Salesforce pricing can vary dramatically depending on what you need it for. Plans can cost from $25 per user per month for standard plans for sales and customer service, to over $15,000 per month for marketing options like Salesforce Pardot. These monthly fees will vary depending on the needs and scale of each business. The difference between these two figures is obviously startling, so the smartest move you can make is to get a direct price quote from Salesforce for how much Salesforce (or rival suites) will cost for your business.
The upfront costs of Salesforce will depend on which plans — or Clouds — you are selecting, and for how many users.
We understand how important it is for business owners to ensure they’ve got the right software, and they’re getting the very best price for it. 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.
If you’re not quite ready to get matched to Salesforce yet, read on to take a look at how the various Salesforce pricing tiers work, in our simple Salesforce cost table (costs are per user, per month):
| Plan | Type | Price | |||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
 | | | | | | | | | | | |
Salesforce Sales Cloud | Salesforce Sales Cloud | Salesforce Sales Cloud | Salesforce Sales Cloud | Salesforce Service Cloud | Salesforce Service Cloud | Salesforce Service Cloud | Salesforce Service Cloud | Salesforce Pardot | Salesforce Pardot | Salesforce Pardot | Salesforce Pardot |
Essentials | Professional | Enterprise | Unlimited | Essentials | Professional | Enterprise | Unlimited | Growth | Plus | Advanced | Premium |
Sales | Sales | Sales | Sales | Service | Service | Service | Service | Marketing | Marketing | Marketing | Marketing |
Salesforce CRM Pricing
Worried about how much Salesforce will cost your business? Compare price plans in a few simple steps with our quotes tool
The most important thing, of course, is to understand which Salesforce tier is correct for your business. Fortunately, after years of research and in-depth analysis, we've done the heavy lifting for you by providing this pricing comparison form. Fill in a few quick questions about your business and we'll match you to the perfect CRM system for your business – saving you time and money.
In the guide below, we take a look at Salesforce's costs to help you figure out which Salesforce plan meets your needs. Plus, we help you decide if this is the right CRM system for your company.
Salesforce Pricing Plans
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. If you want to save time, you can join the dozens of other businesses who have used our quote-finding form and get matched to a pricing plan much quicker this way.
- Salesforce Sales Cloud Costs – from $25 per month, 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.
- Salesforce Service Cloud Costs – from $25 per month, allows for online customer service on any device, and the ability to integrate customer service data with client records in other Salesforce clouds.
- Salesforce Marketing Cloud Costs– from $400 per month, allows you to create one-to-one marketing campaigns.
- Salesforce Commerce Cloud Costs – price available on request, helps companies build online shopping experiences.
- Salesforce Pardot Pricing – from $1,250 per month, this marketing automation platform can streamline a lot of your marketing.
- Salesforce Anywhere Pricing – from $100 per month, this collaboration platform helps ease the transition to remote work.
Sales, Marketing, Service, and Commerce 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.
For those just starting out, however, Sales Cloud is the place to start.
For pricing, Salesforce offers a 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).
You can read more about the Lightning services here. 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.
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.
If, however, you need help with marketing, we'd recommend the Salesforce Pardot platform. This platform is just a simply monthly fee, but prices can up there depending on your needs — it starts at $1,250 per month and goes all the way to $15,000 per month.
We left Marketing and Commerce clouds off the table, since their prices are only available on demand, but you can find them by filling out our cost quote form now.
Annoyed by complicated pricing models? Compare the cost of Salesforce plans in a minute or two with our free quotes tool.
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, which you can evaluate with our price comparison form.
Salesforce Sales Cloud Costs
The Sales Cloud is the most basic 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. AI-powered tools and customizable templates can further streamline and automate daily chores, cutting down on costs and helping agents focus on what matters.
Each of the four tiers offers more features and functionality than the last. Sales Essentials costs $25 per user, per month; Lightning Professional is $75 per user, per month; Lightning Enterprise is $150 per user, per month; and Lightning Unlimited is $300 per user, per month.
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.
| Plan | Price | Users | Storage | Lead scoring | API | Custom reports | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| | | | | ||||
Essentials | Professional | Enterprise | Unlimited | ||||
10 | Unlimited | Unlimited | Unlimited | ||||
File storage: 1GB | File storage: 10GB + 2GB per license | File storage: 10GB + 2GB per license | File storage: 10GB + 2GB per license | ||||
| $15 per user per month | |||||||
Salesforce Service Cloud Costs
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.
The Community 360 feature, for example, allows customer service agents to see if your clients have looked for help already on your website or filed any support tickets. This helps the agents get a better picture of what's going on with any given client.
With Service Cloud, Salesforce says you can reach any customer on any device to meet their needs as they arise.
The costs for Service Cloud are the same as for the Sales Cloud. Essentials is $25 per user, per month, Lightning Professional starts at $75 per user, per month, Lightning Enterprise costs $150 per user, per month, and Lightning Unlimited starts at $300 per user, per month.
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.
| Plan | Price | Users | Email support | Phone support | Live chat support | Social media support | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| | | | | ||||
Essentials | Professional | Enterprise | Unlimited | ||||
10 | Unlimited | Unlimited | Unlimited | ||||
| 1 license | Additional cost | ||||||
| Max 2 accounts | Max 2 accounts | Max 2 accounts | Max 2 accounts |
Salesforce Marketing Cloud Costs
Marketing Cloud, Salesforce's one-to-one marketing platform, integrates with other Salesforce “clouds” for a more complete understanding of your customers' history.
The idea with Marketing Cloud 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.
Marketing Cloud's pricing is a little more expensive than the Sales and Service Clouds. It offers four distinct plans: Basic, Pro, Corporate, and Enterprise. The Basic plan comes in at $400 per month, while the Pro plan is at $1,250 per month, and the Corporate plan rounds it out at $3,750 per month.
In our research, we found that Salesforce Marketing Cloud isn't your best option 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.
| Price | Email Marketing | Content Creation | Automation | Einstein AI | Advanced Analytics | Mobile Functionality | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| | | | ||||||
Salesforce Marketing Basic | Salesforce Marketing Pro | Salesforce Marketing Corporate | ||||||
Salesforce Commerce Cloud Costs
Finally, the Commerce Cloud helps businesses build better online buying experiences for their target audience: If it's a consumer-facing business, the B2C Commerce solution is the best option, and if it sells directly to other businesses, the B2B Commerce cloud is the best tier.
B2C Commerce allows for one-touch payment, customer segmentation, social integrations, mobile-responsive design, merchandising tools, marketing tools, and management features for product, pricing, and catalog. Pricing for the service is customized based on gross merchandise value.
B2B Commerce's core features include customer and segment catalog entitlements, pricing guided by customer and segment specs, multi-account and contract ordering, multiple payment methods, shipping to multiple locations in a single order, and real-time dashboards and reports. Pricing is again only available through a custom quote, and Salesforce uses order volume to determine their pricing.
Salesforce is the leading name in CRM software for good reason, and has separate sales-focused and customer service-focused packages. Granted, its many-tentacled software options can be overwhelming, but the company offers plenty of supporting databases, documents, and live or virtual training options to help you conquer the learning curve.
Most usefully, Salesforce can give you a tailored quote for the size and needs of your business. Once your team understands the services and their costs, the incredible customization will become a strength. Salesforce provides great overall value that can boost sales and retention.
- Established: 1999
- HQ: San Francisco, Ca, U.S.
- Only available as SaaS
- Easy to navigate
- Functionality range can be overwhelming
Salesforce Pardot Pricing
Salesforce acquired the marketing automation service Pardot in 2012, and now offers it as an add-on for Salesforce users. The 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.
Pardot 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.
Salesforce Pardot 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 Pardot 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 Salesforce Pardot. Save time and money by taking a minute to fill out our free, no-commitment form right now.
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 Pardot pricing and benefits page to get the full breakdown.
| Plan | Price | Users | Storage | Email marketing | Social marketing | Content marketing | Paid marketing | Omnichannel features | Contact limit | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| | | | | |||||||
Growth | Plus | Advanced | Premium | |||||||
Unlimited | Unlimited | Unlimited | Unlimited | |||||||
100 MB | 500 MB | 10 GB | 10 GB | |||||||
10,000 | 10,000 | 10,000 | 75,000 |
Salesforce Anywhere Pricing
If your team has gone remote during the pandemic, you might be in need of some kind of collaboration platform. With Salesforce Anywhere, you can connect with your team in a meaningful way at a reasonable cost.
Salesforce Anywhere costs $100 per user per month on top of other Salesforce plans, and allows for 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 – 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.
There are plenty of great Salesforce alternatives to choose – it isn’t the only name in the game. Here's a quick pricing breakdown of five popular CRM platforms, including Salesforce.
Top CRM Price Comparison
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:
Hubspot – Best for marketing
When it comes to marketing, you can't beat Hubspot. With its Marketing Hub — starting at $45 per month and offering a great free plan — you'll be able to manage your marketing efforts from a single hub. Email, content, paid, and social are all available with this platform, as well as some robust omnichannel features that can make your whole setup infinitely easier.
Pros
- Highly scalable with four major marketing channels
- Vast functionality across all feature sets
- Provides product onboarding service
Cons
- Requires larger investment
- Limited organizational tools
- Almost no team infrastructure features
Zendesk – Best for customer service
For customer service, we highly recommend Zendesk for your business. This platform offers a whole bunch of pricing plans and options — starting at $19 per user per month — so you can cater the cost to your particular needs. Zendesk offers the most built-in communication channels on the market, as well as some great perks like offline customer service options and ticketing functionality.
Pros
- Open API for unlimited customizability
- Great security, reporting, and customer support options
- Lots of infrastructure to manage teams
Cons
- No organizational tools like calendar or task manager
- SLA support and surveys not available in cheapest plan
Zoho CRM – Best for sales & small businesses
Obviously, Salesforce is known for its sales platform, and if you can afford the cost and have a bigger team, we definitely recommend going with Salesforce. Still, Zoho CRM provides a great sales platform that can handle your needs at a lower price, starting at $14 per user per month and offering free plan to try, too.
Pros
- Free 30-day trial
- Fully customizable dashboard and interface
- Includes sales, marketing, and service functionality
Cons
- Potentially not suitable if you have simple needs
- No spam prevention on web forms
Getting Started with Salesforce
Still unsure? When budget is tight and you need to make sure you've got the best possible deal, you want all the facts. Reading up on all the available CRM's is a time-consuming job, but getting the right CRM for your business needs is important, and getting it wrong can be costly.
For a quick price comparison, fill in our quotes tool and receive exact prices matched to your business requirements. It only takes a minute but can save you a lot!
As far as value for money is concerned though, Salesforce does offer a robust features package as well as impressive support options, so you're definitely getting some serious bang for your buck.
However, it's always important to consider exactly what you need CRM software for at your business before making a decision, and Salesforce may not always match those needs, which is why a little bit of research on other CRM providers can go a long way.
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