Salesforce vs ConvertKit

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 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.

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

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

Large or scaling businesses and sales teams

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

• 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 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

• 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).

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.

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.

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.

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

• Web app only

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.

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.

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

• 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

• 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

• 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