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Salesforce vs. monday Comparison

Salesforce and monday are popular CRM platforms for small businesses. Here's how they compare.

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Written by: Sean Peek, Senior AnalystUpdated Feb 18, 2025
Gretchen Grunburg,Senior Editor
Business.com earns commissions from some listed providers. Editorial Guidelines.
Editor's Rating9.5/10
Editor's Rating9.5/10
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Customer relationship management (CRM) software is no longer a “nice-to-have” component of your company’s tech stack. Today, businesses need CRM software to navigate an increasingly competitive marketplace and consolidate customer data. Salesforce Sales Cloud and monday Sales CRM give businesses a 360-degree view of their customers. This way, they can tailor personalized experiences, forecast predicted behavior and make data-informed business decisions. We’ll compare each platform’s pricing, features and usability to help you find the right CRM software for your needs.

FYIDid you know
CRM software can streamline customer tracking methods, including monitoring downloads, website visits, purchase history, traffic channels and email metrics.

Salesforce Sales Cloud vs. monday Sales CRM Highlights

With robust feature sets, Salesforce and monday Sales CRM are two of the best CRM solutions available. However, distinct differences may make one or the other the better choice for your business.

Criteria

Salesforce Sales Cloud

monday Sales CRM

Starting prices

$25 per user, per month

$9 per user, per month (billed annually; minimum of three users)

Sales forecasting features

Requires Pro Suite, Enterprise, Unlimited or Einstein 1 plan

Requires Pro or Enterprise plan

App integrations

Over 4,000

Over 200

Custom automations

Starting at five flows per flow type (increasing with higher tier plans)

Starting at 250 actions per month for Standard plans (increasing with higher tier plans)

AI features

Requires Unlimited plan for full capacity (basic AI features available in lower tiers)

In beta testing (opt-in available)

Ease of use

Challenging, requires more technical knowledge and/or admin support

Easy to use

Who Is Salesforce Sales Cloud For?

Salesforce Sales Cloud is highly customizable and flexible, which makes it ideal for medium-to-large tech-savvy businesses that can use the solution to its full potential. Its vast integrations and add-ons can help businesses create a tailored solution for highly specific processes and industries; it can then share that solution across divisions and departments. Additionally, Salesforce Sales Cloud is an excellent choice for growing companies that need a scalable CRM. For more details about Salesforce Sales Cloud’s capabilities, read our in-depth Salesforce CRM review.

Salesforce Sales Cloud

Salesforce Sales Cloud has multiple add-ons and integrations that help businesses create a custom solution. Source: Salesforce

Who Is monday Sales CRM For?

monday Sales CRM is a budget-friendly CRM ideal for smaller businesses or individual teams within an organization. For example, sales teams can invest in the solution to streamline their department and gain a comprehensive customer journey overview. Marketing departments and customer support teams can also benefit from monday’s insights. Companies that choose monday will benefit from greater visibility into the sales funnel and specific operations to inform decisions. Read our detailed overview of monday’s features and functions in our monday Sales CRM review.

Did You Know?Did you know
Investing in CRM software can help you sell more, successfully convert leads, boost customer retention and improve business efficiency through task automation.
monday.com app marketplace

monday’s app marketplace helps you find integrations with the business software you already use. Source: monday

Salesforce Sales Cloud vs. monday Sales CRM Comparison

Salesforce and monday are both great companies with excellent reputations and similar feature sets, which means they’re difficult to compare. However, the following lists illustrate their differences.

Pricing

Affordability is a huge concern for many small businesses. However, larger enterprises may find Salesforce’s features worth the extra costs.

Salesforce Sales Cloud Pricing

Salesforce has five service levels for businesses:

  • Starter Suite: $25 per user, per month (billed annually). The Starter Suite plan has account, contact, lead and opportunity management features. It also features email integration with Gmail and Outlook.
  • Pro Suite: $100 per user, per month (billed annually). The Pro Suite plan has everything in the Starter Suite plan, plus sales quoting and forecasting, real-time chat, and additional customization and automation features.
  • Enterprise: $165 per user, per month (billed annually). The Enterprise plan includes everything in the Pro Suite plan, plus advanced sales pipeline management and deal insights, conversation intelligence, and built-in artificial intelligence (AI) sales agents (Agentforce).
  • Unlimited: $330 per user, per month (billed annually). The Unlimited plan includes everything in the Enterprise plan, plus premier support and sales engagement tools based on conversation intelligence.
  • Einstein 1 Sales: $500 per user, per month (billed annually). The Einstein 1 — the name of which refers to Salesforce’s AI technology — includes everything in the Unlimited plan, plus unified data and CRM integration availability.

Salesforce also offers various flexible add-on features for additional costs, including the following:

  • Configure, Price and Quote (CPQ): from $75 per user, per month
  • Einstein for Sales: from $75 per user, per month
  • Revenue Intelligence: from $220 per user, per month

monday Sales CRM Pricing

monday has four service plans:

  • Basic: $9 per seat, per month (billed annually). There’s a three-seat minimum, which means your starting price will be at least $27 monthly. This package includes unlimited customizable pipelines, contacts and boards; lead, contact and deal management templates; one dashboard; and iOS and Android mobile apps.
  • Standard: $12 per seat, per month (billed annually). There’s a three-seat minimum, which means your starting price will be at least $36 monthly. The Standard package includes everything in Basic, plus advanced contact and deal management; quotes and invoices; two-way email integration; five dashboards; and custom CRM automations and integrations.
  • Pro: $19 per seat, per month (billed annually). There’s a three-seat minimum, which makes your starting price at least $57 monthly. This plan includes everything in Standard, plus sales forecasting, email tracking, mass emails, sales analytics and more.
  • Enterprise: You’ll need to contact the company for a custom quote for this plan. Added features include lead scoring, advanced analytics, enterprise-grade security, HIPAA compliance and more.
Best for Pricing
monday
monday wins this round with a bevy of features at an affordable price. For a midsize business with limited resources, it's hard to beat monday's pricing. While Salesforce is robust and comprehensive, monday has similar features without add-on services and high prices.

CRM Features 

Here’s how Salesforce and monday compare in essential CRM features.

Salesforce Sales Cloud Features

  • Part of the Salesforce ecosystem: Salesforce Sales Cloud is part of a vast Salesforce ecosystem that includes product categories like Marketing Cloud and Commerce Cloud. As your business grows, you’ll have easy access to the advanced solutions you need.
  • Customization: Salesforce Sales Cloud is highly customizable. You can change how dashboards look, set object controls to customize the system and use a developer console to create custom apps.
  • Productivity tools: Salesforce includes productivity-boosting tools like built-in automation and AI-driven insights, project management features, and visual dashboards that make it easy to monitor KPIs.
  • Integrations: Businesses can access a vast collection of integrations and add-ons through the Salesforce AppExchange store.
  • Learning platform: The Salesforce Trailhead learning platform provides in-depth guides and resources for admins, direct communication forums, and comprehensive product-related courses and certification opportunities.
Salesforce Trailhead

Trailhead is an interactive, self-paced online learning platform with modules, projects and super badges to help users improve their Salesforce skills. Source: Salesforce

monday Sales CRM Features

  • Workflow automations: monday’s workflow automation features help teams minimize busy work and automate tasks like email responses, reminders, notifications and more.
  • Lead management: monday’s lead management tools help sales teams generate quality leads, nurture those leads and boost lead conversions. You can also use lead scoring tools to ensure you’re focusing on the right prospects.
  • Customizability: monday makes it easy to create customizable dashboards and sales workspaces that reflect your business needs.
  • Integrations: monday has an extensive integration library to help you customize the solution and use your current business software to keep operations seamless. [Learn more about monday’s integrations]
  • Learning platform: The monday Academy has free self-paced courses and on-demand webinars, along with live training.
Best CRM Features
Tie
We're calling it a draw in this category. It's hard to beat Salesforce's vast integrations, app library and features. However, its Pro Suite plan starts at $100 a month per user, which renders the solution out of reach for many small businesses. monday’s app library is smaller but still respectable. Plus, its essential CRM features can help small businesses manage customer relationships throughout the customer life cycle. Its Standard CRM plan starts at $12 a month per seat, making it a much more affordable option.

AI Capabilities

AI is transforming industries, and the CRM space is no exception.

Salesforce Sales Cloud AI Capabilities

Salesforce’s groundbreaking AI tool, Einstein, is available on upper-tier plans or as a paid add-on. Einstein has generative AI abilities that can improve the sales process by creating emails, summarizing calls and generating data-driven text. Businesses can also leverage Agentforce (formerly known as Einstein Copilot), an AI-based platform with autonomous agents that can handle sales, marketing and customer support tasks.

Einstein’s AI functions go even deeper; they actively capture and sync sales information to keep your CRM updated, make predictions about sales forecasts, identify customer signals and more. Additionally, Salesforce’s AI Cloud is dedicated to integrating Salesforce technologies to provide secure, generative services for enterprises.

monday Sales CRM AI Capabilities

monday’s AI assistant is primarily used to do the following:

  • Generate text, such as composing emails
  • Build custom monday formulas
  • Summarize larger bodies of text into comprehensive bullet points

Keep in mind that monday AI is still in beta testing, meaning you’ll need to opt in to leverage these features.

Best AI Capabilities
Salesforce Sales Cloud
Salesforce Sales Cloud wins this category hands down with its groundbreaking AI functions. Salesforce has improved Einstein since its inception, incorporating the recent wave of generative AI to become the premier AI in the CRM space.
Did You Know?Did you know
Einstein can gather data from user input and system use to support decision-making with decision-support systems that offer advice based on live analytics.

Ease of Use

Here’s how Salesforce and monday stack up regarding ease of use.

Salesforce Sales Cloud Ease of Use

Businesses can tailor Salesforce to fit their specific needs with highly advanced features. However, this customizability comes with a steep learning curve. IT professionals must make a significant time investment to configure the platform — especially with custom flows and integrations. Plus, you may need expert support to ensure it runs smoothly for your company.

However, this investment of time and money can be well worth it for businesses that can make full use of Salesforce’s features. Additionally, you don’t need to devise a complicated solution immediately; you can adjust the software and add features as you grow more comfortable with the system. Salesforce provides ample online resources to help you get started. You can also pay for extra guidance and coaching.

monday Sales CRM Ease of Use

monday users enjoy an easy learning curve and can use the software right out of the box. It has extensive online resources to help you get started and address any issues you encounter. Most businesses — even very small businesses — can get monday Sales CRM up and running quickly. Plus, it’s easy to manage the platform without expert guidance. Users who want to get the most out of the platform can access video tutorials and the monday Academy, which posts interactive courses and webinars.

Best for Ease of Use
monday
When it comes to ease of use, it's no contest: monday Sales CRM wins. monday's platform is straightforward and easy to use; you can be up and running in minutes and explore learning resources to dig deeper into the platform's usability. For the right businesses, however, Salesforce is certainly worth the initial setup headaches.
monday sales CRM interface

monday Sales CRM has a clean, modern interface that’s intuitive to navigate and easy to learn. Source: monday

FYIDid you know
monday makes it easy for businesses to switch CRM systems and migrate data. It keeps structures intact when you import spreadsheets from platforms like Excel, Google Sheets and Trello.

Salesforce Sales Cloud vs. monday Sales CRM Summary

Both Salesforce and monday are great choices. However, they’re best suited for different company sizes. While they share many core CRM functionalities, their unique feature sets make them ideal for the following companies.

Salesforce Sales Cloud is best for enterprises.

Salesforce Sales Cloud is a powerful CRM solution used by many large, enterprise-level companies across various industries. Salesforce offers an unparalleled suite of tools, integrations and advanced AI features, which make organizations operate more efficiently and effectively. Its plans may be cost-prohibitive for small businesses. However, large companies can expect a high ROI by shortening deal cycles, highlighting probable opportunities and automating many tasks.

monday Sales CRM is best for SMBs.

monday Sales CRM is a versatile platform that can unite different teams across a business to help make data-informed decisions. monday’s pricing is affordable for smaller businesses, while its many features will help midsize businesses level up in their industry. The software is easy to use. So, you can implement it quickly within your company and start improving your processes right away.

FAQs

Salesforce was founded in 1999; it was one of the first cloud-based SaaS companies. Before entering the market, enterprise businesses with CRM software required custom-built, expensive computer systems. More recently, Salesforce was one of the first companies to invest heavily in consumer AI with its AI, Einstein, which launched in 2016.
monday is an excellent platform for businesses that need to simplify their tech stack and save money. However, few companies can compete with Salesforce’s vast feature set, integration capabilities and AI tools. However, this high-level functionality comes with a steep learning curve — and an even steeper price tag.
Learning how to administer Salesforce effectively can take a few weeks. Depending on your business needs, you might require technical knowledge; such know-how includes database management, web development and even an understanding of Apex, Salesforce’s proprietary programming language. Salesforce launched its learning platform, Trailhead, to help expedite setup and implementation.
monday can import and export data to and from spreadsheets; you can organize your data into tables similar to spreadsheets. You can also create spreadsheet functions. Not all businesses can say goodbye to spreadsheets. But, CRM tools like monday and Salesforce make excellent additions to any organization’s tech stack.

Danielle Fallon-O’Leary contributed to this article.

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Written by: Sean Peek, Senior Analyst
Sean Peek co-founded and self-funded a small business that's grown to include more than a dozen dedicated team members. Over the years, he's become adept at navigating the intricacies of bootstrapping a new business, overseeing day-to-day operations, utilizing process automation to increase efficiencies and cut costs, and leading a small workforce. This journey has afforded him a profound understanding of the B2B landscape and the critical challenges business owners face as they start and grow their enterprises today. At business.com, Peek covers technology solutions like document management, POS systems and email marketing services, along with topics like management theories and company culture. In addition to running his own business, Peek shares his firsthand experiences and vast knowledge to support fellow entrepreneurs, offering guidance on everything from business software to marketing strategies to HR management. In fact, his expertise has been featured in Entrepreneur, Inc. and Forbes and with the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.
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