Mailchimp vs Salesforce
Trying to choose between Mailchimp vs Salesforce as your email marketing software? Here's when to choose each tool – and the pros and cons to know about.
- 1.4 TrustPilot
- 4.5 Capterra
- 4.3 G2
Average 3.4 / 5
Mailchimp
An email marketing software with automations and integrations. Plus, a hosting and website and landing pages builder.
Pricing
Starts at $13 a month for 500 contacts
Key features
- Email automation
- Hosting, websites, and online stores
- Landing page builder
- Marketing CRM
- Integrations with various services
- Drag-and-drop email builder
Support
24/7 support via email and chat on paid plans, phone support on Premium. Email support for the first 30 days on the Free plan.
- 1.4 TrustPilot
- 4.4 Capterra
- 4.3 G2
Average 3.4 / 5
Salesforce
Salesforce is a powerful marketing ecosystem that includes CRM, a system for marketing personalization, sales automation, analytics, and more — and all that is AI-powered.
Pricing
Dynamic, depending on the number of users, add-on products, and more
Key features
- CRM
- Email marketing automation
- Personalization
- Segmentation
- Analytics
- A/B testing
Support
Salesforce Help, phone, online chat, separate support systems for additional products
General info about company
Mailchimp
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.
Salesforce
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.
Difficulty
Mailchimp
Creating emails doesn’t require design or coding skills. However, the interface can be confusing to novices.
Salesforce
Most users claim that it takes at least a month to learn working in Salesforce, so it’s not beginner-friendly.
Best for
Mailchimp
Small to medium e-commerce companies that want email marketing together with their website hosting.
Salesforce
Large or scaling businesses and sales teams
Free plan
Mailchimp
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
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
Pricing
Mailchimp
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
Salesforce
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
Support
Mailchimp
- 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)
Salesforce
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.
Features
Mailchimp
- 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.
Salesforce
- 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
Templates
Mailchimp
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
Salesforce
- 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).
Video/screenshots
Mailchimp
Salesforce
Integrations
Mailchimp
315 integrations including WordPress, Shopify, Facebook, Stripe, LiveChat, Canva, Unsplash, and more.
Salesforce
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.
Devices
Mailchimp
- Website
- A mobile app for iOS and Android to create and send emails, add clients, check analytics, etc.
No installable solution.
Salesforce
- Web app
- Desktop app
- Mobile apps for iOS and Android
Languages
Mailchimp
English
Spanish
Portuguese
Salesforce
Chinese (Simplified)
Chinese (Traditional)
Danish
Dutch
Finnish
English
German
Italian
Portuguese (Brazil)
Russian
Spanish
Spanish (Mexico)
Swedish
Thai
Automation
Mailchimp
Many pre-built automations (called customer journeys):
- Welcome series
- Abandoned cart
- Product retargeting
- Lead generation
- Order notifications, and more
Salesforce
Salesforce offers Automation Studio for automating email journeys which allows users to create complex email sequences with many conditions.
Pros
Mailchimp
- Essential features for small businesses
- 315 integrations
- Website hosting
- A mobile app
- Stylish design and built reputation
- Landing page builder
Salesforce
- Great support on onboarding from the vendor
- Sophisticated customer journeys
- Dynamic content in emails
- Integrations with CRMs
Cons
Mailchimp
- 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
Salesforce
- 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
Reviews from experts
Mailchimp
Mailchimp is a perfectly good tool for most English-speaking users, with its ease of use and range of features, as well as their free and pay-as-you-go plans.
Keep in mind, though, that their subscription plans are relatively expensive compared to similar newsletter tools.
Perhaps if you’re a business with specific needs, like multilingual software, or use of your own tracking domain, then you may need to look further afield for the correct newsletter tool. But there really is a lot to like from Mailchimp.
The interface is simple and intuitive, and you don't need to be technically savvy to get up and running with email campaigns. I have easily trained non-technical colleagues and elderly clients on how to use Mailchimp to send newsletters. It's easy to add contacts on the go using the Mailchimp mobile app.
Cons: The biggest downside is that the free plan is very limited now compared to when I first started. The free option is really only good for very small lists and basic emails. To do anything more sophisticated with segmentation, automations, or larger lists, you need to pay for one of the monthly subscription plans.
Salesforce
Salesforce scores a perfect 5/5 in our data reporting research category. It offers a lot of data visualization 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 analyze data faster, you can create feasible business goals and targets.
When it comes to email marketing, you build your stack according to your size and maturity. You will consider Salesforce Marketing Cloud (either Engagement or Account Engagement) once you have data in your CRM and want to use it. In this case, Salesforce Marketing Cloud competitors would be Adobe, Oracle or Braze.
But Salesforce Marketing Cloud is a great solution if you consider the platform. You can easily use your CRM data, you have powerful Artificial Intelligence features with Einstein and one of the most powerful Customer journey orchestrators with Journey Builder.
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As for me, Salesforce meets the needs of both SMB and enterprise companies, but be careful with budgets: of course when customization needs are rising, you have to pay for that. But exactly the CRM gives you that opportunity.
*This information is current as of 09/28/2023. While we regularly update our articles, it`s possible that this article may not contain some of the latest information.
