement platform, this service streamlines a marketing team’s daily and long-term tasks, from automating all the simple chores to sending custom alerts that can jog agents’ memories to ensure they follow up on all of their clients’ needs.
Marketing Cloud Account Engagement offers an impressive range of features in four main marketing categories: lead generation, thanks to tools covering lead tracking, email, social media, landing pages, and A/B testing; lead management, due to custom-designed engagement and nurturing programs; sales alignment, with tools including customer activity tracking, campaigns, and CRM integration; and, finally, ROI reporting, with metrics tracking tools that cover the whole sales funnel.
You’ll need to grab the Advanced or Premium plans if you’re interested in using artificial intelligence to improve your business. These plans come with Einstein AI built in, so you can reach out to your leads at the perfect moment to ensure a sale is as likely as possible.
How much does Salesforce Quip cost?
If your team has gone remote, you might be in need of some kind of collaboration platform. With Salesforce Quip, you can connect with your team in a meaningful way alongside your Sales, Marketing and Customer Service tasks, while keeping within the Salesforce suite.
Salesforce Quip costs $100 per user, per month on top of other Salesforce plans, and allows for activities including document and spreadsheet sharing, real time updates on team progress, mobile optimization for business on the go, and team messaging to stay in touch easily and effectively.
Does Salesforce Have a Free Plan?
No, Salesforce does not offer a free plan. The cheapest basic plan is the Sales or Service cloud, either one of which starts at $25/user/month.
A few big names in CRM – Apptivo, HubSpot, and Zoho CRM – do offer free plans, although all of them come with one big caveat: a limited feature set. Apptivo’s free plan only supports a maximum of three users, for instance, compared to Salesforce’s minimum of five.
Cost is not the only issue to consider, of course: You also have to decide whether the CRM platform you pick has the right features, integrations, and storage capacity for your needs. Not all CRM systems are the same, and any free option is unlikely to have all the features you’ll need, particularly if you plan to expand your operation in the future.
The Salesforce Home dashboard is a customizable hub that hosted all of the important information we needed for our sales and service business. Source: Tech.co testing
Salesforce Pricing Add-Ons
Depending on your particularly business needs, you might need a bit of added functionality beyond the standard Salesforce experience. Fortunately, the CRM is equipped with a massive library of add-ons that can enable all kinds of business actions.
These add-ons, however, will cost a bit extra. That means that, in addition to paying the Salesforce pricing per user model, you’ll also have to pay a monthly fee per user to include these add-ons.
As for what kind of add-ons are available with Salesforce, the list is extensive, ranging from sales planning and billing growth for the Sales Cloud to feedback management and survey response for the Service Cloud. Make sure your budget can handle all these add-ons before commit, because the price of these add-ons can range from $25 per month to $46,000 per month.
What you’ll notice from the pricing table above is that Salesforce – like pretty much all CRM platforms – charges on a per user, per month basis. Salesforce Essentials for Sales Cloud, for example, charges $25 per user, per month. There’s a set minimum of five users, but no maximum. Sales Cloud and Service Cloud both charge on this per user basis.
For marketing, however, the available plans from Marketing Cloud Engagement and Marketing Cloud Account Engagement both offer standard monthly rate for a set number of marketing contacts. You won’t be charge by the user, but the prices are substantially more expensive than the Sales Cloud and Service Cloud options for that reason.
We were able to email leads directly from Salesforce, but we did have to connect our Gmail or Outlook account beforehand. Source: Tech.co testing
Per-user pricing schemes are typical for business software. It ensures the pricing structure is scalable, so it won’t break the bank for the smallest companies that only need Sales Cloud for a few users, while still charging a fair price for larger companies.
If you need a CRM system for a full five users, you’ll be paying around $1,500 per year for Salesforce. If you’re a small company of 10 users moving up to the Lightning Professional tier, then you’ll be paying about $9,000 per year.
When you’re considering which clouds to pay for, keep in mind the number of current employees as well as how quickly you plan to expand. Keeping the per-user pricing in mind means you’ll always know how much you’ll be paying for Salesforce at any given time.
Annoyed by complicated pricing models? Compare the cost of Salesforce plans in a minute or two with our free quotes tool.
Alternatives to Salesforce CRM
While Salesforce is an undeniably popular choice when it comes to CRM, it’s not ideal for everyone. In fact, given the higher price and the robust nature of the platform, Salesforce can be a bit intimidating for certain businesses. Fortunately, the CRM market is riddled with amazing platforms that can get the job done.
Here are some of our top picks for CRM alternatives to Salesforce that can handle marketing, sales, customer service, and small businesses:
| Best for | Starting price | Most expensive plan | Free plan | Free trial | Verdict | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| | FEATURED PROVIDER  |  |  |  |  |  | |
| In-depth analytics | Automation | Scalability | Customizability | Free plan | Microsoft users | Small businesses | |
| | | | | | | | |
| 30 days | 14 days | Unlimited | 7 days | 21 days | 30 days | 30 days | |
| An incredibly popular and customizable CRM for all businesses, with excellent communication tools | Core CRM features in flexible pricing plans make this one of the best value CRM options for any small business | An easy-to-use and highly scalable platform ideal for growing businesses, with an excellent free plan. | A great all-round CRM with a great, easy to understand dashboard | A highly intuitive CRM that is packed with plenty of features and even has a free plan option | A robust CRM platform that embeds brilliantly with Microsoft products | An attractive option, with lots of features for a low price |
We take our impartial research and analysis seriously, so you can have complete confidence that we're giving you the clearest, most useful recommendations.
After conducting an initial exploration to identify the most relevant, popular, and established CRM tools in the market, we put them through their paces to find out more about their strengths and weaknesses. In total, we analyzed 13 CRM systems, grading them across 84 areas of investigation.
Based on years of market research and CRM product testing, we've established a CRM research methodology to score products, which consists of six main assessment categories and 13 subcategories. This covers everything from the available features and scalability capacity to the product's value for money and much more.
Our main testing categories for CRM systems are:
Features: The functionalities and capabilities provided by the CRM software, such as contact management, lead and opportunity tracking, and task and activity management.
Help and Support: The resources and assistance available to users when they encounter issues or require guidance while using the CRM software.
Customization: The ability to tailor the CRM software to suit the specific needs and processes of the organization, e.g. customizing fields, layouts, and workflows.
Scalability: The ability of the CRM software to accommodate the growth and changing needs of the organization, such as the capacity to handle a growing customer database.
Price: The cost associated with using the CRM software. It includes factors such as licensing fees, subscription plans, and additional charges for add-on modules or features.
Team Structure – Sales CRM: Determining if a platform makes it easier to manage large sales teams, including team dashboards, team hierarchies, and team inboxes.
Usability – Small Business CRM: Assessing the simplicity of the interface, the ease of navigating through menus and options, and the overall user experience.
When it comes to calculating a product's final score, not all testing areas are weighted evenly, as we know some aspects matter more to our readers than others, which are merely "nice to have." After hundreds of hours, our process is complete, and the results should ensure you can find the best solution for your needs.
At Tech.co, we have a number of full-time in-house researchers, who re-run this testing process regularly, to ensure our results remain reflective of the present day.
Verdict: Is Salesforce Worth the Cost?
As you can tell, Salesforce pricing varies dramatically from plan to plan, with options starting at $25 per user, per month for basic sales and service software, all the way to $15,000 per month for more robust marketing tools.
As you can imagine, smaller teams won’t need to pay that much for a comprehensive platform that can get work done. Small businesses should stick to the lower priced Sales Cloud and Service Cloud options, as costs are low and competitive with other platforms. For marketing, Salesforce gets pretty complicated and expensive, and there are better options out there, like HubSpot.
Still unsure about Salesforce pricing? For a quick price comparison, use our free CRM price comparison tool and receive exact prices matched to your business requirements. It only takes a minute but can save you a lot!
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