Salesforce CRM Review: Is it Right for Your Business?

We tested Salesforce to see if it lives up to its reputation as the best CRM software – and by and large, it did. After using the platform and getting to grips with the powerful CRM tools provided, we concluded that it would be suitable for businesses of all sizes, and could certainly meet the demands of a large team with a sizeable customer or client base.

Salesforce offers a range of AI tools that will help automate your sales processes, robust analytics tools that will help you gain insights from the data you’re storing, and excellent customer support options. However, with Salesforce’s pricing quickly reaching over £100 per user, per month, it’s not the most affordable solution for small businesses.

In this review we’ll assess Salesforce’s pros and cons, its features, its pricing, and let you know how it stacks up against leading competitors. We’ll also help you find out if it’s right for your business.

If you need a quicker way to know which CRM software fits your business’ needs, try our free quote finding tool. All you need to do is give us a few details about your business, and the top providers will be in touch with obligation-free quotes. Yes, the CRM world can be daunting, but we’re pros when it comes to navigating this area, so read on!

Testing Summary: Our Experience with Salesforce

We tested Salesforce’s Starter Suite, its entry-level sales CRM platform, designed for small businesses.

It came preloaded with preset dashboards, leads, and contacts, which helped give us a sense of how our own data would appear in the platform. We were particularly impressed by the platform’s use of doughnut charts to summarise data, making it easily digestible and understandable at a glance. This is a relatively new feature, introduced in June 2024 as part of Salesforce’s Lightning UI update, an effort to improve navigation.

That said, when it came to practical tasks like creating reports, we were a little overwhelmed. There are so many options to choose from to build reports, and without having spent a substantial amount of time perusing the platform and understanding all its terminology, it can be confusing.

That said, once you’ve figured it out, Salesforce reporting tools are a great asset. Besides the sheer number of datasets available to build reports from, Salesforce also has a button to quickly turns datasets into a chart, with a number of preset types, from bar, to funnel, to doughnut.

To make the platform easier to use, Salesforce has a “tour” option, which guides you through the different sections on the platform. It also has a useful help button in the top bar, which comes with plenty of support options, such as links to how-to guides for the specific page you’re on, and a search bar to find answers to specific questions.

The Pros and Cons of Salesforce

Here’s a quick glance at the advantages and disadvantages of using Salesforce CRM:

✓ Pro: Offers powerful reporting tools

Salesforce has more in-depth analytics tools than other CRM platforms. Reports can cover a host of topics, from leads, to activities, to contracts, to opportunities, and more.

On Salesforce’s more premium plans, you get access to even more advanced features, such as joined reports that combine data from multiple spreadsheets, and forecasting with customisable KPIs and charts for better visualisation. These features can help you effectively plan for the future by giving you a better understanding of your progress and what strategies work best.

✓ Pro: Provides extensive customisation options

Salesforce’s platform allows for a great deal of customisation. This includes the ability to build custom dashboards, and reports, combining various data from your platform into one page.

You can make it easier to visualise this data using Salesforce’s chart builder, and revenue data views, which allow you to better understand data, explain trends, and generate valuable insights. When you can analyse data faster, you can create feasible business goals and targets.

✓ Pro: Highly scalable

Salesforce is a highly scalable system, offering plans for small businesses that start at £20 per month, as well as enterprise-level solutions for businesses with over 1,000 employees. This means businesses using the system are unlikely to outgrow Salesforce’s offering and have to switch to a different provider.

Plus, Salesforce offers separate software for different use cases (including sales, marketing, and services), each with respective plans from small business up to enterprise level. This allows businesses to scale up different teams while sticking to the same software, making training and crossover easier.

✘ Con: Expensive plans when compared with other CRM options

Even Salesforce’s small business plans are more expensive than the equivalent offered by other CRM platforms. Its two entry-level plans costs between £20 and £80 per user, per month, more than Zoho CRM’s entire range, which costs between £12 and £42 per user, per month.

Although Salesforce certainly has the tools to back up its price, more isn’t always better, especially if you don’t need the complex reporting functions offered by Salesforce. Small businesses can still find all the essential features they need on cheaper platforms like Zoho CRM or Freshworks.

✘ Con: Can be overwhelming for beginners

Because Salesforce’s CRM platform comes with so many tools for reporting and customisation, it can be overwhelming for those who are new to using CRM platforms. So, even though Salesforce has plans for small businesses, that doesn’t mean they’re beginner-friendly.

For example, figuring out how to build a report for the first time is a bit of a minefield, because of the sheer number of categories and sub-types you have to choose from.

How Much Does Salesforce Cost?

Salesforce’s three main CRM solutions are its Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, and Marketing Cloud, but its sales CRM is by far the most popular.

Salesforce sales CRM costs

Here’s what you can expect to pay for Salesforce’s Sales Cloud, including its small business plans:

Salesforce’s cheapest plan, Starter Suite, costs £20 per user, per month. Both the Starter Suite and Pro Suite are designed with small businesses in mind, and come with enough useful customisation and integration features to allow you to streamline your sales.

That said, Salesforce’s pricing is more expensive than its competitors, with the average starting price for CRM starting at £12 per user, per month.

The upside is that Salesforce offers a 30-day free trial on all of its paid plans. Plus, its succeeding plans come with more lead conversion features such as lead scoring and a customisable sales pipeline.

But, if you’re a startup looking to cut back on costs, you’ll be better off with a cheaper solution than Salesforce. Freshsales could be a better bet as it offers a free plan that enables unlimited users and more lead communication services, such as native VoIP and website live chat.

Salesforce marketing CRM costs

Salesforce’s marketing CRM costs far more than its sales CRM, with its Marketing Cloud Engagement platform ranging from £1,000 to £3,360 per company, per month. The Marketing Cloud Account Engagement platform has a slightly cheaper range, £1,000 to £2,200 per month.

It’s a simple yet modern marketing automation platform that allows marketing and sales departments to create, execute, and manage marketing campaigns online that’ll help generate better leads.

Salesforce services CRM costs

Salesforce’s Service Cloud costs less on average than both its Sales and Marketing clouds, with prices ranging from £20 to £264 per user, per month.

It’s fairly typical for customer service CRM to cost less, since it typically doesn’t require the advanced analytics tools or email marketing functions of sales and marketing.

What Are Salesforce’s Standout Features?

Here’s a closer look at two of Salesforce’s best features:

Lead management

Lead management is the core of any good CRM platform, and Salesforce’s lead management features are quite comprehensive.

You can track, and qualify prospective leads as cold, warm, or hot and assign them to the correct agents based on their status. There’s also a function to automatically block duplicates from being created, so your dashboard stays nice and neat.

Plus, you’ll be able to call and email leads directly from the Salesforce platform, thanks to integrations with Gmail, Outlook, and VoIP systems, such as RingCentral and Dialpad. This helps avoid having to switch between platforms, and makes sure conversations are recorded.

However, Salesforce is lacking some lead communication features, such as social listening, instant messaging app integrations, and a website chatbot. The platform is more focused on enhancing data analysis than integrating new communication methods. You can find some of these missing features at Hubspot.

Salesforce also lets you customise your sales process on every plan, allowing you to match the platform to your in-house sales path and team objectives. This is important for making the platform easy to use, and for avoiding unnecessary workarounds.

On Salesforce’s most expensive plans, you’ll also get access to AI tools to help you qualify leads, which we’ll get into in the next section.

Einstein Copilot AI

Einstein Copilot is Salesforce’s generative AI assistant, and it’s available on all of its most expensive CRM plans. It can be used in a variety of ways to help qualify leads and speed up work.

Here are a few things it can do:

• Attribute predictive scores to leads
• Transcribe or summarise conversations and generate insights
• Generate replies to conversations with leads and customers
• Create contact forms based on contact data
• Dynamically automate tasks, without you having to alter settings
• Build data visualisations

Of course, as with all AI tools, we recommend you take Einstein’s suggestions with a pinch of salt. It can only work with the knowledge you give it, so it’s not omniscient.

AppExchange

AppExchange might just be one of the most important features that Salesforce has to offer. It’s essentially an app market for third-party integrations, but it also has some native Salesforce tools.

You can find integrations with accounting tools (Sage, Quickbooks), VoIP systems (CloudCall), and ecommerce platforms (WooCommerce), for example. The AppExchange currently offers about 9,000 apps, so we won’t list them all. There are ready-to-install apps, so they don’t require API coding to connect to your Salesforce platform.

For context, Zoho CRM has around 3,000 app integrations, roughly three times fewer than Salesforce. Being able to integrate with a variety of third-party platforms, and having easy access to Salesforce’s own add-on tools can help you unify data across platforms, and ensure your CRM has all the tools you need to operate smoothly.

If you already use a lot of software tools, Salesforce is a good option, because chances are it can easily integrate with your existing kit.

What Kind of Business is Salesforce Best for?

Salesforce is best for data-driven businesses that need powerful reporting and analysis tools. It comes with easy data visualisation, custom reporting, and AI-powered automation, if you’re on the most expensive plans, making it a useful tool for businesses that deal with complex pipelines.

It’s also an extremely scalable platform, suitable for businesses of all sizes, from small to enterprise-level, thanks to its numerous pricing tiers and industry-specific software platforms.

That said, since Salesforce is on the expensive side, it might be over budget for some small businesses. Its powerful reporting tools also mean it can be difficult to use for total beginners. In both cases, simpler and more affordable tools like Freshworks, Monday CRM, or  Zoho CRM are better options.

How Does Salesforce Compare with Other CRM Software?

Considering the key factors is fundamental when choosing the right CRM software for your business. As well as pricing, the priorities for sales team CRMs are lead capture and communication features, scalability, and the availability of customer support channels. Here, we evaluate how well Salesforce performs in these factors against other leading CRM platforms on the market.

Salesforce is more expensive on average than its competitors, with its entry-level plan starting at £20 per user per month, more than all its competitors. The only provider that comes close to Salesforce in terms of pricing is Hubspot, whose most expensive plan is £3,740 per month, close to the £3,360 Salesforce charges for its most expensive marketing CRM solution.

When it comes to lower-tier plans, you’ll get better value for money with a provider like Zoho, which, while not offering the same depth of reporting as Salesforce, offers features like lead scoring and AI assistance at a much lower price than Salesforce − from £35 per user, per month, compared to from £132.

Does Salesforce Have good Customer Reviews?

Salesforce’s scores in our extensive research prove it to be one of the best CRM software solutions out there. However, we also wanted to investigate what users have to say about it. These reviews are taken from business review sites such as Trustpilot and G2:

Not all users are happy with the service, however. Despite Salesforce’s numerous customer support channels, users occasionally report that they have a hard time connecting with the support team for assistance – like this succinct reviewer:

How We Reviewed Salesforce