Salesforce vs ActiveCampaign

Salesforce, Inc. is a cloud-based software company that was founded in 1999 and is currently headquartered in San Francisco, California. It provides customer relationship management software and applications focused on sales, customer service, marketing automation, e-commerce, analytics, and application development.

ActiveCampaign was founded in 2003 by Jason VandeBoom. Hubs in Chicago, Sidney, and Dublin.

Most users claim that it takes at least a month to learn working in Salesforce, so it’s not beginner-friendly.

No coding or design skills are required as there are plenty of automation recipes available. The system itself is comparatively complex, though, and needs some getting accustomed to.

Large or scaling businesses and sales teams

Businesses that plan to scale their email marketing up to include CRM, e-commerce integrations, and diverse automation schemes.

No free plan, 30-day free trial that includes:

• Preloaded data for learning
• Pre-configured processes, reports, and dashboards
• Online training and live onboarding webinars

No free plan. Has a free 14 days trial with up to 100 email sends to 100 contacts. The features available within the trial match the Professional tier of features.

The trial is limited to 1 user and doesn’t include:

• Predictive Sending
• Predictive Content
• Sending auto-responder campaigns
• Custom fields in forms
• Using “Email Results” in subscription forms
• SMS credits or sending
• Adding a domain to a landing page

Salesforce has a very complex pricing system that includes several products. Since we’re only talking about email marketing, here are the pricing plans for the email, mobile, and web marketing package.

Basic: $410/month with unlimited users, billed annually, includes:

• Subscriber profiles
• Drag-and-drop segmentation
• Email and mobile-optimized templates
• Content management and workflows
• A/B testing
• Personalisation tools
• Preference center
• Integration with Salesforce Sales Cloud and Service Cloud
• Reports and dashboards

Pro: $1282/month with unlimited users, billed annually, includes:

• Personalisation Builder
• Automation Studio
• Triggered Communications
• Automated workflow and campaigns
• Web and mobile analytics

Corporate: $3844/month with unlimited users, billed annually, includes:

• Journey Builder
• Mobile SMS and MobilePush
• Multi-channel predictive content
• Advanced reporting

Entreprise: pricing depends on contact and message volume, unlimited users, includes:

• Real-time big data segmentation
• Distributed sending
• Shared content, subscribers, and data
• Locked templates
• Custom roles and permissions
• Business Units

Marketing + CRM

For 500 contacts, billed yearly/monthly:

• Lite $9 / $15
• Plus $49 / $70
• Professional $149 / $187
• Enterprise — individual pricing

Other pricing features:

• 2-year price lock
• Billing pause for 12 months with the account and campaigns intact.
• Only charges for the contacts the client actively markets to, no matter how many lists they’re on.
• A 20% discount for nonprofits.
• Free 14 days trial.

All customers regardless of a pricing plan can create a case in Salesforce Help using their Salesforce or Trailblazer accounts. Phone support in English is available 24/7 but support in other languages has limited availability for some regions:

• French Support (Canada) — Monday–Friday, 3:00 AM–11:30 AM EST
• Spanish and Portuguese Support for Latin American countries — Monday–Friday, 8AM–8PM EST
• French, German, Italian, Dutch, Spanish and Portuguese Support for European countries — Monday–Friday, 8AM–4:30PM GMT
• Mandarin and Korean Support for Asian countries — Monday–Friday, 10AM 7PM AEST

In addition to that, Salesforce also provides an extensive knowledge base, a YouTube channel with longform video tutorials, and communities for admins and developers.

Working hours: 9 am – 11 pm CDT (GMT-5)
Either live chat or email requests

Aside from online support, ActiveCampaign offers:

• Free online training
• Community and forum
• FAQ website section
• Study Hall — in-person learning classes

• CRM
• Email marketing automation
• AI-powered list segmentation
• A/B testing
• No-code email template builder
• Analytics in customizable dashboards
• Google Analytics integration
• Integration with third-party data sources for relevant embedded ads

• Marketing automation
• Landing page builder
• Built-in CRM for small-medium-sized businesses
• Many service integrations
• Drag-and-drop email designer
• Free migration from other services
• SMS marketing
• Site messages
• Live chat and automated chatbot workflows

• Pre-made templates are empty but offer different layout options.
• Salesforce includes three types of templates: Classic (basically plain text with little customization options), Lightning Experience (allow for images, links, rich text, etc.), and built-in Email Template Builder (your regular marketing email editor).

125+ templates
No-code dynamic content available
Email template recommendations and guides

Templates for:

• Abandoned Cart
• Conference Event
• Customer Service
• Holiday
• Newsletter
• Reviews Feedback

4000+ integrations and apps like other CRM systems, other ESPs (for example, Mailchimp), Slack, Tableau, Zoom, and more. Some of these integrations are free, others are paid for separately or only available for certain pricing plans.

Facebook, Google Analytics, WooCommerce, WordPress, Shopify, Unbounce, ClickFunnels, Salesforce, Zapier, and more

• Web app
• Desktop app
• Mobile apps for iOS and Android

• Website
• Email extensions for Chrome and Outlook
• Mobile app for Android and iOS (possible to review email reports, track customer activity, and manage CRM data).

• No installable solution

Chinese (Simplified) Chinese (Traditional) Danish Dutch Finnish English German Italian Portuguese (Brazil) Russian Spanish Spanish (Mexico) Swedish Thai

Czech Dutch English French German Hungarian Indonesian Italian Polish Portuguese Brazilian Portuguese Russian Slovenian Spanish Danish Finnish Simplified Chinese Turkish Vietnamese

Salesforce offers Automation Studio for automating email journeys which allows users to create complex email sequences with many conditions.

800+ automation recipes for email and other marketing channels.

Offers the whole customer experience automation:

• Links different integrated services (like Shopify or Facebook) into cohesive scenarios.
• Collects broad data on each customer, so it’s possible to customize segments based on almost any parameter.
• Helps to choose the best content, send time, and delivery channel for each individual customer.
• Has AI advice on improving the marketing strategy.

• Great support on onboarding from the vendor
• Sophisticated customer journeys
• Dynamic content in emails
• Integrations with CRMs

• Hundreds of automation options even for sophisticated purposes
• CRM features
• Mobile app
• A dedicated email deliverability specialist checks the client’s email for compliance before sending
• Automation of 1:1 communications to customers on the website or social media

• Steep learning curve
• Very convoluted pricing system that caused most of the negative reviews on TrustPilot
• Hard to implement and maintain, requires a Salesforce administrator to help
• Very expensive and includes arising additional costs

• High price and no free plan
• Customer support is often unavailable or slow
• Complicated automations system
• Steep learning curve
• Reports aren’t great (not enough information, no real-time results, visually unappealing, etc.)