Our tests found Salesforce is one of the best CRMs on the market, with robust analytics, helpful support tools, and a bevy of third-party integrations for a wide range of customer needs.
We got our hands on the newest interface while testing out the Salesforce Starter Suite plan. This all-in-one solution handles sales, marketing, and customer support functionality, allowing us to discover leads, close deals, and service cases, for just $25 per user, per month.
Salesforce offers a variety of industry-specific “clouds,” like the Sales Cloud and the Marketing Cloud, which offer more advanced features for a higher price, as well as a free forever plan for tiny operations.
Key Takeaways
- Salesforce offers a lot of functionality for lead conversion, although tools for lead communication require paid add-ons.
- In terms of pricing, Salesforce is more expensive than most other CRM solutions, with plans between $25 and $550 per user, per month.
- Salesforce now has a free forever plan, which offers sales and customer service functionality, as well as access to the home dashboard and reporting tools.
- Salesforce is a top choice for security, with tools like SSO, multi-factor authentication, and IP restriction for all plans.
- For scalability, Salesforce provides excellent team infrastructure features, like KPIs, user hierarchy, and task management, so you can grow with the platform.
Pros
- Free forever plan
- Vast data collection combined with customizable reporting tools
- Helpful customer support pop-ups throughout the platform with 24/7 live support
- Varied pricing plans and industry-specific "Clouds" make it very scalable
Cons
- More expensive than industry average of $15 per user, per month
- 24/7 support will cost extra, adding to price
- Robust analytics probably aren't necessary for smaller businesses
- Starter Suite: $25/user/month
- Pro Suite: $100/user/month
- Enterprise: $175/user/month
- Unlimited: $350/user/month
- Agentforce 1 Sales: $550/user/month
- 30-day free trial
Test Summary
We tested the Salesforce Starter Suite and found navigation was intuitive, with useful guidance tips built in. Top features include:
- Analytics: The platform offers customizable dashboards with a wide range of data points, custom reports and sales forecasts (even if it was a bit intimidating).
- Integrations: Salesforce offers third-party integrations that made set up very easy for our team.
- Customer support: Salesforce’s customer support team is reachable via email, phone, and live chat, and the Guidance Center has how-to guides and tips.
Custom dashboards
The Salesforce CRM is known for its analytics tools, and the custom dashboards functionality is why. It’s easy to use, while providing a wealth of reporting options tailored for your business.
You start with an empty page and then add widgets to create the type of visualization you want, and which metrics are tracked. Uploading the text or images you need is easy.
We created and customized a sales dashboard in the Salesforce analytics tab. Source: Tech.co testing
When you’re finished, you’re left with a pristine, professional-looking dashboard that looks so good your design team will assume you’re getting outside help from a third party.
Even better, you can make unlimited dashboards and organize them with folders and filters.
What's new with Salesforce for Spring 2026?
- Agentforce Sales users now have an AI-powered Sales Workspace, a hub for agents, analytics, and predictive insights.
- Agentforce Service users can now monitor customer signals from the Command Center.
- New security restriction: user-authored emails can only be sent from verified domains.
Guidance Center
Click the Guidance Center logo in the upper right-hand corner of your Salesforce interface, and you’ll open a sidebar. This sidebar is filled with helpful guides and articles that can help you use Salesforce more effectively, like “Define Your Pipeline” or “Set Up Accounts.” You’ll also find guidance relevant to the specific page you’re viewing.
Managers can assign learning paths to other team members by scrolling to the bottom of the Guidance Center sidebar to find the Learning view.
The Salesforce Guidance Center was available at a single click. Source: Tech.co testing
Lead management
Salesforce’s comprehensive lead management system lets you create leads with just a few simple steps, manually adding information like contact details, lead status, and campaign history. Even better, when you complete the lead, it automatically adds relevant information into other categories:
- Opportunities
- Accounts
- Contacts
Salesforce lacks meaningful lead capture features, like the social listening and website chatbot HubSpot offers. You won’t get many lead communication features either, such as the website live chat and instant messaging apps provided by Freshsales.
You can, however, email leads in the platform, thanks to integrations with Gmail and Outlook. Just navigate to the customer page and find the email tab, and you’ll be able to draft, edit, and send emails directly from Salesforce. Set up the right AI function and future emails and calendar events can even be logged automatically.
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
Customizability
Salesforce is very customizable beyond just its analytic tools: a home dashboard lets you fully customize what information is available when you enter the system. From sales closed to cases opened, we were able to get a clear picture of our business every time we opened the platform.
The home dashboard lets you pick what’s seen on the primary display. Source: Tech.co testing
Is Salesforce a Good Value for Its Cost?
Salesforce is a premium CRM with a starting price of $25 per user, per month. That’s higher than the $15 per user, per month, industry average, but justified by its superior analytics and customization.
Salesforce Sales Cloud is the most popular version for everyday users.
| Plan | Price Billed annually | Users | Lead scoring | API | Custom reports | Advanced forecasting | Agentforce AI | Try it | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
 | | | | | | ||||
| Free | Starter Suite | Pro Suite | Enterprise | Unlimited | Agentforce 1 Sales | ||||
| Free | $25/user/month | $100/user/month | $175/user/month | $350/user/month | $550/user/month | ||||
| 1 | 325 maximum | Unlimited | Unlimited | Unlimited | Unlimited | ||||
| | | | | | | ||||
| | | Paid add on ($15/user/month) | | | | ||||
| | | | | | | ||||
| | | | | | | ||||
| | | | Paid add-on | Paid add-on | | ||||
| Try Free | Try Salesforce | Try Pro | Try Enterprise | Try Unlimited | Try Agentforce 1 |
Our breakdown of plan costs:
- Starter Suite: $25 per user, per month
- Pro Suite: $100 per user, per month
- Enterprise: $175 per user, per month
- Unlimited: $350 per user, per month
- Agentforce 1 Sales: $550 per user, per month
You get a lot for the cost. For customizability and support, few CRMs are better than Salesforce and the analytics tools are unmatched. If you need a customizable tool that can tackle a whole lot of reporting, Salesforce is still a solid deal.
For more information, read our Salesforce pricing guide.
Does Salesforce have a free plan?
Salesforce does offer a free plan with basic sales and customer service features, including:
- Pipeline tools
- Case resolution functionality
- Customizable home dashboard
- Analytic reporting tools
The paid plans also have a 30-day free trial, so you can test advanced features like marketing automation before committing to the minimum one-year contract Salesforce requires.
Check out our full Salesforce free plan review.
The Salesforce sales pipeline tracks a contact from lead to conversion, and it’s available with the free plan. Source: Tech.co testing
Who Is Salesforce Best For?
Salesforce is best for financial services businesses that require a lot of reporting, and other large organizations that require scalability and customizability to manage enterprise-level workflows.
Based on our testing, Salesforce is also one of the best CRMs for sales teams, due to its analytics features, like custom reports and an in-depth dashboard.
Salesforce stands out for customer support, a top CRM benefit, thanks to phone, email, and live chat support. The Guidance Center also provides a vast selection of self-service support options.
We accessed both sales and customer service functionality seamlessly. Source: Tech.co testing
How Does Salesforce Compare With Other CRMs?
Salesforce is a popular CRM, but that doesn’t mean it’s right for your business. We’ve tested some of the best Salesforce alternatives to help you find the CRM that fits your particular needs.
| Starting price | Most expensive plan | Free plan | Free trial | Verdict | AI features | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| SPONSORED PROVIDER  |  |  |  |  |  |  | |
| Creatio | Salesforce | HubSpot | Freshsales CRM | Microsoft Dynamics 365 | SugarCRM | Zoho CRM | |
| $25/user/month | $25/user/month | $9/user/month | $9/user/month | $65/user/month | $59/user/month | $14/user/month | |
| $85/user/month | $550/user/month | $3,600/user/month | $59/user/month | $150/user/month | $1,000/month | $52/user/month | |
| | | | | | | | |
| | 30 days | Unlimited | 21 days | 30 days | 7 days | 30 days | |
| Stands out for offering a comprehensive no-code CRM platform with built-in AI, empowering teams to automate intelligently and innovate faster | An incredibly popular and customizable CRM for all businesses, with excellent communication tools | An easy-to-use and highly scalable platform ideal for growing businesses, with an excellent free plan | 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 | A great all-round CRM with a great, easy to understand dashboard | An attractive option, with lots of features for a low price | |
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HubSpot vs Salesforce
If the robust analytics and scalability of Salesforce attracted you, but the entry price was too high, HubSpot might be a better fit. The CRM offers a similarly enterprise-level solution and has excellent 24/7 customer support.
Perhaps most importantly, HubSpot pricing starts at only $15 per user, per month. Compared with the $25 per user, per month, starting option for Salesforce, HubSpot is all about affordability.
HubSpot made managing tickets easy. Source: Tech.co testing
monday CRM vs Salesforce
monday CRM is a customizable alternative to Salesforce, with a wide range of customizable data dashboards for clear and efficient insights.
The monday CRM starting price is only $12 per user, per month, and the most expensive plan is only $28 per user, per month. However, monday CRM is exclusively a sales CRM, so you won’t have any customer service functionality, to say nothing of Salesforce’s time-saving AI functions for quickly logging calls or segmenting leads.
monday CRM lets you view your sales data through a wide variety of interactive, customizable charts. Source: Tech.co testing
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 a Good Choice?
If you need a CRM with a robust set of analytical tools, a top-tier customer service experience, or a scalable platform to grow with your business, Salesforce might be the perfect fit.
Its strong customizability allows for in-depth insights for your sales team, and easy-to-reach support reps will help you solve problems quickly and efficiently.
Salesforce isn’t perfect, though. It lacks lead communication and lead capture features, and the high price of all its plans makes it less accessible to small businesses. Still, if analytics and customizability are important to you, it’s hard not to recommend Salesforce for your business.
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