Salesforce vs AWeber

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.

AWeber was founded in 1998 by Tom Kulzer. Headquarters in Chalfont, PA.

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. The software is intuitive with many pre-made templates and automations but lacks advanced features like photo editing inside the email builder.

Large or scaling businesses and sales teams

Small to medium companies that only need an email marketing platform with basic features.

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

Has a free plan for up to 500 subscribers and 3,000 emails a month. The features are limited, only basic templates and support are available on the free plan.

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

For up to 500 contacts, billed yearly/monthly:

• Lite $12.50 / $14.99
• Plus $20 / $29.99
• Unlimited $899

Other pricing features:

• 3 months of service free and up to 60.5% discount for nonprofits
• 20% discount for students
• Customer referral program
• Account hold package for $4.99 a month

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.

• 24/7 support via email
• Live chat: Mon-Fri 7:00 am — 10:00 pm ET (UTC-5)
• Sat-Sun 8:00 am — 5:00 pm ET (UTC-5)
• Support phone line: 8 am — 8 pm ET (UTC-5)
• Guides and YouTube tutorials
• 24/7 paid email marketing master class
• AWeber expert service

• 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

• Email automation and pre-built autoresponders
• Landing page and sign-up forms builder
• Custom sales pages
• Web push notifications
• Integrations with various services
• Drag-and-drop email builder
• Custom template design service
• Free migration services
• 3 mobile apps for iOS and Android with various features

• 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).

600+ templates and 600+ free stock photos
Custom email template design service

Templates for:

• Newsletter
• Holiday
• Various industries (real estate, food services, agencies, etc.)
• Birthdays and anniversaries
• Events

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.

700+ integrations including WordPress, PayPal, Intercom, Pipedrive, Shopify, Facebook, Salesforce, Google Analytics, Twilio, Zapier, and more

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

• Website
• 3 mobile apps for Android and iOS (possible to check email marketing stats, add new subscribers, create and send newsletters)

• No installable solution.

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

English

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

Offers 3 types of email marketing automations:

• Open-based to track and reward the most engaged subscribers
• Click-based to send campaigns based on subscribers’ actions
• List-based to easily organize lists

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

• Only necessary email marketing features
• 700+ integrations
• 3 mobile apps for different purposes
• Easy-to-use no-code automations
• 24/7 email support
• Landing page builder

• 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

• Dynamic content requires coding
• Free plan and Lite plan are very limited
• Relatively high prices
• Lacks advanced features (like photo editing)