Salesforce vs Mailgun
Trying to choose between Salesforce vs Mailgun as your email marketing software? Here's when to choose each tool – and the pros and cons to know about.
- 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
- 4.2 TrustPilot
- 4.3 Capterra
- 4.3 G2
Average 4.3 / 5
Mailgun
An email marketing platform equipped with dedicated delivery and validation tools. Features include transactional emails, email APIs, and SMTP relays.
Pricing
Starts at $35 a month for 50,000 emails/month
Key features
- Drag-and-drop email builder
- Personalization
- Analytics
- Email validations
- Transactional emails
- Integrations with various services via APIs
Support
Ticket support on all plans, chat and phone on weekdays for higher plans.
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.
Mailgun
Founded in 2010 by Ev Kontsevoy and Taylor Wakefield. In 2021, Mailgun was acquired by Sinch. Company headquarters are in San Antonio, Texas.
Difficulty
Salesforce
Most users claim that it takes at least a month to learn working in Salesforce, so it’s not beginner-friendly.
Mailgun
The service is aimed at developers and people with advanced coding knowledge, so it’s not easy to use for the general public.
Best for
Salesforce
Large or scaling businesses and sales teams
Mailgun
Large companies with extensive mailing lists that require both marketing and transactional emails, deliverability monitoring, and a stable technological solution.
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
Mailgun
No free plan, only a 30-day free trial paid plans.
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
Mailgun
Billed monthly:
- Foundation starting at $35 for 50,000 emails a month. Includes APIs, webhooks, ticket support.
- Scale starting at $90 for 100,000 emails a month. Includes everything from the previous plan and 5,000 email validations, live chat and phone support, dedicated IP pools.
- Enterprise with custom pricing. Includes everything from the other plans and dedicated support, comprehensive onboarding, early access to new features.
Extra emails and email validations available for additional price
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.
Mailgun
Ticket support with 24-hour response time, Knowledge Center, Comprehensive SDKs, Customer Feedback Forum, and Documentation available on all plans.
Chat and phone support are available on the Scale and Enterprise plans. Chat support is available Monday through Friday from 7 am to 7 pm CST. Phone support is available Monday through Friday from 8 am to 5 pm CST.
On the Enterprise plan, users also have access to managed support.
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
Mailgun
- Drag-and-drop email builder and templates
- SMTP services for sending transactional emails
- Email validations
- Email previews on 100+ devices and clients
- Inbox placement testing
- Send time optimization
- Email analytics
- Integrations with various services via APIs
- Additional email optimization services for monitoring
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).
Mailgun
- Basic 7 templates with different layouts.
- Mailgun Templates API allows to integrate other templates into the service and manage the existing ones.
Video/screenshots
Salesforce
Mailgun
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.
Mailgun
64 integrations including WordPress, Zendesk, Webflow, Airtable, Google Sheets, Jotform, and more.
Devices
Salesforce
- Web app
- Desktop app
- Mobile apps for iOS and Android
Mailgun
- Available only on the web.
- No installable solution.
Languages
Salesforce
Chinese (Simplified)
Chinese (Traditional)
Danish
Dutch
Finnish
English
German
Italian
Portuguese (Brazil)
Russian
Spanish
Spanish (Mexico)
Swedish
Thai
Mailgun
English
Automation
Salesforce
Salesforce offers Automation Studio for automating email journeys which allows users to create complex email sequences with many conditions.
Mailgun
Basic automations using API (requires coding)
Pros
Salesforce
- Great support on onboarding from the vendor
- Sophisticated customer journeys
- Dynamic content in emails
- Integrations with CRMs
Mailgun
- Useful API that easily integrates into other services
- Deliverability features
- Reliability and data protection
- Helpful support
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
Mailgun
- Learning curve for beginners
- Interface is not very intuitive
- Stiff pricing structure
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.
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.
Mailgun
What do you like best about Mailgun?
Easy to use and reliable. The reporting features are very helpful too. The option for dedicated IP is great for businesses sending lots of emails. The email verification API also helps us protect our domain reputation.
What do you dislike about Mailgun?
Only one API key. I wish we could generate multiple ones with different access levels so we could easily revoke them if anything goes wrong. I wanted to have one key for email verification only, and one key for each application that uses the email API.
What do you like best about Mailgun?
You can integrate it to almost anything. The way that it manages the stream of emails it must send out is what makes this tool almost irreplaceable.
What do you dislike about Mailgun?
Hard to find something to not like about this. It is a very useful tool, it's not for novices. You need to know about email campaigns to know how to make best of it.
What problems is Mailgun solving and how is that benefiting you?
Keeping me out of spam list for the most part. Keeping our email in the green zone when it comes to spam detectors. It makes it easy to remove any bad emails, dnc's, and gauge things correctly.
*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.
