Salesforce Editions and Pricing: Differences, Limitations and Comparison

When deciding to start using Salesforce, it is crucial to take different aspects into account, including Salesforce cost. But realizing how much does Salesforce cost can be a real challenge since there are different kinds of plans you may need. So let's break the plan costs down so that it is easier to decide what is the most suitable one.

What Is Salesforce and How to Use It?

Salesforce is a CRM system designed for sales teams that is a great assistant in managing deals and customer service through process automation. Because using the system is not difficult, as well as it is simple to customize and adjust it to your needs, it has become considered a standard in the field of sales.

Designed for sales teams, Salesforce is a great assistant in customer service and deal management owing to its process automation. Being user-friendly, highly available for customization, so that you can tailor it to your needs, and easy in management, it is considered a gold standard in the sales field.

In general, Salesforce allows you to automate sales and marketing processes, which helps to improve the way you do the job. Of course, you can proceed with a lot of tasks manually, but doing things on your own is much slower than using Salesforce. As the platform also allows integrating a variety of extensions, applications and other add-ons to make use even more convenient and helpful, it is not surprising that Salesforce pricing can be pretty diverse and challenging to calculate.

With adopting any new tool, it may seem at the beginning that it is not easy to use. Salesforce is not an exception since there are indeed so many useful features and information, that they may seem to be overwhelming at first. But there is nothing to worry about, once you get acquainted with the interface, it to and to facilitate this process even more, we have prepared the overview illustrating the most common ways how it can be used. Thus, make the Salesforce onboarding easier for you and your company.

How to Find Out What Edition of Salesforce I Have?

⇒Go to quick search, type and navigate to Company Information.

⇒Look for Organization Edition.

⇒Here you will find the edition you are using.

Let’s see how it is possible to check what edition of Salesforce you use:

• Log in to your Salesforce account and hover over the gear icon on the top-right corner of the page near your account photo.
• From the drop-down list choose ‘Setup’. Once you do it, a left-column section appears.
• In this section navigate to Settings ⇒ Company Settings ⇒ Company Information.
• Click on it and in the opened section scroll to the Company edition field. Here you will be able to see the current Salesforce edition.

How Much Does Salesforce Cost?

So the price of Salesforce solutions starts at $5, which does not seem to be a huge investment for salespeople. However, this cost only lies on the surface and adds up as you use Salesforce more and have more users. At the same time, additional expenses also provide more benefits, which is a reasonable investment as well.

Salesforce Editions and Pricing

When choosing Salesforce Sales Cloud as a CRM system to manage a company’s sales-related processes, it is of vital importance to optimize the Sales Cloud edition according to the needs of the business. This requires evaluating all editions in Salesforce as they differ considerably in characteristics, functional limitations, and prices.

A company will not be able to satisfy its sales needs with a CRM system by choosing the wrong Salesforce edition. This may provoke additional spending and cause problems for a company. That is why it is important to consider Salesforce Editions comprehensively.

Basically, there are two options on how you can extend the range of features one can use while also increasing Salesforce’s small business cost. These imply advancing your account plan and integrating additional, customization features. In general, Salesforce editions and pricing options differ, so each is to be taken into account.

Evidently, Salesforce pricing depends on a number of factors. Therefore, there is no average cost that would be universal for everyone. However, getting to know the factors that influence Salesforce cost will allow you to estimate the cost for your case.

To get an overview of what the cost of Salesforce is for one user (and thus calculate the cost for the entire company), it is worth starting with the fundamental part.

To consider, Salesforce Contact Manager can cost one as low as $5 per month. Acquiring this provides you with a number of features:

• Tracking options, such as for events and tasks;
• Integration of Outlook and Gmail;
• A library with content;
• Access via a mobile app;
• Report building;
• Chatter (an internal tool for message exchange).

With this in mind, you get a range of simple but essential features for a reasonable price.

While you can start with having a small, extremely affordable set of features, you can increase the number of possibilities you have with more expensive options. There are different editions of Salesforce, particularly four main types of Salesforce for enterprise, aimed to help a company address specific sales-related needs. They are the following:

1. Essentials
2. Professional
3. Enterprise
4. Unlimited

Each edition has its own Salesforce limitations and features. Editions in Salesforce also differ in terms of price, so, depending on the type of a company (its product and service lines as well as the size of sales teams), it should determine the edition that suits its needs best.

1. Essentials

This edition costs $25 for a user per month, which should be billed annually. Essentials offer a company a simple assortment of default features, so it is a perfect option to satisfy the basic needs of the sales team, such as:

• Administration of sales-related assignments and events;
• Lead management;
• Account, contact, and opportunity management;
• Configuration of records and dashboards;
• Promotion of communication between the employees with Chatter;
• Mobile access to the system;
• Automation of sales-related processes.

There also are some Salesforce limitations of the Essentials, which make this edition not suitable for midsize and large companies. For instance, Essentials does not allow users to customize the solution with code as well as has quite restricted sales automation capabilities.

The users of this edition are also not able to use the function of Salesforce-third-party system integrations. This may provoke additional costs for companies that use various systems to manage business processes.

In general, Essentials is the best option for small companies, which have around 10 CRM users and do not need advanced CRM functionality.

2. Professional

The edition costs $75 for a user per month, billed annually.

The Professional plan offers a company advanced CRM functionality, so it can be used to manage diverse books, agreements, orders, and other records essential in the sales process. There are also no user limits, so Professional will suit an actively growing company.

This edition has several default features, such as:

• Rule-based lead scoring;
• Contract administration;
• Products and price books;
• Salesforce Enterprise Territory Management;
• Transaction and order management;
• Lightning Sync.;
• Sales forecasting.

At the same time, engineers can develop, integrate, and test new functionality of the CRM system with no impact on the current environment. Another useful feature Professional can offer to big companies is Enterprise Territory Management Salesforce. This allows creating a particular territory management system to administer sales worldwide.

The limitations of the Professional edition are similar to those mentioned above. Similarly to Essentials, the Professional edition does not offer to customize and automate the solution via coding.

This edition will best fit the needs of small or midsize businesses with a single sales department, which has 11-60 members in their sales teams.

3. Enterprise

Enterprise edition CRM Salesforce costs $150 per user for a month, billed annually.

Salesforce Professional vs Enterprise

Enterprise offers users all the functional capabilities of the Professional as well as some additional features, including the following:

• Workflow and approval automation;
• The possibility of the sales team members to cooperate and work on one particular deal;
• The opportunity to split to share revenue between the sales team members according to their contributions;
• Advanced reporting and data management features and automation capabilities;
• The unlimited number of users, as well as their roles, permissions, and the number of record types per object;
• Lightning sales cloud - enterprise edition;
• APIs for integrating the function of Salesforce with other systems;
• Developing and testing capabilities.

One should note that the Salesforce enterprise level can be managed by the validation rules, which ensures that the system meets the company’s internal CRM standards. Lightning CRM enterprise edition helps to develop and manage applications with point-and-click devices or with code.

Still, this option is limited to 100 validation rules per object. Some other limitations include the limits on custom objects (200 maximum), custom fields per object (500 maximum), and custom report types (200 maximum).

This edition will best fit large-scale organizations with different sales departments, which consists of more than 50 sales team members.

4. Unlimited

This is an advanced type of organization editions in Salesforce, which costs $300 for a user per month that should be billed annually.

It offers an almost endless set of capabilities, including but not limited to process automation, customization with Apex code, and unification via APIs. It also provides the users with:

• 24/7 assistance of the Salesforce support team;
• Access to premier resources such as knowledge base and Salesforce webinars;
• Support of Salesforce admin and developers as well as a possibility to visit the sessions with a Salesforce expert;
• Developer support.

This edition has some limitations, such as the inability to create more than 2,000 custom objects, 800 custom fields per object, 200 report types, and 200 validation rules. However, the limitations are not critical to a company considering the unlimited capabilities offered by this edition.

The functionality of Unlimited will fit the needs of enterprise-level organizations, whose multiple sales departments have more than 250 sales team members.

While these prices are pretty clear, keep in mind that you will be billed annually, which can be a serious expense for the company. Then, you need to take into account the fact that you will have some additional expenses for team Salesforce training. Therefore, Salesforce adoption requires careful calculations to come up with accurate total Salesforce CRM pricing.

Premier Salesforce Editions and Pricing

In addition to the basic plans, the CRM also has several success plans that include the entire team training and support. So you can choose a plan that allows you to use the platform more independently or those that provide detailed step by step guidance.

Here are the premier success plans you can choose from:

• Standard. This plan is included in all the licenses that come with all the Salesforce products automatically, which means that you do not have to install it on your own additionally. The users have the support of success communities and guided journeys containing recommendations on how to use the platform. Product support is also provided through a hotline for calls or messages.
• Premier. This most popular guiding plan, yet the pricing for these plans changes depending on the original license. The guidance includes success management, accelerators, interactive webinars and events. The product support is 24/7 through phone, chat or quick message responses, as well as you get developer support.

It goes at 20% of the annual license net cost. For instance, your Enterprise edition costs $150 per month or $1800 per year. It means that to receive the Premier Success plan cost you calculate 20% out of $1800 and receive $360 per user per year.

• Premier Plus. This plan comprises all the features of the Premier plan plus Admin Assist option which allows assigning time-consuming administrative tasks to the team of experienced Salesforce-certified administrators. It goes at 30% of the annual license net cost. If you use the Enterprise edition at $150 per month or $1800 per year, you will pay 30% from $1800 which makes the payment $540 per user per year.

Evidently, each plan pretty much offers the extension to the basic plans mentioned earlier. The price of these plans, particularly the Premier, Premier Plus, is around 20-30% from the cost of your original license. Depending on which plan you choose initially, you can calculate the price for these extended options.

How to Upgrade Your Salesforce Edition?

As soon as one understands that the current Salesforce edition does not meet the requirements of business anymore, it is time to upgrade the contract with Salesforce.

For that purpose, it is better to contact the Salesforce's representative and request them to upgrade the currently owned Salesforce edition.

Salesforce helps a company fulfill its needs, and the upgrade only requires paying the difference in price between the current edition of Salesforce and the intended one. Hence, instead of waiting for the end of the license of the current Salesforce edition, it is worth upgrading as soon as the current plan stops satisfying business sales needs.

To make the right choice of Salesforce Editions, it is required to consider organizational and sales complexity, along with the needs of customization. Then, one should evaluate whether the needs of a company align with the operative capacities and Salesforce limitations of each edition.

Top CRM Pricing Comparison

While the breakdown of Salesforce cost has helped to see how much does Salesforce cost, it is still not clear what place it takes in terms of the price range on the market. Therefore, it is interesting to make an overview of some similar systems to learn more about the competitors’ pricing.

In fact, Salesforce was pretty much the first to invent the SaaS kind of pricing model in terms of billing, which would be used for a cloud app that is always on. This explains why the prices of its competitors are quite similar and don’t differ from Salesforce CRM pricing much.

Here are some examples:

• Microsoft’s Dynamics CRM. This one is probably the closest competitor of Salesforce since one accesses similar applications and features to Salesforce to transfer sales from the manual mode to the automated one. Not to mention, the pricing system is quite similar to the Salesforce cost breakdown: it’s divided into annual billings based on the user per month sums. The price varies depending on the plan from $65 to $95 per user, as for Salesforce.
• Oracle Engagement Cloud. This platform offers recently launched applications that assist users in automation. The platform has a pricing breakdown to monthly payments for each user, just like Salesforce does, and it is also targeted at large organizations. The price varies from $65 to $300 per user.
• Insightly. In addition to the basic features for automation, the system also provides features for project management, which provides you with an opportunity to extend your possibilities when working. This one is pretty affordable and even has a free plan yet with, of course, a limited range of features. The price starts at $5 and may reach $100 per user.
• Zoho’s CRM. This CRM provides sales automation features to small and medium companies, additionally offering integration with applications to use outside the system. Therefore, you can naturally integrate the tools used by any department, such as HR or finance. The pricing starts with $12 annually (or $18 if you pay monthly) and increases to $45 per month for the most extended plan.

• HubSpot. This platform allows you to keep a hand on your sales pipeline including tracking of a team and individual performance of your employees. Its features include dashboard reporting, possibility to receive insights, schedule meetings, lead management, and live chat option. They offer 3 plans at the following prices: Free – $50/user – $400/user.
• SAP Sales Cloud. Apart from the real-time analytics reports, unified billing management platform and collaboration space for sales teams to set up and negotiate pricings, this CRM also offers AI content recommendations and a mobile version. The prices start at $58 per user.

As you can see, there is little difference between the pricing for Salesforce’s competitors while there are differences in what opportunities you get with each of the platforms.

Sum-Up

Salesforce CRM pricing is pretty affordable for the leading CRM system it is on the market. Salesforce has brought sales automation that is cloud-based to a new level and basically initiated the growth of the market. Besides, the company was the first to deliver a particular pricing model, the ‘user per month’ one, which is now followed by numerous businesses for their product cost.

Salesforce pricing is diverse and ranges depending on a number of factors. It is important that you are familiar with the additional Salesforce cost you may need to pay prior to adopting it. However, the cost is quite affordable, and the breakdown is pretty convenient when you investigate it in detail.