Salesforce is the largest CRM platform in the world, covering sales, service, marketing, commerce and analytics on a shared customer record. It is bought less for any single feature than for the fact that it can be configured to model almost any sales process, and for the ecosystem of consultants and apps that surrounds it.
Salesforce: the short answer
Every line below is drawn from facts verified on 9 August 2026.
- What it is
- The enterprise CRM standard, extended into a full customer platform
- Best for
- Mid-market and enterprise sales organisations
- Starts at
- From $25 per user/month (Starter Suite)
- Free option
- No free plan, 30 days trial
- Biggest strength
- Configurable enough to model almost any sales process
- Biggest drawback
- Expensive, and the jump from Starter to Pro Suite is fourfold
- Closest alternative
- HubSpot - Far easier to adopt and cheaper to run; less configurable at the top end
- True annual cost
- from $300 a year at the cheapest paid tier
Salesforce at a glance
| Best for | Mid-market and enterprise sales organisations, Complex, multi-stage sales processes needing heavy customisation, Companies that want one customer record across sales, service and marketing |
|---|---|
| Category | Sales, Marketing, AI |
| Starting price | From $25 per user/month (Starter Suite) |
| Free plan | No |
| Free trial | 30 days |
| Pricing model | subscription |
| Company | Salesforce, Inc. |
| Founded | 1999 |
| Headquarters | San Francisco, California, United States |
| Founders | Marc Benioff, Parker Harris, Dave Moellenhoff, Frank Dominguez |
| Platforms | Web, iOS, Android |
| Public API | Yes |
| Browser extension | Yes |
| Mobile apps | iOS + Android |
| Self-hosting | No |
| Affiliate programme | No |
| Data source | Vendor pricing page and public records |
| Last checked | August 2026 |
Salesforce pricing
Prices below were read from the vendor's own pricing page on 9 August 2026. Pricing model: subscription. Free trial: 30 days.
| Plan | Price | Billing | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| Starter Suite | $25 | per month | per user - Billed monthly or annually. Simplified CRM with marketing and service |
| Pro Suite | $100 | per month | per user, billed annually - Adds customisation, forecasting and greater automation |
| Enterprise | $175 | per month | per user, billed annually - Advanced pipeline management and deeper configurability |
| Unlimited | $350 | per month | per user, billed annually - Adds premier support and expanded sandboxes |
| Agentforce 1 Sales | $550 | per month | per user, billed annually - Bundles Agentforce AI agents and Data Cloud |
What Salesforce actually costs over a year
A monthly price is not the same thing as a monthly contract. These are the plans above multiplied out to twelve months, per seat or unit where the plan is charged that way.
| Plan | Monthly | Over 12 months |
|---|---|---|
| Starter Suiteper user | $25 | $300 |
| Pro Suiteper user, billed annually | $100 | $1200 |
| Enterpriseper user, billed annually | $175 | $2100 |
| Unlimitedper user, billed annually | $350 | $4200 |
| Agentforce 1 Salesper user, billed annually | $550 | $6600 |
Which Salesforce plan should you buy?
| Your situation | Recommended | Why |
|---|---|---|
| You are a small team wanting a simple CRM | Starter Suite | $25 per user with marketing and service included. Note this is not the Salesforce most people mean. |
| You need customisation and forecasting | Pro Suite | $100 per user billed annually. |
| You have a complex multi-stage sales process | Enterprise | $175 per user. This is the tier where Salesforce's configurability actually applies, and where most buyers end up. |
| You need premier support and expanded sandboxes | Unlimited | $350 per user billed annually. |
| You have no administrator or implementation budget | Do not buy Salesforce | The platform will faithfully encode a bad process and then make it permanent. HubSpot or Pipedrive instead. |
| You just need a pipeline | Consider Pipedrive instead | $14 a seat, working the same afternoon, with no configuration project. |
Verdict by who you are
Enterprise sales organisationYes
Nothing else configures to a genuinely unusual sales process at this scale, and the ecosystem of consultants and apps is unmatched.
Company wanting one record across sales, service and marketingYes
Achievable here in a way that stitching point tools together never quite manages.
Small teamNo
Enterprise at $175 a seat plus implementation is not a small-business purchase, and Starter Suite is a different product from what you were sold on.
Team with no adminNo
Unadministered Salesforce becomes an expensive database nobody updates.
Organisation wanting value in week oneNo
This is an implementation, measured in months.
Should you buy Salesforce?
Buy Salesforce if…
- Mid-market and enterprise sales organisations
- Complex, multi-stage sales processes needing heavy customisation
- Companies that want one customer record across sales, service and marketing
Do not buy Salesforce if…
- Small teams who need a pipeline and nothing more
- Organisations without an administrator or implementation budget
- Anyone wanting to be productive in the first week
Key features
- Highly configurable objects, fields and record types
- Opportunity, pipeline and revenue forecasting
- Flow automation and approval processes without code
- Reports and dashboards across the whole customer record
- AppExchange marketplace with thousands of installable apps
- Agentforce AI agents on higher tiers
- Sandboxes and a full deployment lifecycle for changes
- Territory, quota and compensation management on upper tiers
Integrations
- Slack
- Microsoft 365 and Outlook
- Google Workspace
- Tableau and MuleSoft
- DocuSign
- Thousands of apps via AppExchange
- REST and SOAP APIs
Salesforce screenshots
Captured by us in August 2026 at 1440px, unedited. Interfaces change, so these show the product as it looked on the date we verified this profile. Vendors localise pricing by visitor region, so a pricing screenshot may display a different currency to the USD figures recorded above.
Our assessment
Salesforce is the most capable CRM available and the most expensive way to get a CRM wrong. Its strength is that almost any process can be modelled in it, which is exactly why implementations fail: the platform will faithfully encode a bad process and then make it permanent. Licence cost is also only part of the spend, because Enterprise and above realistically assume an administrator and often a consultancy. Where it earns the money is scale and consolidation, when sales, service and marketing genuinely need to share one record and no smaller tool can hold the complexity.
What works in Salesforce
- Configurable enough to model almost any sales process
- Reporting and forecasting are best in class at enterprise scale
- Enormous ecosystem of apps, integrations and available expertise
- One customer record across sales, service, marketing and commerce
What doesn't
- Expensive, and the jump from Starter to Pro Suite is fourfold
- Realistically requires an administrator, and often an implementation partner
- Interface is dense and onboarding is slow for sales teams
- Costs compound through add-ons, Data Cloud consumption and sandboxes
EveryAny Decision Score
Scored by dimension rather than averaged into one number, because the trade-offs are the useful part. 3 of these 8 dimensions are calculated from verified facts by published formula; the rest are editorial judgement, labelled as such. How each score is calculated.
- Cost position4.3/10
derivedentry tier at $25 a month against a category median of $25 across 7 comparable tools
- Portability5/10
derivedpublic API
- Subscription flexibility6/10
derivedfree trial, subscription, monthly billing
- Feature depth10/10
editorialeditorial judgement, reviewed at last check
- Ease of learning2/10
editorialeditorial judgement, reviewed at last check
- Collaboration7/10
editorialeditorial judgement, reviewed at last check
- AI capability8/10
editorialeditorial judgement, reviewed at last check
- Professional adoption10/10
editorialeditorial judgement, reviewed at last check
What leaving Salesforce would cost
moderate lock-in
Calculated as 10 minus a portability score of 5, built from four signals (self-hosting, a public API, open-source licensing and a documented export path) . Salesforce scores on: public API. Formula.
Salesforce competitors and alternatives
| Alternative | Why you might pick it instead |
|---|---|
| HubSpot | Far easier to adopt and cheaper to run; less configurable at the top end. |
| Pipedrive | If you genuinely only need a sales pipeline, at a fraction of the cost. |
| Microsoft Dynamics 365 | The natural alternative if the organisation already runs on Microsoft. |
The real cost is not the licence
A useful rule when budgeting Salesforce: the subscription is roughly half the first-year cost. The rest is configuration, data migration, integration work and the person who owns the system afterwards. Organisations that skip that last item are the ones whose Salesforce becomes a half-populated database nobody trusts within eighteen months.
The tier that matters
The step people underestimate is Starter Suite at $25 to Pro Suite at $100. Starter is deliberately constrained, and teams outgrow it as soon as they want real customisation or forecasting. If you expect to need either, model Pro Suite from the beginning rather than treating $25 as your price.
Enterprise at $175 is where most serious sales organisations land, and Unlimited at $350 mainly buys support and sandboxes rather than capability.
Agentforce and where AI pricing is heading
Agentforce 1 Sales at $550 per user per month bundles AI agents with Data Cloud. It is worth reading that number carefully: it is more than twenty times the Starter price, and it signals that the platform’s growth is now being priced through AI consumption rather than seats alone. Whether that represents value depends entirely on whether the agents replace headcount.
Salesforce or HubSpot?
Choose HubSpot if you want to be productive in a fortnight, if marketing and sales are the same small team, and if nobody is going to administer a platform. Choose Salesforce if your process genuinely does not fit a simpler tool, if you need territory and quota management, or if you are already large enough that consolidation is the point. Salesforce also owns Slack, which increasingly shows up as tighter integration between the two.
Salesforce questions, answered
- Is Salesforce worth it?
- Salesforce is the most capable CRM available and the most expensive way to get a CRM wrong.
- How much does Salesforce cost?
- From $25 per user/month (Starter Suite). The cheapest paid tier we recorded works out at $25 a month, or $300 over a year. Verified against the vendor's pricing page.
- Does Salesforce have a free plan or free trial?
- Salesforce has no free plan. A free trial is available: 30 days.
- What is the best Salesforce alternative?
- It depends on the job. HubSpot: Far easier to adopt and cheaper to run; less configurable at the top end. Pipedrive: If you genuinely only need a sales pipeline, at a fraction of the cost. Microsoft Dynamics 365: The natural alternative if the organisation already runs on Microsoft.
- Can I self-host Salesforce?
- No. Salesforce is a hosted service only, so your data lives on the vendor's infrastructure.
Provenance and freshness
When each fact was last checked
- Pricing ·
- Plans ·
- Free trial
- Features
- Platforms
- Integrations
- Affiliate programme
- Company details
What has changed
-
August 2026
- Per-user pricing verified across all editions
- Added plan picker and verdicts
Sources & verification
Facts on this page were read from the sources below on the dates shown. Where a vendor does not publish a figure, we record it as not disclosed rather than estimating it.
- Salesforce Sales Cloud pricing - checked 9 August 2026
Spotted something out of date? Email [email protected] and we will re-check it. Corrections are logged on the page.
