Salesforce vs Brevo

When choosing a CRM, Salesforce and Brevo stand out as two popular platforms catering to different aspects of customer relationship management. Salesforce is known for its extensive enterprise-level capabilities, offering advanced tools for sales, marketing, and analytics, making it ideal for large businesses with complex needs. Brevo, in contrast, focuses on small to mid-sized businesses, providing email marketing, SMS, and CRM tools designed for streamlined multi-channel engagement. In this post, we’ll review their key features, ease of use, pricing, and more. We'll also be introducing folk – in case you’re looking for a simple yet powerful CRM that's easy to use.

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 Brevo?

Brevo, formerly known as Sendinblue, is a comprehensive customer relationship management (CRM) and email marketing platform tailored for small to mid-sized businesses. Brevo also offers a wide range of tools, including email and SMS marketing, chat, CRM, and marketing automation to help businesses effectively engage with their audience across multiple channels.

Key features of Brevo

• Marketing platform: Provides tools for email, SMS, and WhatsApp campaigns, as well as marketing automation to improve multi-channel campaign engagement and streamline marketing efforts.
• Sales platform: Helps manage pipelines and track sales activities with tools like automated deal tracking, meeting scheduling, and call recording, making it easier for teams to follow leads and close deals.
• Conversations platform: Allows businesses to offer customer support through live chat, a shared inbox, and multi-channel communication solutions, ensuring seamless customer interaction.
• Customer data platform: Enables businesses to unify, manage, and analyze customer data across platforms with a multi-table data model, sourcing library, and customer analytics, improving data-driven decisions.
• Messaging API: Provides APIs for sending emails, SMS, and WhatsApp messages, with features for transactional emails, inbound parsing, and integrations with other applications for customized communication.

Salesforce vs. Brevo: Feature Comparison

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

1. Sales pipeline management

While Salesforce offers more advanced analytics and AI-driven insights, Brevo provides flexibility and ease of use for smaller teams or those with simpler sales processes. Ultimately, the choice between the two will depend on the complexity of your sales operations and the level of customization you require.
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. This allows sales teams to make informed decisions quickly and efficiently.
Brevo's Pipeline feature is designed to help manage the sales process by offering custom deal pipelines. It enables teams to track deals across various stages and organize tasks for follow-ups and meetings. Users can customize deal stages to match their sales cycle and automate some repetitive tasks. The feature also supports bulk contact import, allowing teams to link contacts and deals for easier organization. Basic analytics provide data insights, though it may require further customization to meet specific needs.

2. Ease of use

Salesforce provides a comprehensive but complex interface that may require training and a steep learning curve, whereas Brevo offers a more intuitive and user-friendly experience, making it accessible for small businesses and new users without extensive onboarding.

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. Brevo includes contact enrichment capabilities as part of its Customer Data Platform. This feature allows businesses to unify, manage, and sync customer data, making it easier to create a more complete customer profile.

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. Brevo's outreach capabilities focuses more on its Marketing Platform, which includes tools for email, SMS, and WhatsApp marketing, enabling a cohesive multi-channel strategy.

5. Automation

Salesforce offers robust automation features designed to streamline business processes, including workflow rules, flow builders, and AI automation through Einstein AI. Brevo provides marketing automation tools within its Marketing Platform, enabling users to set up automated campaigns based on customer actions and behavior, and supports automated personalization with AI for email.

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.

7. Artificial Intelligence

Salesforce CRM integrates AI through its Einstein platform, which enhances decision-making by providing predictive analytics, intelligent recommendations, and automated insights. Brevo integrates AI into its platform, particularly within its Marketing Platform, focusing on enhancing email marketing through personalized and optimized content.

Price and plans comparison

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

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: $100/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

Brevo  prices

Brevo has a limited free version that gives you access to 300 emails. After that, the price plans provide you with the number of emails you can send per month. As well as other features. You then also have the option of customizing your plan, so that it can be based on the number of emails you send a month. And, the number of contacts. The following is an overview of their annual plan.

• Starter: Starting from $8.08/month.
• Business: Starting from $16.17/month.
• Enterprise: Undisclosed.

Introducing folk CRM: the best alternative to Salesforce and Brevo

Looking for an affordable alternative? We recommend folk. A multiple award-winning CRM platform loved for its easy-to-use, plug-and-play CRM system. folk supports multiple business functions including sales, marketing, recruitment, and more. You can also use folk as a solopreneur, small to mid-size team, and large enterprise.

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.

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. Brevo: What's the verdict?

It's apparent that both Salesforce and Brevo offer robust CRM solutions, each with unique strengths. Salesforce excels in providing a comprehensive ecosystem for large enterprises, with advanced customization and AI integration. Brevo, on the other hand, offers a more streamlined and cost-effective solution suitable for smaller businesses. However, for companies that need a more personalized approach to relationship management, folk provides a flexible alternative to these traditional CRM options, blending ease of use with customization. Try folk today, free.