Salesforce Review and Pricing: The Best CRM for Scalability

Our in-depth research into 11 leading customer relationship management (CRM) tools found Salesforce to offer the most scalable CRM software, earning a score of 4.7/5 in the scalability criteria of our research.

As one of the most customisable solutions, Salesforce allows you to manage your marketing database, sales leads, and customer life cycle in a single app. With all of this, growing businesses can easily implement the technology they need to achieve their goals.

In this review, we’ll examine how Salesforce performs in the key factors you should compare when shopping for a sales CRM: as well as scalability, these key factors are pricing, lead capture features, lead communication features, and customer support channels. We’ll also analyse how Salesforce performs against leading competitors which offer cheaper CRM plans, tackle its standout features, and look at its pros and cons.

If you need a quicker way to know which CRM software fits your business’ needs, try our free quote finding tool. All you need to do is give us a few details about your business, and the top providers will be in touch with obligation-free quotes. Yes, the CRM world can be daunting, but we’re pros when it comes to navigating this area, so read on!

Salesforce’s pros and cons

✓ Pro: Highly scalable

Salesforce is a sustainable system, meaning businesses using the system are unlikely to need to switch to another CRM provider as they grow – its plans offer the functionality needed to keep your team efficient as it evolves. This is why Salesforce earns an excellent score of 4.7/5 in the scalability criteria of our research, the highest scalability score of all the CRM platforms we analysed.

Each Salesforce plan has the flexibility to allow you to customise your own sales pipelines to suit your business model. In addition to this, each plan also has a social listening feature, which can help you enhance your social media marketing strategy. This feature can only be added when you get the social intelligence add-on. However, you need to call the customer service to discuss add-on fees.

✓ Pro: Offers lots of data visualisation options

Salesforce scores a perfect 5/5 in our data reporting research category. It offers a lot of data visualisation tools on all of its plans, which are important tools for any kind of business, and whether you’re looking for a sales or customer service CRM. These tools include custom reports, a chart builder, and revenue data views, and allow you to better understand data, explain trends, and generate valuable insights. When you can analyse data faster, you can create feasible business goals and targets.

✓ Pro: Provides extensive customisation options

Many companies have pre-existing processes, so it’s important to have CRM software that allows you to integrate these current processes. Salesforce allows you to do exactly that, offering a whole lot of customisation options on every plan, including custom dashboards and an automation builder. It scores 4.3/5 for customising in our analysis.

✘ Con: Expensive plans when compared with other CRM options

Salesforce’s Sales Cloud is designed to help businesses of all sizes to scale every process with automation, so staff can focus on increasing sales and growing the business. However, its plans are more expensive for small businesses than other CRM options. Its cheapest plan costs £20 per user, per month and, while it offers lots of customisation, data visualisation, and integration options, the service is limited to 10 users maximum. It also lacks some important digital sales tools – such as website chatbots and live chat – that would allow you to connect with your customers easily to deliver faster support, improve marketing strategies, and increase customer satisfaction rates.

Meanwhile, Zoho CRM is a better option for smaller businesses because it offers a great value free plan, and when comparing both Salesforce and Zoho CRM’s standard plans, Zoho CRM’s is a lot cheaper at £12 per user, per month. Plus, it enables you to have unlimited users on the system and comes with more digital selling tools, such as website visitor tracking, web forms, and social listening, making it better value for money.

✘ Con: Lacks digital selling tools

While Salesforce may offer a web form feature, it lacks digital selling tools, such as a website chatbot. This feature can help you prioritise leads, reach out to the right person at the right time, and gain customer insight. This is why Salesforce only scores a below average 2/5 in the lead capture category of our research.

Zoho CRM, on the other hand, scores a perfect 5/5 for lead capture. Its use of AI in its digital features, such as Zoho Sales iQ, is matched with its real-time translation feature that helps overcome language barriers, resulting in converting more leads. Aside from that, Zoho CRM also offers a social listening feature, but, unlike Salesforce, you don’t need to pay extra for this to be added to your plan.

How much does Salesforce cost?

Salesforce Sales Cloud pricing

Salesforce doesn’t offer a free plan, but its cheapest plan, Essentials, costs £20 per user, per month and is geared toward small businesses. It comes with enough useful customisation and integration features to allow you to streamline your sales, marketing, and customer service operations, but more importantly, enough tools to launch your sales journey. However, it does lack lead capture and lead communication features, such as a website chatbot, instant messaging apps, and website live chat.

The upside is that Salesforce offers a 30-day free trial on all of its paid plans. Plus, its succeeding plans come with more lead conversion features such as lead scoring and a customisable sales pipeline. but still not as many lead capture and lead communication features as competitors, thus earning a low score of 1/5 in the pricing category of our research.

If you’re a startup wanting to cut back on costs, Freshsales could be a better bet as it offers a free plan that enables unlimited users and more lead communication services, such as native VoIP and website live chat.

Salesforce Marketing Cloud Account Engagement Pricing

Marketing and sales are two important branches of your business. Marketing must engage with customers and entice them towards the service or products you offer, while sales must turn these potential leads into paying customers. Salesforce also offers a CRM for marketing teams: Marketing Cloud Engagement, another cloud service.

It’s a simple yet modern marketing automation platform that allows marketing and sales departments to create, execute, and manage marketing campaigns online that’ll help generate better leads. However, the pricing for this is even steeper than that of Sales Cloud. It’s charged on a per organisation, per month basis, rather than per user, per month.

How does Salesforce compare with other CRM software?

Considering the key factors is fundamental when choosing the right CRM software for your business. As well as pricing, the priorities for sales team CRMs are lead capture and communication features, scalability, and the availability of customer support channels. Here, we evaluate how well Salesforce performs in these factors against other leading CRM platforms on the market.

Lead capture and communication

Salesforce’s Essentials plan is fairly affordable at £20 per user, per month, but it does lack lead capture features, such as a website chatbot and website live chat, seeing it earn a low score of 2/5 in our lead capture research category.

Meanwhile, Zoho CRM has a free plan available, and its Standard plan is a lot cheaper than Salesforce’s Essentials plan. It’s only £12 per user, per month, and comes with unlimited users and more digital selling tools such as website visitor tracking, web forms, and social listening.

Despite lacking some lead capture features, Salesforce offers more business process features such as custom objects which is the highest level of customisation over their CRM system, and Zoho CRM doesn’t offer this in its free, Standard and Pro plans.

Scalability

Salesforce is king when it comes to scalability, scoring a solid 4.7/5 in this category in our research, the highest among the rest. Our expert software researchers measure scalability using a list of metrics, including:

• Customisability
• Integrations
• Team infrastructure features
• Security features
• Customer support

Salesforce scores very well in all of these criteria. For example, it offers a solid list of essential security services on all of its plans, including custom permissions, SSO, multi-factor authentication, IP restrictions, and data restrictions. However, it’s worth noting that Pipedrive, our favourite CRM system for data protection, offers more security options than Salesforce on its Essential plan, such as custom permissions.

On the other hand, every Salesforce plan comes ready with first-party and third-party sales engagement integrations, but first-party integrations aren’t available on any of Pipedrive’s plans.

Customer support

Salesforce scores a perfect 5/5 for its customer support in our research because it offers all the essential customer support channels. (Phone support and 24/7 live support aren’t available on the Essentials plan, but will be included once you upgrade to Salesforce’s pricier plans.) Support channels on offer include a community forum, knowledge base, phoneline, chat, email, and 24/7 live support. It’s worth noting that the 24/7 phone support costs extra on both the Professional and Enterprise plans. This service will be free when you upgrade to the £240 per user, per month Unlimited plan.

Even though Zoho CRM also scores a perfect 5/5 for customer support, Salesforce still comes up on top. This is because Zoho’s 24/7 live support option is only included on its most expensive plans, Ultimate and Plus, while Salesforce includes this service on all plans except Essentials.

Salesforce’s other standout features

AppExchange

AppExchange might just be one of the most important features that Salesforce has to offer. It’s a public directory with a vast range of free and paid applications, from cloud computing to marketing automation, which users can access, download, and install. This was launched in 2005, and currently offers about 7,000 apps that provide business solutions for any unique business challenges you may encounter.

There are ready-to-install apps, pre-built business processes to help accelerate automation, and a platform on which to build apps and custom pages without using code. This feature isn’t only for the tech-savvy; it’s also designed with beginners in mind.

Enhanced Einstein Bots

Without needing a human agent, the Einstein Bot can be programmed to do a lot, such as provide answers, search records, create new inquiries as leads, create new cases, and collect feedback. The Enhanced Einstein Bot came from Salesforce’s standard bot, but their main difference is feature parity. Meaning, the Enhanced Einstein can send images or share files, while the standard one can only send texts.

These days, businesses have been using bots to communicate with customers for a myriad of reasons. It’s cheaper, more efficient, and can improve customer experience. The Enhanced Einstein Bot is native to Salesforce and was only recently developed in 2022. It can be used on multiple channels, such as SMS, Chat, Slack, and Facebook Messenger so you can reach out to your business customers easily and increase your brand’s visibility.

Not only that, it’s multi-lingual and can answer queries in different languages. However, at the moment the Einstein Bots feature is only available on the Service Cloud Unlimited Edition (£240 per user, per month) user licences. The upside is that Salesforce is planning to include this feature in Sales Cloud later in 2023.

What kind of business is Salesforce best for?

Our research shows that Salesforce is the most highly scalable system on the market. Industry giants, such as Apple and Amazon, have been using it for years. However, Salesforce uses cloud service technology and offers great automation tools that would be perfect for small businesses, too. This is why Salesforce is best for small businesses that are expecting lots of growth in the future, or those that wouldn’t want the hassle of switching to another CRM as they grow.

Does Salesforce have good customer reviews?

Salesforce’s scores in our extensive research prove it to be one of the best CRM software solutions out there. However, we also wanted to investigate what users have to say about it. These reviews are taken from business review sites such as Trustpilot and G2:

Not all users are happy with the service, however. Despite Salesforce’s numerous customer support channels, users occasionally report that they have a hard time connecting with the support team for assistance – like this succinct reviewer: