Keap vs Salesforce
Trying to choose between Keap vs Salesforce as your email marketing software? Here's when to choose each tool – and the pros and cons to know about.
Keap
- 2.6/5 on Trustpilot
- 4.1/5 on Capterra
- 4.2/5 on G2
A sales and marketing automation platform catered to small businesses. Has CRM and email and text marketing features.
Pricing
Starts at $159 a month for 1,500 contacts (billed yearly)
Key features
- Email automation
- Drag-and-drop email builder
- Segmentation
- Reporting and analytics
- Integrations with various services
- CRM
- Virtual phone number
Support
24/7 online chat support, email support, and call-in support for the UK, US, and Australia. US call-in support is available on weekdays from 6 am to 7 pm PST.
Salesforce
- 1.4/5 on TrustPilot
- 4.4/5 on Capterra
- 4.3/5 on G2
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
Keap was founded in 2001 by brothers Scott and Eric Martineau and now CEO Clate Mask. The company headquarters is in Chandler, Arizona.
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.
Although users can create emails and automations without coding or designing, the platform is vast and can be overwhelming to navigate.
Most users claim that it takes at least a month to learn working in Salesforce, so it’s not beginner-friendly.
Small businesses that need to constantly keep in touch with clients via not only email but also text and phone.
Large or scaling businesses and sales teams
No free plan, only 14 day free trial.
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
Keap has three plans, billed yearly/monthly:
Pro $159 / $199
- 1,500 contacts
- 2 users
- Email marketing
- Marketing, sales & workflow automation
- CRM
- Quotes, invoices & payments
- Landing pages & online sales
- Text marketing (US)
Max $229 / $289
- 2,500 contacts
- 3 users
- Core features
- Dedicated phone line (US & Canada)
- Appointments
- Enhanced landing pages & sales tools
- E-commerce tools (promo codes, order bumps, etc.)
- Advanced reporting
Ultimate $279 / $349
- 2,500 contacts
- 3 users
- Core features
- Premium CRM & sales management
- Advanced marketing & sales tools (round robin, email health report, etc.)
- Permission levels for users
- Affiliate management & collaboration
- Advanced reporting
Other pricing features:
- 14 days free trial with all the features
- All plans require a mandatory one-time onboarding fee of $999
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
24/7 online chat support, email support, and call-in support for the UK, US, and Australia. US call-in support is available on weekdays from 6 am to 7 pm PST.
Customer support managers for each user, access to Keap Academy’s live training events and online learning platform, and Knowledge Base.
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 and text marketing automation in a drag-and-drop builder
- Segmentation
- Reporting and analytics
- Integrations with various services
- CRM
- A mobile app for iOS and Android for a virtual phone number and leads management
- Forms and landing pages
- Appointments booking and payments
- 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
18+ templates
Templates for one on one email conversations with clients
Templates for:
- Promo emails
- Online stores
- Flash sale
- Healthcare
- Home decor
- Fitness
- 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).
29 integrations including Zapier, Jotform, WordPress, Instapage, OptinMonster, and more.
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.
- Website
- A mobile app for Android and iOS to use a virtual phone number and manage contacts. Available in the U.S., Australia, Canada, U.K., and New Zealand
- No installable solution.
- Web app
- Desktop app
- Mobile apps for iOS and Android
English
Chinese (Simplified)
Chinese (Traditional)
Danish
Dutch
Finnish
English
German
Italian
Portuguese (Brazil)
Russian
Spanish
Spanish (Mexico)
Swedish
Thai
Marketing and sales automations:
- Free consultation
- Deal follow-up
- Reminders
- Yearly birthday greetings
- Review request
Salesforce offers Automation Studio for automating email journeys which allows users to create complex email sequences with many conditions.
- Helpful automations
- Many features (CRM, email marketing, etc.) in one place
- Customer support
- Integrations
- Great support on onboarding from the vendor
- Sophisticated customer journeys
- Dynamic content in emails
- Integrations with CRMs
- No A/B testing
- Difficult to cancel and billing issues
- Steep learning curve
- Software is slow
- 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
Pros: Keap Max Classic: It has a lot of features to support businesses that need the room to scale up. It is pretty powerful in what it can do.
Cons: Keap Max Classic: It is convoluted, complex, and confusing. We had to make custom forms and interfaces for our staff because everyone was too confused working directly within Keap. It is also SLOW. Most functions are not snappy. Creating and maintaining campaigns get really confusing really quickly once you graduate from the simplest of campaigns.
What do you dislike about Keap?
Keap is a very robust platform, which means it does have a bit of a learning curve. They provide training and plenty of resources to help you learn, but it takes a little time to understand all its abilities fully.
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 01/20/2025. While we regularly update our articles, it`s possible that this article may not contain some of the latest information.
