Salesforce Pricing: How Much Does Salesforce Cost in 2023?

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 $500 per user, per month. 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. In August 2023, Salesforce changed its pricing across most of its prominent plans, increasing most plans by an average of 9% each. The most popular Salesforce platform is the Sales Cloud, which is why we've outlined this in the table below:

In This Guide:

• Salesforce Pricing Plans
• Does Salesforce Have a Free Plan?
• Salesforce Pricing Add-Ons
• Salesforce Cost Per User
• New Salesforce Pricing Explained 
• Top CRM Price Comparison
• How We Test CRM Software
• Getting Started With Salesforce
• Salesforce Pricing FAQs

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 $1,250 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 $100 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.

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 $80 per user, per month; Lightning Enterprise is $165 per user, per month; Lightning Unlimited is $330 per user, per month; and Lightning Unlimited+ is $500 per user, per month.

It's worth noting that the Unlimited plan is where you can unlock the built-in AI features, which provide in-depth lead and opportunity scoring, as well as insights into customer interactions and deal health at your business.

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. Salesforce does, however, offer some of the most robust sales dashboards on the market.

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 $80 per user, per month, Lightning Enterprise costs $165 per user, per month, Lightning Unlimited starts at $330 per user, per month, and Lightning Unlimited+ costs $500 per user, per month.

The availability of Einstein AI features is relegated to the Enterprise, Unlimited, and Unlimited+ plans only. Additionally, the functionality will cost extra, running businesses an additional $50 per month for advanced analytics and smart service features.

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 for more information 

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 three distinct plans: Pro, Corporate, and Enterprise. The Pro plan costs $1,250 per month, and the Corporate plan rounds it out at $4,200 per month. The Enterprise plan requires you to contact Salesforce to get a quote.

For the best AI-powered results, you'll need to subscribe to the Corporate or Enterprise plans, as the Pro plan does not have AI functionality built in. With these features, you can supercharge your marketing campaign with smart insights to reach and convert customers.

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.

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.

You'll need to grab the Advanced or Premium plans if you're interested in using artificial intelligence to improve your business. These plans come with Einstein AI built in, so you can reach out to your leads at the perfect moment to ensure a sale is as likely as possible.

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 guide to get the full breakdown.

Salesforce Quip Pricing

If your team has gone remote, 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.

Salesforce Pricing Add-Ons

Depending on your particularly business needs, you might need a bit of added functionality beyond the standard Salesforce experience. Fortunately, the CRM is equipped with a massive library of add-ons that can enable all kinds of business actions.

These add-ons, however, will cost a bit extra. That means that, in addition to paying the Salesforce pricing per user model, you'll also have to pay a monthly fee per user to include these add-ons.

As for what kind of add-ons are available with Salesforce, the list is extensive, ranging from sales planning and billing growth for the Sales Cloud to feedback management and survey response for the Service Cloud. Make sure your budget can handle all these add-ons before commit, because the price of these add-ons can range from $25 per month to $46,000 per month.

Salesforce Cost Per User

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.

New Salesforce Pricing: August 2023 Price Increase Explained

Salesforce recently announced in August 2023 that the platform would be undergoing a price increase across the majority of its Clouds and pricing plans. The move is a rare one from Salesforce, as the company hasn't seen a price increase to its popular CRM platform in more than seven years. Still, it can be a bit jarring for those familiar with Salesforce, which is why we wanted to explain it as effectively as possible.

For starters, it's not a massive increase, which is always good to hear. Pricing plans are getting on average a 9% increase, which certainly won't break the bank. The Professional plan has gone from $75 to $80 per user, per month, the Enterprise plan has gone from $150 to $165 per user, per month, and the Unlimited plan has gone from $300 to $330 per user, per month.

As for the reason behind the price increase, the development and rollout of generative AI technology to the platform is the main driver – at least according to the company itself.

“Salesforce is leading the way on delivering trusted generative AI for the enterprise and helping customers in all industries adopt and deploy AI.” – Salesforce

Salesforce has been hard to work to bring generative AI functionality to its wide variety of platforms. More specifically, Salesforce recently launched an Einstein GPT tool that can improve sales, service, and marketing efforts at your business. On top of that, it has rolled out AI Cloud and Sales GPT and Service GPT, so it's safe to say that the slight price increase is more than worth it.

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:

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 pricing is accessible to more users than Salesforce, particularly when it comes to marketing.

Check out our HubSpot pricing guide for more information

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 CRM for small businesses, thanks to low prices and still plenty of features.

How We Test CRM Software

Salesforce Pricing FAQs