Salesforce vs SendGrid

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

Salesforce vs SendGrid 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

  • 1.4 TrustPilot
  • 4.2 Capterra
  • 4 G2

Average 3.2 / 5

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SendGrid

SendGrid is a cloud-based platform for transactional and marketing emails.

Pricing

Starting at $15/month, dynamic pricing, depends on the number of emails sent monthly and the contact list volume.

Key features

  • Email automation
  • Email builder with templates
  • Email testing
  • A/B testing
  • Signup forms
  • List management
  • Dynamic content in emails

Support

Web form tickets, Twitter DMs, live chat support for paid users, phone support for users on Pro/Advanced plans and higher

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.

SendGrid

SendGrid is based in Denver, Colorado, and it was founded in 2009. In 2019, the company was acquired by Twilio, the service for customer communications and data storage.

Difficulty

Salesforce

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

SendGrid

SendGrid may require technical expertise to set up and start working, so it’s not 100% beginner-friendly.

Best for

Salesforce

Large or scaling businesses and sales teams

SendGrid

Entreprises and tech companies

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

SendGrid

SendGrid offers a free plan with a limit of up to 2,000 contacts and 6,000 emails sent per month. The free plan includes:

  • Design & code editors
  • Segmentation
  • A/B testing & actionable insights
  • 3 email testing credits
  • 1 signup form
  • Ticket support
  • 1 user
  • Automation

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

SendGrid

Dynamic pricing, depends on the number of contacts, emails sent per month, the number of users, and the set of platform features:

Basic: $15–200/month, 5–100K contacts, up to 300K emails per month. Includes:

  • Design & code editors
  • Segmentation
  • A/B testing & actionable insights
  • 10 email testing credits
  • 5 signup forms
  • Ticket & chat support
  • 1 user

Advanced: $60–900/month, up to 200K contacts and 1 million emails/month. Unlike the Basic plan, it includes:

  • 60 email testing credits
  • 15 signup forms
  • Up to 1,000 users

The plan also unlocks access to:

  • Automation
  • Dedicated IPs
  • Guaranteed response times on ticket, chat, & phone support

Custom: Custom pricing for high-volume sending over 200K contacts and 1 million emails/month.

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.

SendGrid

Support is available 24/7 in English via the following channels:

  • Twitter DMs and web form tickets — for all users
  • Live chat support — for paid users
  • Phone support — for paid users on Advanced email marketing plan/Pro API plan and custom high-volume plans

SendGrid also provides a knowledge center for marketers and developers with screenshots and video tutorials. Articles in the knowledge base are partially translated to French, Japanese, Portuguese (Brazil), German, and Spanish (Mexico). The videos are only available in English.

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

SendGrid

  • Email marketing automation
  • Signup forms
  • List management
  • Email editor: both no-code and code
  • Email templates
  • A/B testing
  • Analytics
  • Email testing
  • Dynamic content
  • Deliverability insights

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).

SendGrid

60+ free templates for different campaign types and industries, including:

  • Healthcare
  • Traveling
  • E-commerce
  • Non-profits
  • Emails for small businesses

SendGrid also offers templates for:

  • Welcome emails
  • Holiday emails
  • Promotional emails
  • Newsletters
  • Transactional emails (i. e. order confirmation, shipping confirmation, etc.)

Some of these templates contain dynamic content.

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.

SendGrid

100+ integrations with other ESPs like Klaviyo and Litmus, CRM systems like AgileCRM, content management systems like WordPress and Verst., and more.

Devices

Salesforce

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

SendGrid

A web app and an iOS app with limited functionality (management and troubleshooting only), you can find an APK for Android but it’s not an official release

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

SendGrid

English English

Automation

Salesforce

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

SendGrid

SendGrid offers a tool for building custom automated sequences and a pre-built welcome series. The automation editor allows users to select entry criteria, enable and temporarily disable the sequence, set conditions, and add as many emails to the sequence as they want.

Pros

Salesforce

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

SendGrid

  • A solid transactional API
  • Good choice of integrations
  • Great testing tool
  • Good for scaling businesses

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

SendGrid

  • Slow customer support
  • Many reviewers complain about deliverability issues like blacklisted IPs
  • Bugs like no 2FA emails to log in to the platform
  • Could be more user-friendly

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

SendGrid

SendGrid's email editor allows you to customize existing templates, build a new email newsletter with the drag-and-drop functionality, or code an email from scratch. You can customize the design of the email by changing attributes such as background color, text, and font, as well as add new content blocks, including buttons, images, texts, and snippets of code.
One of the most useful aspects of the email editor is the ability to add tags in the message, which allow you to add custom fields. This includes adding the recipient's name and location, date of last open, or any other information you collect on your subscribers, which enables a high level of personalization.

Karen McCandless

Karen McCandless

Сontent strategist, digital analyst, and researcher, writer for The Next Web, Softonic, Business2Community, Business.com, and Microsoft Europe.

Sendgrid is a powerful email marketing tool that offers superior services to its customers. Sendgrid is a must-have tool for start-ups, eCommerce businesses, freelancers and corporates. One thing that separates Sendgrid from other email marketing tools is their scalability once our list grows. The free version of Sendgrid allows you to send 100 emails every day.
What I like most about Sendgrid is that most of the tools out there offer easy integration with Sendgrid. Some apps can even directly integrate with SendGrid without using automation software like Zapier.

Rahul R

Rahul R

Chief Technical Officer at ONZE Technologies

*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.