Infusionsoft vs Salesforce: Company Comparison

A marketing automation tool is a significant investment. You have to wonder if the business will actually be around 5, 10, even 20 years from now. There's also the issue of size - large businesses typically like to work with other large businesses, and small businesses like other small businesses.

In this section, I'll look at the company behind each of these two tools. The comparison is a little trite - Salesforce is a humongous company with nearly 20,000 employees and a market cap touching $60B. InfusionSoft is a growing company itself (over $127M in funding, hundreds of employees), but is dwarfed by InfusionSoft's sheer size.

InfusionSoft

Year Founded: 2001
Company Type: Private
# of Employees: 650+
Funding: $127.9M
Revenues (approx.) $100M+

InfusionSoft has been around since 2001, which is an eon ago in internet years. It's revenues and business has grown steadily over the years. This isn't a hyped-up, pump-and-dump startup you hear about from breathless Silicon Valley journalists; this is a real business with real customers and real revenues.

Revenue figures for InfusionSoft aren't readily available, but as per this recent interview, they're north of $100M. InfusionSoft has also raised some $127M in funding, which means it should have plenty of cash to go around.

If you are a small business, this large size would usually be a negative. However, since InfusionSoft is aimed squarely at small business owners, you'll get plenty of personalized attention.

Bottomline: InfusionSoft isn't going anywhere. It's a robust business with thousands of paying customers. You might get lost in the crowd, but there is no danger of this startup being acqui-hired away by a competitior.

Salesforce

Year Founded: 1999
Company Type: Public (NYSE: CRM)
# of Employees: 19000+
Funding: Went Public (NYSE: CRM)
Revenues (approx.) $6.67B (2016)

Salesforce is among the world's most valued tech companies. It went public in 2004 with an initial stock price of $3.95. Today, that stock is up to 81.47 - nearly 1950% growth. Today, Salesforce has a market cap of $56B with revenues in excess of $6.7B.

All this is just a roundabout way of saying: Salesforce isn't going anywhere. This is a massive company with established processes and all the money in the world to throw at problems. It has thousands of customers, ranging from small businesses to Fortune 500 companies.

While this size might be comforting for some, most small businesses might be a little unnerved . If you've dealt with a huge enterprise company before, you know that it's perfectly possible for the "little guy" to get lost in the crowd. If you have 100 salespeople and a $100k per year in billing, you'll get personalized service. But if you're just 5 people and $3k/year in bills, will you get the same attention?

To be fair, Salesforce has done a wonderful job of being small-business-first. The company has championed small businesses in all its 18 years and that won't change anytime soon. But with a business of that size, gaps can and will arise.

InfusionSoft vs. Salesforce: Features

Above all else, you buy software for its features. Price and usability are nice to have, but if it can't do what you want it to do, lower prices and support are worthless. So in this section, I'll look at InfusionSoft and Salesforce's features in terms of marketing automation.

Keep in mind that my target user in this comparison is a small business or a startup with fewer than 100 employees. The needs of this market will be very different from those of a large enterprise customer with 1,000+ employees.

The feature comparison also focuses on marketing automation, not the CRM or any of the dozens of products Salesforce offers.

InfusionSoft Features

InfusionSoft does a good job of balancing features and usefulness. To get features beyond what InfusionSoft offers, you'll have to shell out thousands for an enterprise-grade software suite (like Salesforce). InfusionSoft has also been growing its offering from purely marketing automation to a complete sales + marketing solution with a built-in CRM. Most Most small businesses will find that InfusionSoft has everything they need for marketing automation - and then some more.

Highlights

Automation capabilities are second to none.
In-depth segmentation possible thanks to tagging feature.
In-built CRM helps speed up sales process.
Lack of split testing capabilities out of the box is a big negative

What I like

Rock solid, enterprise-grade marketing automation at (relatively) affordable prices
Powerful segmentation capabilities for laser-sharp marketing
Lots of integrations and supporting apps in the InfusionSoft marketplace

What I don't like

Too many features; can get overwhelming for inexperienced businesses
Lack of built-in split testing capabilities is sorely missed.
No real-time sales alerts
CRM is very basic; no support for social CRM

Powerful, Enterprise-Ready Marketing Automation

Unlike Salesforce, InfusionSoft focuses entirely on marketing automation. This is also its biggest plus point: its marketing automation features are second to none.

InfusionSoft makes it easy to map out entire funnels and create complex automation rules. You get an incredibly useful tagging feature to segment audiences. You also get landing pages, email templates and a payment processor to send highly targeted offers to your segmented audiences.

You'll spend the bulk of your time in the campaign builder. This is where you can visually map out your funnel and set up automation rules. The visual editor is easy enough to get used to, though you might get slightly overwhelmed if you haven't used complex marketing software before.

Setting up your automation workflow can take a while. The mandatory onboarding fee of $999 might sound like a lot at first, but it will help you get up to speed with all of InfusionSoft's features.

If you're buying on features alone and care only about marketing automation, InfusionSoft is a top bet.

Above: InfusionSoft's intuitive visual campaign builder used for setting up automation rules and funnels.

Go Beyond Marketing with Sales Automation

Once you've captured and nurtured a lead, what next?

In a traditional enterprise setting, marketing and sales will decide where the handoff from marketing to sales occurs (always a point of contention). Once a marketing qualified lead (MQL) turns into a sales qualified lead (SQL), you'll transfer the leads to a sales CRM. Here, you sales team will start making calls to close deals.

InfusionSoft comes in handy here as well. Instead of relying on salespeople to score leads and create custom quotes, you can use the built-in sales automation features to automate a number of sales activities.

Here are a few things you can do with sales automation:

Score leads automatically
Send your prospects custom quotes automatically
Manage your pipeline

Admittedly, this isn't nearly as comprehensive as what, say, Salesforce can offer you. But if you want something that won't cost a ton and integrates nicely with your marketing, the sales automation tool is very useful.

You can control opportunity stage, decide ownership, and schedule 'next action date' with InfusionSoft's sales automation.

Lots of Integrations

As a growing business, you rely on a number of software products to grow your business. Apart from a marketing automation tool, you might have a CRM, an accounting tool, a social media monitoring tool, etc.

Unless you want your existing marketing workflow to break, you'd want these tools to play nice with your marketing automation software.

InfusionSoft does great on this count. It has a marketplace with hundreds of integrations. It also has an API to facilitate integrations for non-supported tools.

I estimate that nearly 90% of businesses will find the integrations they need through the InfusionSoft marketplace. Do remember that integrations aren't necessarily free. Having far too many integrations will increase your costs. Factor this into your marketing decision.

A few apps from InfusionSoft's marketplace.

Email Deliverability Can be Spotty

This is one of InfusionSoft's biggest failings: you can't use your own servers to send email. You have to rely on InfusionSoft's own servers.

On paper, this sounds like a plus since it makes setup much easier. In reality, it can actually cost you in the long run.

You see, since thousands of cusomers use InfusionSoft to send their email, some email clientts might flag mails coming from InfusionSoft's servers as "spam" or "promotional". The problem is more acute in some industries than others (travel and internet marketing particularly).

Email deliverability isn't nearly catastrophic, but it can affect your reach. Since so much of marketing automation is about email, I count this as a big negative.

InfusionSoft's email campaign builder. You can send both text and HTML emails. Deliverability remains a concern, however.

Salesforce Features

I feel a little unfair clubbing Salesforce into the "marketing automation" category. It's not. Salesforce is primarily a CRM solution. As the company has grown, it has bought/developed additional solutions, including Pardot and Marketing Cloud for marketing automation. But if you were to ask a random person what Salesforce does, you'll unanimously hear: "CRM".

Keep this in mind when you consider Salesforce for marketing automation. The Marketing Cloud with its focus on 1:1 customer journeys is incredibly powerful, but the entire Salesforce still revolves around the CRM, not the marketing funnel.

Which is to say: Salesforce is for experienced teams with clear handoff between sales and marketing and robust marketing practices. The features are robust and powerful, but a smaller, inexperienced business will likely not be able to utilize them fully.

Highlights

Complete sales solution that works in every stage of the customer's journey
Poewrful segmentation capabilities and dynamic content
Best-in-class sales automation features
Mobile Studio makes mobile marketing automation a breeze

What I like

Integrates all your customer data in a single-view
Dynamic content is a killer personalization feature.
Powerful reporting makes it easy to calculate marketing ROI
Mobile Studio is a delight to use (Marketing Cloud)

What I don't like

Complex; you will take a while getting used to the software
Setting up is difficult. You will need a lot of handholding to get started.
No sales pages/shopping cart.
Need to buy extra products to get the most out of the software

Different "Studios" to Handle Different Marketing Needs

Salesforce has a *lot* of products. There are two marketing automation solutions - Pardot (for B2B marketing automation) and the Marketing Cloud (for internet marketing automation). The Marketing Cloud has 5 different "studios" to handle different marketing automation needs. These five are:

Email Studio for handling email marketing automation
Mobile Studio for mobile marketing automation
Social Studio for social media marketing automation
Web Studio for creating landing pages and forms
Advertisng Studio to create ad campaigns on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc.

Besides the above, the Marketing Cloud platform has a Journey Builder, a Personalization Builder, an Audience Builder, a Content Builder, and a Marketign Cloud Builder.

I'll be honest with you, this can get pretty confusing, pretty fast. If you are the DIY-kindof person, you'll get lost in the sea of products.

Besides making product selection harder, it also increases your costs. You might want some features from Pardot, some features from the Email Studio and some from the Mobile Studio. This customization can increase your costs.

Which is to say, if you're new to marketing automation, this isn't the software for you.

The Marketing Cloud "Social Studio" for automating and monitoring social media marketing.

Complete Customer Journey Planning

I love InfusionSoft's Visual Campaign Builder, but the Journey Builder in Salesforce Marketing Cloud is great, especially if you have your customer journey already mapped out.

The Journey Builder gives you a lot of control over your data sources. It works best when used with Salesfoce CRM, of course, but you can use other lead sources as well.

Once you get a lead into the system, you can start creating complicated journey paths. These can have multiple nodes, each node signifying an if/then decision. You can add text messages, surveys, automated email triggers, etc. as the lead progresses further down the buyer's journey.

The Journey Builder in Salesforce Marketing Cloud is where you'll create your marketing sequences.

Stellar Segmentation Capabilities

Where Salesforce really shines is in its use of data. You can pull in data from virtually any source into the Marketing Cloud. You can then use the Audience Builder to get a single-view of all the available data for any customer.

What good is this single-view of data, you ask? Segmentation

Audience Builder helps you use this data to create complex segments using any combination of attributes. Want to target leads who came in through email, who work at businesses with over 50 employees, and who you last contacted 2 weeks ago? Sure, you can do that with just a few clicks.

As any experienced marketer will tell you, segmentation lies at the heart of marketing automation success. The more precise your segments, the more targeted your offers. The Audience Builder works wonderfully well in this regard.

The single-view of each customer makes segmentation easy while also giving you better customer insight.

Personalization Builder Makes 1:1 Customer Journeys Possible

The idea behind "1:1 Customer Journeys" is to create a customer experience that is tailored for an individual customer.

To make this idea possible, Salesforce offers a powerful Personalization Builder as part of the Marketing Cloud.

This Personalization Builder has all the expected bells and whistles - email integration to send personalized emails, landing page personalization, etc. But it also has behavioral analysis and predictive content capabilities built in.

What this means is that you can:

Build customer behavior profiles based on existing data with a single click.
Predict the 'next best content' for each customer based on machine learning algorithms.

This kind of predictive capabilities is something InfusionSoft sorely lacks.

The Personalization Builder is powered by Salesforce "Einstein" and uses machine learning to predict what content to use at each stage of the buyer's journey.

Features Head-to-Head: InfusionSoft vs. Salesforce

Feature	InfusionSoft	Salesforce
Lead scoring	Yes	Yes
Lead segmentation	Yes	Yes
Shopping Cart	Yes	No
Web Content Personalization	Yes	Yes
Predictive Analytics	Yes	Yes
A/B Testing	No	Yes
Social CRM	No	Yes (with Salesforce CRM)
Membership Sites	Yes	No
Drip Email Campaigns	Yes	Yes
Affiliate Center	Hosted	NONE
Email Deliverability	Poor	Good
Third Party Integrations	Excellent	Excellent
Built-in Video Hosting	No	No
Built-in Text Messaging	No	Yes

InfusionSoft vs. Salesforce: User-Experience

This is, from the very outset, a battle of unequals.

Salesforce and InfusionSoft are different categories of software. The latter is more for smaller businesses just discovering the powers of marketing automation. The former is for medium to large businesses using marketing automation to hit scale (and take some burden off their sales/marketing teams).

The user-experience varies accordingly. InfusionSoft is easy enough for a solopreneur to pickup and learn. Salesforce will require singificant hand-holding and some sales experience to get the most out of.

My comparison here will focus on how well individual features in each tool work, and how well they integrate with other tools and features.

InfusionSoft User-Experience

InfusionSoft's user-experience is polished, modern and intuitive. You wouldn't think so given that it's a 16 year old company, but recent changes - especially the campaign builder - have turned InfusionSoft into an experience that can almost be described as "delightful".

Highlights

Intuitive and capable visual campaign builder.
Search is fast and useful.
Easy navigation - you'll seldom struggle to find what you want.

What I like

Data cleanup (removing duplicates, deleting old records) is fast
Modern, clean design looks good and fresh.
Drag and drop campaign builder saves time.

What I don't like

Sign-up requires going through a salesperson.
Email builder is broken if you're dealing exclusively in HTML emails.
Reporting capabilities are underwhelming.

Visual Campaign Builder Wins Big Usability Points

I've said this before: the visual campaign builder is the single best thing about InfusionSoft.

As would be obvious, the Visual Campaign Builder gives you a visual way to build complex automation campaigns by simply dragging and dropping different elements in place.

Want to direct users to a landing page after they click an email link? Or send a custom notification once someone buys a product? The campaign builder will let you do all that, and more.

I like to think of it as a whiteboard come to life. Pick up sequence elements (say, a landing page followed by a sales page) and connect them on a virtual board. Add your automation rules and you're good to go.

If you're used to mapping out your sequences on paper, then transferring them to a marketing automation tool through clunky sequence builders, you'll absolutely love the visual campaign builder. This is InfusionSoft's big feature and they do a heck of a job promoting it.

For the visual campaign builder alone InfusionSoft gets a 10/10 in terms of user-experience from me.

The visual campaign builder is one of InfusionSoft's cornerstone features.

Easy to Use Navigation

As software becomes more complicated, it becomes harder and harder to find what you're looking for. Searching for a single command turns into an ordeal of digging through a dozen menus, giving up, and using Google to find help.

Marketing automation software, by its very nature, is complicated. Finding a feature or a campaign can be hard.

This was a problem with InfusionSoft as well until a recent redesign. Once clunky, the navigation is now a breeze to use. Instead of clicking through menus and consulting the documentation, you can now almost always find what you want in a few simple clicks.

This is a big improvement that significantly improves the user-experience.

The InfusionSoft navigation menu shows most commonly used features.

Fast and Effective Search

Large marketing automation campaigns typically involve hundreds of content assets, dozens of rules and several segments. Finding a specific content asset or contact can be hard without strong search capability.

InfusionSoft excels at search. The CRM search, for instance, lets you search contacts by name, ID, company, birthday, email, postal code, etc. The search box gets prominent placement at the top of the menu bar as well.

I find myself turning to the search box a lot in my workflow. Once you have a lot of contacts, you'll find yourself doing the same. In my case, I run campaigns for a number of businesses (besides my own) which means that my contact database alone runs the thousands.

InfusionSoft's contact search gives you a lot of ways to find what you want.

Salesforce User-Experience

Salesforce can be difficult to understand at first. The initial hurdle is figuring out which product you actually need to sign-up for. Pardot, for instance, is B2B marketing automation. Marketing Cloud is for general digital marketing automation. Marketing Cloud and Pardot have a lot of feature overlap, but Pardot has some features specifically for enterprise sellers. Then there is the Sales Cloud with the CRM, the Service Cloud, the Commerce Cloud...

What I'm trying to say is: it's not very DIY. You will need help to sign-up, and you will help once you actually start using the software.

The good part is that because of Salesforce's popularity, any competent salesperson would already be familiar with the software. The breadth of Salesforce's training also means that any new person coming onboard will have plenty of help to get up to speed.

Highlights

Close integration with other Salesforce products improves workflow
Journey Builder, Audience Builder and Personalization Builder are (relatively) easy to use
Like most enterprise grade software, suffers from feature bloat

What I like

Complex yet intuitive UI
Journey Builder makes crafting marketing sequences easy
Marketing Cloud Connect makes it easy to access any data

What I don't like

Too many features. Too many silos
Can be difficult to connect different products with each other
Geared towards experienced salespeople/marketers; not newbie friendly

Individual Features Work Really Well

The Marketing Cloud is essentially a bunch of products tied together - Audience Builder, Email Builder, Personalization Builder, etc.

Each of these products works really well independently. The Email Builder, which you'll use to create your emails, for instance, has all the bells and whistles you'd expect from an enterprise-grade email creation software.

Similarly, the Audience Builder has powerful, but easy to use segmentation capabilities.

If you were to throw up any of these individual products on a standalone application, you'd never need any handholdng to get them to work. That Salesforce chooses to label them separately can be confusing, but it's largely a marketing/branding decision. They all come together pretty well on the Marketing Cloud Platform.

Just a few of the 'builders' on the Marketing Cloud platform.

Feature Bloat is a Real Thing

If I were reviewing this from an enterprise user's perspective, I probably wouldn't mention it. But when your target audience is small businesses, "less is more" works far better.

The thing is, Salesforce has a real problem with feature bloat. There are just too many features and you're not always sure what one does over another.

It doesn't help that Salesforce's UI/UX suffers from the common enterprise problem of jargonese. The if/then statements are called "Decision Splits", "Random Splits", "Engagement Splits", etc. User-specific data is clubbed into "Profile Dimensions". These dimensions are grouped inside an "Attribute Library".

This isn't a problem in normal circumstances, but after using Trello as my project management suite and Slack as my collaboration software, I've come to expect my enterprise software to be slightly more fun. The jargon and the feature bloat isn't a deal killer, but it just makes the software slightly less delightful to use.

The Journey Builder is powerful but can be slightly hard to wrap your head around.

Infusionsoft vs Salesforce: Pricing, Sign-up, Support and Others

Features and usability are critical, but what about the other things that matter - pricing, support and community? Can you actually afford the software? Will you actually get support when you need it? Is there a community to turn to for your problems? I'll look at all the bits that matter - pricing, support, sign-up process, community, etc.

InfusionSoft

InfusionSoft isn't cheap, nor is it easy to sign-up for (you have to go through sales), but you do get excellent support for your money. Keep in mind that InfusionSoft is aimed squarely at small to mid-businesses, not small 2-person startups and solopreneurs. If you have the money, it's great. But if you're pre-revenue and struggling the pay the bills, InfusionSoft can get expensive pretty fast.

InfusionSoft Pricing

InfusionSoft's cheapest plan starts at $199/month. This gives you 2,500 contacts and 12,500 emails/month. You also have to buy a mandatory onboarding package that starts from $999 (one-time fee). 2,500 contacts is very limited for any growing business; you'll likely end up buying the "Complete" plan with 10,000 contacts that starts at $379/month.

Verdict: Poor

Sign-up Process

You have to go through a sales person to sign-up for InfusionSoft. This isn't a deal breaker for most people, but after years of SaaS self-service, it is a bit strange to have to talk to a person just to sign-up for a product. I count this as a negative.

Verdict: Poor

InfusionSoft Support

InfusionSoft offers free support during business hours. You can also upgrade to 24/7 support. The support staff is friendly and understands marketing automation. Besides troubleshooting issues, you can also get their help in setting up campaigns. Plus, you can also turn to InfusionSoft's growing marketing library and blog to find useful content.

Verdict: Excellent

InfusionSoft Integrations

InfusionSoft has its own API which makes integrations easy to create. Unless you are using some really obscure tools, you should find an InfusionSoft integration. This is critical if you already have a bunch of sales/marketing apps and need them to play nice with your marketing automation tool.

Verdict: Excellent

InfusionSoft Community

InfusionSoft has a vibrant community of marketers and small business owners. There are popular Facebook groups, local meetups, events and even an "implementation day" in their office in Arizona. This community is great for learning tricks and borrowing ideas from other succesful users.

Verdict: Excellent

InfusionSoft Marketplace

How do you source templates, find designers and hire writers? InfusionSoft has its own marketplace to help you do this. You'll find that this is a great alternative to UpWork or Freelancer.com since the people here already know and understand InfusionSoft and marketing automation. A very useful feature.

Verdict: Excellent

Salesforce

Salesforce is expensive. The close integration with the Salesforce CRM also means that you will be pushed towards buying that as well along with a host of other Salesforce products. This is both good and bad. Salesforce software is great in the long run, but if you're a smaller business, you might get tied into using something you can't fully utilize.

Salesforce Pricing

Salesforce has different pricing for different products. The Email, Mobile and Web Marketing Studio package costs $400/m. Social Media Marketing costs $1000/m. Digital Advertising at $1,250/m. B2B Marketing Automation at $1,000/m. Pardot starts at $1,000/m. Suffice to say, it isn't cheap.

Verdict: Poor

Salesforce Sign-up Process

Even if you can figure out what you actually want, you'll have to call up sales to start using the software. Great if you like handholding, not so great if you're a DIY, SaaS enthusiast.

Verdict: Poor

Salesforce Support

Salesforce support is top-notch. You get standard support from 8AM to 8PM EST. There are local support options in dozens of countries. There is also extensive training and support documentation for troubleshooting issues yourself.

Verdict: Excellent

Salesforce Integrations

Salesforce offers the Force.com platform to help you integrate virtually any tool or data source with Salesforce's products. Because of Salesforce's size, any software worth using already has an integration.

Verdict: Excellent

Salesforce Community

Salesforce practically wrote the book on promoting B2B communities. Dreamforce is one of, if not the biggest business conferences in the world. At the 2015 edition in San Francisco, for instance, 165,000 attendees showed up. The community is among the most vibrant in the tech space.

Verdict: Excellent

Salesforce Marketplace

Salesforce offers customers access to exclusive training, consultation and assistance from experts through the Cloud Services program. There are extensive classes (free as well as paid), delivered both online and offline. You also get access to Salesforce certified experts to help you use the software.

Verdict: Excellent

Infusionsoft vs. Salesforce: Features, Pricing and User-Experience

Infusionsoft vs Salesforce: Company Comparison

InfusionSoft

Salesforce

InfusionSoft vs. Salesforce: Features

InfusionSoft Features

Highlights

What I like

What I don't like

Powerful, Enterprise-Ready Marketing Automation

Go Beyond Marketing with Sales Automation

Lots of Integrations

Email Deliverability Can be Spotty

Salesforce Features

Highlights

What I like

What I don't like

Different "Studios" to Handle Different Marketing Needs

Complete Customer Journey Planning

Stellar Segmentation Capabilities

Personalization Builder Makes 1:1 Customer Journeys Possible

Features Head-to-Head: InfusionSoft vs. Salesforce

InfusionSoft vs. Salesforce: User-Experience

InfusionSoft User-Experience

Highlights

What I like

What I don't like

Visual Campaign Builder Wins Big Usability Points

Easy to Use Navigation

Fast and Effective Search

Salesforce User-Experience

Highlights

What I like

What I don't like

Individual Features Work Really Well

Feature Bloat is a Real Thing

Infusionsoft vs Salesforce: Pricing, Sign-up, Support and Others

InfusionSoft

InfusionSoft Pricing

Sign-up Process

InfusionSoft Support

InfusionSoft Integrations

InfusionSoft Community

InfusionSoft Marketplace

Salesforce

Salesforce Pricing

Salesforce Sign-up Process

Salesforce Support

Salesforce Integrations

Salesforce Community

Salesforce Marketplace

What Others are Saying

Infusionsoft vs Salesforce: Final Verdict

Choose InfusionSoft if You:

Choose Salesforce if You:

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