One of the biggest names in the world of CRM is Salesforce, with a client roster that includes some of the biggest brands in the world right alongside the average small business owner.
This popular CRM platform comes with some upfront costs. Salesforce can cost from $25 per user per month, to over $300 — their monthly fee will vary depending on the needs and scale of each business. The difference between these two figures is stifling – the smartest move you can make is to get a direct price quote for how much Salesforce (or rival suites) will cost for your business.
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):
Salesforce CRM Pricing
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| Essentials | Professional | Enterprise | Unlimited | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
Salesforce Sales Cloud | Salesforce Service Cloud | Salesforce Sales and Service Cloud | Salesforce Marketing Cloud | |
$25 per user, per mo | $25 per user, per mo | N/A | $400 per mo | |
$75 per user, per mo | $75 per user, per mo | $100 per user, per mo | $1,250 per mo | |
$150 per user, per mo | $150 per user, per mo | $175 per user, per mo | $3,750 per mo | |
$300 per user, per mo | $300 per user, per mo | $325 per user, per mo | By request |
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.
In This Guide:
- Salesforce Pricing Plans — Salesforce offers multiple services, with four plan tiers for each.
- Salesforce Cost Per User — The CRM's scalable pricing works on a per-user basis.
- Salesforce Sales Cloud Costs— This platform helps sales teams manage a daily workflow.
- Salesforce Service Cloud Costs— This platform offers a range of customer service tools.
- Salesforce Marketing Cloud Costs— This marketing platform layers on top of other Salesforce clouds.
- Salesforce Commerce Cloud Costs— This platform's tools help create better online stores.
- Salesforce Pardot Pricing— Salesforce's marketing automation software is an extra cost.
- Does Salesforce Have a Free Plan?— The short answer is no. Here's why.
- Top 5 CRM Price Comparison— See how Salesforce costs compare to other leading CRM providers.
- Salesforce Pricing FAQs — Get answers to some of the most common questions about Salesforce pricing
- Getting Started With Salesforce — Learn how to get the best price for your operation.
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, 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.
- Marketing Cloud, starts from $400 per month, allows you to create one-to-one marketing campaigns.
- Service Cloud, again 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.
- Commerce Cloud, price available on request, helps companies build online shopping experiences.
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.
Salesforce Typical Pricing (per user, per month)
Annoyed by complicated pricing models? Compare the cost of Salesforce plans in a minute or two with our quotes tool
| Essentials | Standout features (Salesforce Essentials) | Professional | Standout features (Lightning Professional) | Enterprise | Standout features (Lightning Enterprise) | Unlimited | Standout features (Lightning Unlimited) | |
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Salesforce Sales Cloud | Salesforce Service Cloud | Salesforce Sales and Service Cloud | Salesforce Marketing Cloud | |||||
$25 per user, per mo | $25 per user, per mo | N/A | $400 per mo | |||||
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$75 per user, per mo | $75 per user, per mo | $100 per user, per mo | $1,250 per mo | |||||
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$150 per user, per mo | $150 per user, per mo | $175 per user, per mo | $3,750 per mo | |||||
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$300 per user, per mo | $300 per user, per mo | $325 per user, per mo | By request | |||||
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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.
Marketing Cloud comes in four tiers — Email, Mobile, and Web Marketing; Social Media Marketing; Advertising; and B2B Marketing Automation — each of which is available at a set per-month price. In contrast, Commerce Cloud comes in just two versions — Salesforce B2C Commerce and Salesforce B2B Commerce.
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.
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.
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.
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.
| Price | Email Marketing | Content Creation | Automation | Einstein AI | Advanced Analytics | Mobile Functionality | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Salesforce Marketing Basic | Salesforce Marketing Pro | Salesforce Marketing Corporate | ||||||
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$400 | $1,250 | $3,750 | ||||||
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 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 three plans — Growth, starting at $1,250 per month; Plus, starting at $2,500 per month; and Advanced, starting at $4,000 per month. All three plans cover up to 10,000 contacts at this base price, 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.
| Monthly charge | Annual bill | Contacts | Custom user roles and permissions | SEO Keyword Monitoring | Competitor Monitoring | Files Hosted | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Growth | Plus | Advanced | ||||||
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$1,250 | $2,500 | $4,000 | ||||||
$15K | $30K | $48K | ||||||
10K | 10K | 10K | ||||||
No | Costs extra | Yes | ||||||
100 | 250 | 1,000 | ||||||
10 | 25 | 100 | ||||||
100 MB | 500 MB | 10 GB |
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.
| Verdict | Data cap in basic plan | Email integrations | Social media integrations | Marketing campaigns | API | Email Support | Live chat support | Phone support | Free Trial Version | Cheapest paid plan Price quoted is per user, per month | Most expensive plan Price quoted is per user, per month | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
BEST FOR SALES | BEST FOR MARKETING  |  |  |  |  |  |  |  |  | ||||
Salesforce | HubSpot | Zendesk | Freshworks CRM | Microsoft Dynamics | Zoho CRM | SugarCRM | Apptivo | Sendinblue | amoCRM | ||||
A market leading CRM for good reason and a great all-rounder – should always be considered first. | A strong CRM system with an attractive free tier and great marketing features | An inexpensive, simple CRM tool that offers the best service features available | 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 | Flexible, friendly and effective, Zoho also starts at low price plans and has a great free trial | A great all-round CRM with a great, easy to understand dashboard | Stripped-down, but a solid CRM platform | A decent choice for email marketing that falls behind in some other areas | Intuitive and simple, amoCRM is a CRM suite that impresses | ||||
612MB/user | 5 documents | Unlimited | Unlimited | 10GB + 5GB/20 users | 1GB base + 512MB/user | 150GB/user | 3GB/user | Unlimited | 200MB/user | ||||
Open | Limited | Open | Open | Limited | Limited | Open | Limited | Open | Open | ||||
$25 | $50 | $89 | $29 | $80+ | $12 | $40 | $8 | $25 | $15 | ||||
$300 | $1,200 | $149 | $79 | $255 | $100 | $150 | $20 | $POA | $45 |
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.
Getting Started With Salesforce
If you want your business to continue to grow, and enable your employees to work with ease, then Salesforce is the CRM for your business. There's a reason they're the most reputable CRM on the market right now.
Still unsure? We appreciate that reading up on all the available CRM's is a time consuming job, but getting the CRM your business needs is important, and getting it wrong can be costly. Fill in our quotes tool to get matched to the best CRM for your business. It only takes a minute, but can save you a lot!
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