MailerLite vs Salesforce

Trying to choose between MailerLite vs Salesforce as your email marketing software? Here's when to choose each tool – and the pros and cons to know about.

MailerLite vs Salesforce comparison
  • 4.4 TrustPilot
  • 4.7 Capterra
  • 4.7 G2

Average 4.6 / 5

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MailerLite

MailerLite is an all-in-one email marketing platform that allows you to create newsletters, landing pages, and even websites using pre-made templates. It has 100+ integrations with other platforms and a recurring payment feature for paid newsletters.

Pricing

Free plan, dynamic paid plans depending on the features and the contact list size start from $9/month billed yearly.

Key features

  • Drag-and-drop email editor with an AI writing assistant
  • No-code website, blog, and landing page builder
  • iPad subscriber app for generating leads on offline events
  • Paid newsletter subscription
  • Automated sequences
  • Integrations with online stores
  • Email verifier

Support

24/7 email and live chat support

  • 1.4 TrustPilot
  • 4.4 Capterra
  • 4.3 G2

Average 3.4 / 5

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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

MailerLite

MailerLite was founded in 2005 as a web design agency but then switched to email marketing. The company is remote-first, with employees in 40 countries.

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

MailerLite

No coding or design skills are required to create emails and web pages. The platform also offers an extensive knowledge base with tutorials, which makes it beginner-friendly.

Salesforce

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

Best for

MailerLite

E-commerce, freelancers, small businesses

Salesforce

Large or scaling businesses and sales teams

Free plan

MailerLite

A generous forever free plan with a limit of 1 user, 1,000 contacts, and 12,000 monthly emails. The free plan includes:

  • Email editor and automation builder
  • Website builder and 10 templates for landing pages
  • Sign-up forms and pop-ups
  • 24/7 email and chat support for the first 30 days

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

MailerLite

Growing business:

  • $9-205/month billed yearly, depending on the number of subscribers, with a limit of 50k contacts at the highest price
  • Unlimited emails and 24/7 support
  • Includes extra features like dynamic emails, selling digital products, blogs, and an unsubscribe page builder
  • 3 users available

Advanced:

  • $19-1,600/month billed yearly, with a limit of 500k contacts at the highest price
  • An email limit if you have more than 50k subscribers, up to 6 million, depending on the number
  • Includes features like custom HTML editor, AI writing assistant, Facebook integration, promotion pop-ups, and more
  • Unlimited users

Entreprise:

  • Depends on the scope of work
  • Only available for businesses with 100k and more subscribers
  • Includes the services of a dedicated success manager, onboarding, account audit, and dedicated IP and deliverability consultation

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

MailerLite

Customer support is available 24/7 via email and live chat — however, it’s only available for 30 days on the free plan. Users can also hire experts in email marketing, copywriting, no code development, and more.

MailerLite also offers an extensive Customer Self-Service Center. It includes:

  • A large categorized knowledge base, that includes articles about troubleshooting most common issues
  • Video tutorials
  • A Circle community where users can communicate with each other
  • A free ML Academy with 5 free online courses about MailerLite and email marketing

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

MailerLite

  • Email marketing automation
  • Sign-up forms
  • Landing pages
  • Website builder
  • Blog builder
  • Email verifier
  • Transactional emails
  • Click maps
  • The ability to sell digital products like e-books and online courses
  • Setting up a paid subscription for emails

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

MailerLite

70+ templates for newsletters:

  • Blog digests
  • Events
  • Holiday emails
  • Featured product
  • Notifications
  • Surveys and quizzes
  • Deals and offers
  • Emails for creative professionals

40+ templates for landing pages:

  • For bloggers
  • For creative professionals
  • Events
  • Surveys and quizzes
  • Coming soon
  • Celebrations
  • Books
  • Non-profits

18 website templates for different industries and purposes:

  • Business
  • E-commerce
  • Education
  • Events
  • Food and drinks
  • Portfolio
  • Wellness

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).

Integrations

MailerLite

139 integrations with services for CRM, loyalty programs, e-commerce, project management, surveys, 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

MailerLite

    MailerLite has a web app, an iOS app, and an iPad app only for subscribing leads on offline events.

Salesforce

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

Languages

MailerLite

English English

Salesforce

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

Automation

MailerLite

  • 15 automation recipes for welcome emails, abandoned cart, membership renewal, online courses, and more.
  • Paid versions include an AI writing assistant powered by OpenAI that allows users to write marketing copies faster.
  • Automated A/B testing for up to 3 workflow variations.

Salesforce

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

Pros

MailerLite

  • A very simple and minimalist product that is good for beginners
  • Many unique features like paid newsletters and selling digital goods
  • Great customer support
  • A lot of integrations available
  • Easy migrations from other services
  • Extensive video tutorial library for new users

Salesforce

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

Cons

MailerLite

  • May come off as too simple for experienced marketers
  • You need to get approval to start working with the service
  • 2FA requires a third-party app instead of a phone number
  • Stripe integration can be troublesome
  • Confusing categories in the interface
  • Outdated documentation at times

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

MailerLite

Great level of satisfaction in terms of the results we are obtaining in our campaigns, as well as how it is to work with MailerLite on a daily-basis. Also, very important to mention the amazing customer service provided. Always very quick, detailed and helpful. Message Factory couldn’t be any happier by working with MailerLite!

Andre R.

Andre R.

Project manager at msgFactory

On the down side, MailerLite felt a bit unpolished at times. Things like the odd feature that was incomplete, or a tab that seemed to be in the wrong place – small things that slowly added up, resulting in a bittersweet experience.
MailerLite is great, and I’m sure it will only get better with time. It just fails to deliver an exceptional email marketing experience right now

Alexandros Melidoniotis

Alexandros Melidoniotis

Freelance writer and editor with experience in digital marketing

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.

Dudez Perez-Ignacio

Dudez Perez-Ignacio

Content Writer for Expert Market

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.

Mounir Nejjaj

Mounir Nejjaj

ISV & Mar Tech blog founder, SFMC expert

*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.