Salesforce vs ActiveCampaign

For busy teams that need to optimize their time, choosing the right Customer Relationship Management (CRM) platform is crucial. Salesforce and ActiveCampaign are two prominent CRM solutions, each offering distinct features tailored to different business needs. Salesforce is renowned for its comprehensive tools and scalability, ideal for large enterprises, while ActiveCampaign focuses on marketing automation and customer engagement, appealing to small and medium-sized businesses. This article compares their key features, pricing, and benefits to help you make an informed decision for your organization. Additionally, we'll introduce folk. A popular alternative.

What is Salesforce?

Salesforce is a robust CRM platform for large enterprises, offering tools for sales, marketing, service, and analytics, with extensive scalability.

Key features of Salesforce

• Comprehensive ecosystem: A unified platform offering CRM, marketing automation, customer service, and custom app development, suitable for the varied needs of large enterprises.
• Customization and scalability: Salesforce is highly customizable and scalable, allowing large organizations to tailor the platform to complex workflows and manage significant growth.
• Artificial intelligence (AI) integration: Salesforce Einstein offers AI-driven analytics and automation, providing insights that help large businesses optimize their strategies.
• Extensive integration capabilities: With Salesforce's AppExchange, large companies can integrate the platform with a wide range of third-party applications, ensuring seamless operation across different business systems.
• Enterprise-grade security and compliance: Salesforce provides robust security measures and compliance features, critical for large organizations handling sensitive customer data.
  

What is ActiveCampaign?

Active Campaign is a marketing automation platform designed to help businesses of all sizes manage customer interactions and drive growth through personalized and automated communication.

Key features of ActiveCampaign

• Email marketing: Create personalized email campaigns with drag-and-drop templates, advanced segmentation, and automated sequences to engage your audience effectively.
• Marketing automation: Automate workflows for email, SMS, and site messages, based on user behavior and custom triggers, enhancing customer engagement and retention.
• Sales automation: Integrates a CRM with automation tools to streamline the sales process, track leads, manage deals, and automate follow-ups.
• CRM feature: Sales focused CRM to track and manage processes using automation.

Salesforce vs. ActiveCampaign: Feature Comparison

Let's break down the key features of two CRM software solutions and take a closer look at their sales automation, email marketing tools, and contact management.

1. Sales pipeline management

Salesforce's pipeline management feature, known as Pipeline Inspection, provides a comprehensive view of sales opportunities by consolidating key metrics, deal changes, and AI-powered insights into a single interface. ActiveCampaign's sales pipeline management feature is integrated with its CRM, enabling businesses to streamline their sales processes. It allows users to visually manage deals through customizable pipelines, automate tasks like follow-ups, and track every stage of the sales journey.

2. Ease of use

Salesforce can be complex due to its extensive features, requiring more training and customization. ActiveCampaign is user-friendly, with an intuitive interface that allows users to quickly navigate and implement marketing strategies without extensive training.

3. Contact enrichment

Salesforce's contact enrichment feature leverages tools such as the Data Cloud to automatically enhance and update contact records in real time, drawing from verified data sources like LinkedIn and InsideView to provide real-time updates. ActiveCampaign does not appear to have a contact enrichment feature.

4. Outreach

Salesforce's outreach solution is powered by its AI capabilities, particularly through the integration of Einstein AI and their Outreach list that allows users to see cross-sales paths and leads they need to engage with. ActiveCampaign’s outreach capabilities are functional, offering email, SMS, and some social media tools for multi-channel communication. It allows businesses to segment their audiences and send personalized messages, while automations help manage follow-ups across different channels. However, the SMS functionality is quite basic.

5. Automation

Salesforce offers robust automation features designed to streamline business processes. Its automation capabilities include workflow rules and flow builders, approval processes, and AI automation through Einstein AI. ActiveCampaign's automation features allow users to create workflows that automate tasks like sending emails, updating contact records, and triggering follow-up actions based on predefined conditions. These workflows can be set up using a visual drag-and-drop builder, and they support a range of triggers, such as contact behavior, form submissions, or sales pipeline changes.

6. Integration

Salesforce integrates with a wide range of third-party applications through its AppExchange marketplace, allowing users to connect tools for marketing automation, customer service, analytics, project management, and finance. Popular integrations include platforms like Slack for team collaboration and Mailchimp for email marketing. ActiveCampaign offers a wide range of integrations with over 900 third-party applications, allowing users to connect the platform with tools like Shopify, WordPress, Salesforce, and Google Analytics.

7. Artificial intelligence

Salesforce CRM integrates AI through its Einstein platform, which enhances decision-making by providing predictive analytics, intelligent recommendations, and automated insights. It helps automate tasks such as lead scoring, opportunity forecasting, and data entry, while also offering natural language processing for customer sentiment analysis. ActiveCampaign integrates AI features to enhance various aspects of its platform, such as email marketing and automation. The AI-powered tools include predictive sending, which analyzes contact behavior to suggest the best time to send emails, and predictive content, which helps in optimizing subject lines and messaging.

Price and plans comparison

Let's take a closer look at the price and plans of both Salesforce and ActiveCampaign.

Salesforce prices

Salesforce's sales cloud pricing plans are as follows.

• Starter suite: $25/user/month provides basic CRM features for small businesses.
• Pro suite: $80/user/month includes advanced tools for growing businesses.
• Enterprise plan: $165/user/month offers extensive customization and automation for large companies.
• Unlimited plan: $330/user/month provides comprehensive features for large enterprises.
• Einstein 1 Sales: $500/user/month provides AI-driven insights and advanced features for large enterprises.

ActiveCampaign prices

ActiveCampaign's price plans are based on the number of contacts you have. The following is based on a plan for 1,000 contacts.

• Starter: Starting from $15/month.
• Plus: Starting from $49/month.
• Pro: Starting from $79/month.
• Enterprise: Starting from $145/month.

Introducing folk CRM: the best alternative to Salesforce and ActiveCampaign

Looking for an affordable alternative? We recommend folk. There is a reason why folk is a multiple award-winning CRM platform loved for its easy-to-use, plug-and-play CRM system.

Key features

• Ease of use and customization: Easily customize the pipelines, dashboards, automation, email sequences, so that you can use it across your sales cycle and pipeline management – and other business functions such as recruitment, marketing, and more.
• Social media integration: Import people and companies from LinkedIn, Sales Navigator, Instagram, and X within a click thanks to folk’s Google Chrome extension.
• Contact sync from Gmail and Outlook: Full email sync enabling users to manage all communications directly from the CRM.
• Find email addresses in a click: Contact enrichment powered by Apollo, and Dropcontact so you can fill in missing data points with 1-click.
• Email sequences: Send email sequences with reminders if your leads don’t reply to your first emails. It includes an AI integration allowing you to personalize email at scale.
• Notes and reminders: Attach notes directly to a contact's profile in folk, and access them on the go. And assign reminders so you know exactly when to follow-up.

Price and plans

folk has a 14-day free trial. After that, there are affordable monthly or annual subscription plans. The annual subscription plan is as follows.

• Standard: $20 per user, per month.
• Premium: $40 per user, per month.
• Custom: Starts from $80 per user, per month.

Salesforce vs. ActiveCampaign: What's the verdict?

Between Salesforce and ActiveCampaign, it's clear that each has its strengths: Salesforce excels in scalability and customization for large enterprises, while ActiveCampaign offers robust marketing automation for small to mid-sized businesses. However, for companies seeking a more tailored approach to CRM, folk emerges as a compelling alternative. It combines ease of use with powerful customization options, making it ideal for businesses that prioritize personalization in managing relationships. For those interested in exploring this flexible solution, try folk today, free.