Salesforce pricing starts at $25 per user, per month for its Sales Cloud and Service Cloud platforms, with more expensive plans getting as high as $300 per user, per month. These monthly fees will vary depending on the needs and scale of your business.
The difference between the above two figures is startling, so the smartest move you can make is to get a direct price quote from Salesforce for how much Salesforce will cost for your exact business needs. You can also use our CRM quote comparison tool to receive quotes from a range of CRM providers, in addition to Salesforce.
The most popular Salesforce platform is the Sales Cloud, which is why we've outlined this in the table below. Scroll down for all of Salesforce's plans and pricing information, including Sales and Marketing solutions.
Plan | Price Billed annually | Users | Storage | API | |
---|---|---|---|---|---|
BEST FOR SMB | |||||
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/user/month | | |
Salesforce's most expensive solutions are its robust marketing automation platforms. Prices for this come in at between $1,250 per month and $15,000 per month, so you can see the price tag can vary wildly depending on exactly what you're looking for.
Worried about how much Salesforce will cost your business? Compare price plans in a few simple steps with our custom quote tool.
Salesforce CRM Pricing
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.
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.
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.
- 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.
- 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.
- Marketing Cloud Engagement Costs– from $400 per month, allows you to create one-to-one marketing campaigns.
- Marketing Cloud Account Engagement Costs (Formerly Pardot)– from $1,250 per month, this marketing automation platform can streamline a lot of your marketing.
- Salesforce Quip Pricing – from $75 per month, this collaboration platform helps ease the transition to remote work.
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.
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).
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.
Plan | Price Billed annually | |||||||||||||||
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Sales Cloud | Sales Cloud | Sales Cloud | Sales Cloud | Service Cloud | Service Cloud | Service Cloud | Service Cloud | Marketing Cloud - Engagement | 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 | Quip Collaboration Software |
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 Marketing Cloud | Salesforce Marketing Cloud | Salesforce Marketing Cloud | Salesforce Marketing Cloud | Salesforce Marketing Cloud Account Engagement (Formerly Pardot) | Salesforce Marketing Cloud Account Engagement (Formerly Pardot) | Salesforce Marketing Cloud Account Engagement (Formerly Pardot) | Salesforce Marketing Cloud Account Engagement (Formerly Pardot) | Salesforce Quip |
Essentials | Professional | Enterprise | Unlimited | Essentials | Professional | Enterprise | Unlimited | Basic | Pro | Corporate | Enterprise | Growth | Plus | Advanced | Premium | Quip |
Salesforce Sales Cloud Costs
The Sales Cloud is the standard 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. It's also one of the few CRM options that allows for sales forecasting functionality across all its pricing plans. 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.
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.
Plan | Price Billed annually | Users | Storage | API | |
---|---|---|---|---|---|
BEST FOR SMB | |||||
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/user/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.
Read our full Salesforce vs Zendesk comparison here.
Plan | Price Billed annually | Users | |
---|---|---|---|
Essentials | Professional | Enterprise | Unlimited |
10 | Unlimited | Unlimited | Unlimited |
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.
Salesforce Marketing Cloud Engagement Costs
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.
Marketing Cloud Engagement's pricing is a little more expensive than the Sales and Service Clouds. It offers four distinct plans: Pro, Corporate, and Enterprise. The Pro plan costs $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 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.
Plan | Type | Price Billed annually | Users | Storage | |
---|---|---|---|---|---|
Pro | Corporate | Enterprise | |||
Marketing | Marketing | Marketing | |||
15 | 45 | 100 | |||
10 GB | 45 GB | 100 GB |
Salesforce Marketing Cloud Account Engagement Costs (Formerly Pardot)
Salesforce acquired the marketing automation service Pardot in 2012, and now offers it as an add-on for Salesforce users. Formerly known as Salesforce Pardot and now referred to as the Marketing Cloud Account Engagement platform, 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.
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.
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. 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 Marketing Cloud Account Engagement pricing and benefits page to get the full breakdown.
Plan | Price Billed annually | Users | Storage | |
---|---|---|---|---|
Growth | Plus | Advanced | Premium | |
Unlimited | Unlimited | Unlimited | Unlimited | |
100 MB | 500 MB | 10 GB | 10 GB |
Salesforce Quip Pricing
If your team has gone remote during the pandemic, 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.
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 Marketing Cloud Account Engagement platform. This option is just a simply monthly fee, but prices can up from there depending on your needs — it starts at $1,250 per month and goes all the way to $15,000 per month.
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.
Alternatives to Salesforce CRM Prices
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:
Verdict | |||||
---|---|---|---|---|---|
SugarCRM | Microsoft Dynamics 365 | ||||
An incredibly popular and highly scalable CRM for all businesses | An extremely solid CRM for all businesses with a great 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 |
HubSpot pricing vs Salesforce pricing
Salesforce Marketing Hub is a competitive, albeit very expensive option when it comes to CRM, but our research found that HubSpot is your best bet in that regard. Both are quite expensive, with the HubSpot Marketing Hub starting at $45 per month, but HubSpot offers a great free plan, whereas Salesforce merely has a 30-day free trial. Simply put, HubSpot is just more accessible to users than Salesforce, particularly when it comes to marketing.
Zendesk pricing vs Salesforce pricing
For customer service, we highly recommend Zendesk for your business as a low-cost alternative to Salesforce. 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.
Zoho CRM pricing vs Salesforce pricing
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. In fact, we found that Zoho CRM is the best option for small businesses, thanks to low prices and still plenty of features.
Verdict: Is Salesforce Worth the Cost?
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!
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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