Salesforce vs ConvertKit

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

Salesforce vs ConvertKit comparison
  • 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

  • 4.7 GetApp
  • 4.7 Capterra
  • 2 TrustPilot

Average 3.8 / 5

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ConvertKit

ConvertKit is a tool for marketing automation and monetization for independent creators.

Pricing

  • Email marketing automation
  • Landing pages
  • Sign-up forms
  • Analytics
  • A/B testing
  • Tools for content monetization

Key features

  • Email marketing automation
  • Landing pages
  • Sign-up forms
  • Analytics
  • A/B testing
  • Tools for content monetization

Support

Community support for all users, email and chat support for paid users

General info about company

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.

ConvertKit

ConvertKit was founded in 2013 and is based in Idaho, the US. It was created by Nathan Barry, a blogger and creator who needed a better way to promote his books and courses.

Difficulty

Salesforce

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

ConvertKit

Not beginner-friendly, since you need to code while creating emails.

Best for

Salesforce

Large or scaling businesses and sales teams

ConvertKit

Bloggers, coaches, course creators, writers, and everyone who makes content for living.

Free plan

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

ConvertKit

The forever free plan includes the contact list of up to 1,000 subscribers and the following features:

  • Unlimited landing pages
  • Unlimited forms
  • Unlimited “broadcasts”, or one-off email campaigns, sent right away or scheduled
  • Audience tagging and segmentation
  • Selling digital products & subscriptions
  • Community support
  • Free recommendations

Pricing

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

ConvertKit

Dynamic pricing depends on the size of your contact list and the features of interest.

Creator: $9–1,916/month billed yearly for 300–400,000 subscribers. Includes all the free features plus:

  • Live chat & email support
  • Paid recommendations
  • Free migration from another tool
  • Automated email sequences
  • Visual automation builders
  • Third-party integrations
  • One additional team member

Creator Pro: $25–2,166/month billed yearly for 300–400,000 subscribers. Includes all the Creator features plus:

  • Newsletter referral system
  • Subscriber scoring
  • Advanced reporting

Support

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.

ConvertKit

Community support:

  • The internal forum where you can ask questions and receive answers from ConvertKit support specialists and other platform users
  • Available even on the free plan

Email and live chat support:

  • Available for Creator users
  • Priority support via email and live chat available for Creator Pro users

ConvertKit also provides a knowledge base and a YouTube channel with tutorials. The platform also runs online workshops for newbies in marketing.

Features

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

ConvertKit

  • Email builder
  • Email marketing automation
  • Landing pages
  • Sign-up forms
  • Tools for selling digital products and paid subscriptions
  • List segmentation
  • Lead scoring
  • A/B testing
  • Reporting and analytics
  • Internal referral systems for creators to earn off putting links in your newsletter or paying to get promoted by other creators

Templates

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).

ConvertKit

25 email templates made for content creators by content creators, includes templates for:

  • Newsletters
  • Content promotion
  • Product sales pitch
  • Waitlist

The templates are sourced from other users and you can create and share your own.

ConvertKit also offers 50+ landing page templates not specified by purpose.

Integrations

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.

ConvertKit

120 integrations with third-party apps for:

  • Memberships and courses
  • Analytics
  • Lead capture
  • E-commerce
  • Giveaways
  • Quizzes
  • Workflows
  • Webinar
  • Affiliate management
  • CRM
  • Scheduling
  • Email verification

ConvertKit also supports Zapier for even more integrations and provides users with the API docs for custom integrations.

Devices

Salesforce

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

ConvertKit

  • Web app only

Languages

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

ConvertKit

English English

Automation

Salesforce

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

ConvertKit

10+ visual automation templates for starting a paid newsletter, releasing a new podcast, crowdfunding for a music album, and other tasks that professional content creators might face.

Pros

Salesforce

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

ConvertKit

  • Good platform for content creators
  • Great deliverability
  • Supports paid newsletters and has a “tip jar” functionality for free donations from subscribers
  • A flexible tagging and segmentation system for targeted campaigns

Cons

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

ConvertKit

  • Very basic reporting
  • Expensive compared to other email marketing tools
  • Not great for midsize and large businesses
  • No drag-and-drop builder which makes it harder to design emails from scratch

Reviews from experts

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

ConvertKit

If you’re a blogger, vlogger, frogger, YouTuber, digital course creator, or anyone who makes their own digital content for sale under a single business entity, ConvertKit is 100% the tool for you, and it’s not even close.
It has everything you need to grow your business, including direct integrations with tools specifically designed to make your life easier like course, webinar, blog, and lead magnet plugins.
If you’ve got a stable business and over 1,000 subscribers, you’ll reap all of the benefits of the world’s most streamlined email autoresponder tool at a price that won’t break the bank and is silly easy to use.

Karl Kangur

Karl Kangur

Director of Marketing at Smash Digital, SEO/Marketing speaker

We bought this software after reading the Capterra reviews here, however we find it very limited in customization so it's mainly take it or leave type of features. We could not block freemailers from subscribing, or use custom CSS for the same purpose. In general, it is not a tool to use if you care about following a brand identity of your own.
The set-up process is tedious with Wordpress websites. We were not happy so we canceled, so instead of letting the current paid period last the software deactivated the account immediately and blocked us out of the software. We could not export our subscribers nor our content.

Karan Singh

Karan Singh

CEO of Code Creative India

*This information is current as of 02/13/2024. While we regularly update our articles, it`s possible that this article may not contain some of the latest information.