Salesforce vs Mailchimp

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.

Mailchimp was founded in Atlanta in 2001 by Ben Chestnut, Mark Armstrong, and Dan Kurzius. Headquarters in Atlanta, GA. Was acquired by Intuit in 2021.

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

Creating emails doesn’t require design or coding skills. However, the interface can be confusing to novices.

Large or scaling businesses and sales teams

Small to medium e-commerce companies that want email marketing together with their website hosting.

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 1,000 emails a month and a daily send limit of 500. It has a lot fewer features than paid plans, fewer available templates, and customer support for 30 days only.

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 monthly:

• Essentials $13
• Standard $20
• Premium $350

Other pricing features:

• 1-month free trial for Essentials and Standard
• A Pay As You Go plan
• Two possible pauses of the account’s billing every 12 months
• 15% discount for nonprofit organizations

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.

• Email support on paid plans and 30-day only on a Free plan
• 24/7 chat support on paid plans
• Support phone line for the Premium plan: Mon-Fri 6:30 am — 6:00 pm ET (UTC-5)

• 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 with pre-made customer journeys
• Hosting, websites, and landing pages builder
• Online store creator
• Marketing CRM
• Integrations with popular services
• Drag-and-drop email builder and pre-made templates
• A mobile app for iOS and Android to create and send emails, add clients, check analytics, etc.

• 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).

100+ templates for emails and landing pages
AI assistant for designing
The free plan has a limited number of pre-built templates

Templates for:

• Welcome messages
• Sales
• Newsletter
• Events
• Announcements
• Win-back

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.

315 integrations including WordPress, Shopify, Facebook, Stripe, LiveChat, Canva, Unsplash, and more.

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

• Website
• A mobile app for iOS and Android to create and send emails, add clients, check analytics, etc.

No installable solution.

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

English Spanish Portuguese

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

Many pre-built automations (called customer journeys):

• Welcome series
• Abandoned cart
• Product retargeting
• Lead generation
• Order notifications, and more

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

• Essential features for small businesses
• 315 integrations
• Website hosting
• A mobile app
• Stylish design and built reputation
• 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

• Relatively high prices
• Free and Standard plans are very limited
• Limited customization
• Customer support is hard to reach and isn’t very helpful
• Many people find the interface not user-friendly
• Unsubscribed and inactive accounts are still included in sending limits