Salesforce pricing plans: What you need to know

In today’s competitive landscape, most companies can’t survive without some sort of sales automation technology — particularly customer relationship management (CRM) software. The past few decades have seen an evolution in tech-supported sales, and Salesforce has emerged as the leading platform for small businesses and major enterprises alike. In fact, Salesforce is practically synonymous with CRM.

Salesforce began as a basic CRM platform but has since grown into a cloud-based, comprehensive suite of solutions that streamlines everything from advanced sales processes to customer service to marketing and every aspect of generating revenue. Together, these solutions provide a centralized platform for tracking customer interactions, analyzing data, automating tasks, fostering collaboration among teams, enhancing customer engagement, and ultimately helping drive business growth. 

Salesforce updated its pricing plans in 2023, but the platform still offers incredible value. Read on for a breakdown of the different options available.

Salesforce pricing overview

Over the years, Salesforce has evolved from a single solution into a robust suite of products. Now, with so many offerings, the company sells each product separately. As of 2023, there are more than 12 individual Salesforce products. Within each of these products, there are a variety of Salesforce pricing options, including

• Tiered pricing: This is based on the features and functionality needed. Each listed price is often per user or a range of users.
• Custom pricing: This pricing is for larger enterprises with a high number of users and unique needs. Salesforce can customize the combination of features, user licenses, and support options to generate prices accordingly.
• Annual discounts: The cost per month decreases when customers pay for one year of use up front.

Salesforce pricing plan analysis

Salesforce has grown so large that it now offers a vast suite of individual products. Prices (and pricing systems) vary from product to product. Here’s a breakdown of the three most popular solutions:

1. Sales Cloud

The Salesforce Sales Cloud is the latest evolution of the company’s CRM platform, now available as a cloud solution. Sales Cloud provides users with the tools they need to manage leads, opportunities, and customer interactions efficiently. The dashboard provides a unified interface for tracking leads throughout the sales pipeline, automating tasks, and generating insights from data analytics.

Price tiers (billed annually):

• Starter Suite: This plan comes in at $25 per month per user and grants access to the basic CRM suite with sales, marketing, and service capabilities for small teams.
• Professional: The Professional plan, at $80 per month per user, provides access to the complete CRM for teams of any size.
• Enterprise: This plan costs $165 per month per user. It gives users a fully customizable CRM for their business that can adapt to the needs of any industry, company, or team.
• Unlimited: For $330 per month per user, the Unlimited plan delivers the ultimate Salesforce Sales Cloud experience. In addition to all the workflow automations and sales capabilities that come with Enterprise, the Unlimited plan also includes built-in artificial intelligence features and one-on-one support for each user.
• Einstein 1 Sales: The Einstein 1 Sales plan costs $500 per month per user, including generative AI and performance management features.

2. Marketing Cloud

After transforming customer relationship management, Salesforce expanded offerings with marketing capabilities. The Marketing Cloud solution is a cloud-based, integrated marketing automation platform that helps users create, execute, and manage targeted marketing campaigns across a wide array of channels. The comprehensive platform offers tools for personalized email marketing, social media engagement, customer-journey mapping, and data-driven analytics.

Price tiers (billed annually):

• Marketing Cloud Account Engagement: At $1,250 per month (for up to 10,000 contacts), this tier provides users with tools for lead nurturing and scoring, access to contacts’ complete engagement history, and in-depth campaign reporting and insights.
• Marketing Cloud Engagement: At $1,250 per month per organization, this tier provides users with tools for email marketing campaigns, content creation, and analysis.
• Marketing Cloud Growth Edition: At $1,500 per month, this tier allows you to write AI-powered emails, conduct campaigns, create forms, and design landing pages.
• Data Cloud for Marketing: At $108,000 per year per organization and up, this tier enables you to consolidate all your data into a single customer profile, offering features for data ingestion and activity resolution.
• Marketing Cloud Personalization: At $108,000 and up per year per organization, this tier grants users access to comprehensive web and email personalization tools, A/B/N testing, deep segmentation and rules-based decisioning.
• Marketing Cloud Intelligence: At $3,000 and up per year per organization, this tier offers 3 million data rows for 10 users.

Salesforce also provides customer loyalty solutions through Loyalty Management and Referral Marketing plans, priced at $20,000 per month per organization and $12,000 per month per organization, respectively.

3. Service Cloud

In addition to sales and marketing, Salesforce has also created solutions for improving customer service. The Salesforce Service Cloud provides users with a comprehensive, cloud-based set of tools for managing customer support across multiple channels through a single platform. Users can streamline response times, track requests more accurately, and expedite cases to deliver exceptional customer service.

Price tiers (billed annually):

• Starter Suite: This tier costs $25 per user per month and grants users access to basic CRM tools like case management automation and knowledge management automation.
• Professional: At $80 per month per user, the Professional tier features tools for managing subscriptions, warranties, and maintenance agreements, as well as easy integrations with telephony systems.
• Enterprise: The Enterprise plan comes in at $165 per month per user. It gives users access to all of the Professional features plus API tools that connect to virtually any external data source for even more visibility into customer interactions.
• Unlimited: For $330 per month per user, organizations have access to all the tools and services of the Enterprise level, with the added bonus of 24-7 support and one-on-one guidance.
• Einstein 1 Service: At $500 per month per user, Salesforce provides advanced AI capabilities along with options for data cloud and service intelligence.

Salesforce offers a variety of tools and solutions to meet the needs of any type of business or organization. Naturally, Salesforce pricing is just as versatile as its products and adaptive to the different budget scopes of its customers. Learn more about the company’s different products and prices here.

Photo by Karolina Grabowska