Salesforce is the clear leader in the CRM market, and it isn’t even close. It boasts of having more than 150,000 customers, and the company holds around 24% of the global CRM market share. This is greater than its next four competitors combined. Around 90% of Fortune 500 companies are thought to be Salesforce customers.
The company recently announced three new editions – Core, Advanced, and Max – for Agentforce Sales, Service, and Industries, with some new prices. It came after Salesforce also announced a 6% price increase in June 2025, packaging the announcement alongside the general availability of new Agentforce user licenses and add-ons. It’s the clear market leader, and customers pay for that prestige. But is it fair to say customers are overpaying?
“Compared to What?”
When we asked Data Strategist and Salesforce MVP, Mehmet Gökmen Orun, if Salesforce customers were overpaying, he said: “Compared to what? It seems cheaper to maintain customer lists in spreadsheets, but these had higher business costs, thus adoption of CRM systems.
“I do believe Headless 360 and agentic transformation will put pressure on legacy implementations, admins and architects alike to discover whether the data and processes are both fit for purpose. How well we deliver on this challenge will impact how successful we and our organizations will be.”
Let’s take a look at some of Salesforce’s competition.
Compared to Vibe-Coded CRMs
Salesforce SMB customers have been switching to vibe-coded CRMs as it’s supposedly much cheaper, and just as good – or at least, nearly as good.
One benefit of Salesforce is the huge potential that comes with the platform, which can be customized to handle a very broad range of tasks, catered to almost any business. But by the same token, 58.6% of Salesforce Admins think the platform is becoming more complicated, according to our 2026 Admin Survey. Do SMBs really need to be paying for a solution where the sky is the limit – when they are not even off the ground properly yet?
A number of small firms have already turned their backs on SaaS providers like Salesforce, ServiceNow, and HubSpot and are now using vibe-coded solutions using AI tools like Claude, according to The Information.
Some firms have apparently seen software costs drop by between 40% – 80%.
David Codrea, a partner at Greenleaf Management, which has historically used Salesforce, said the company saved roughly $100,000 by using Replit and Claude Code to build a custom solution instead of Salesforce. “Salesforce is super complex,” he said. “They provide a lot of value, but…[we were] only using a little piece of it.”
There have been other such public cases. Fred Turner, Founder of Curative, told the 20VC with Harry Stebbings podcast he cancelled his $600,000 Salesforce contract after vibe-coding a CRM in two months, and his company runs an internal CRM which is “working better” and is “more integrated”. He says his Salesforce bill is “zero”.
Gabe Larsen, CRO at AI agent company Atonom, also reportedly cut his business’s $40,000 Salesforce bill to $1,200 with “no functionality lost”, according to a blog post from AI app builder Lovable – the vendor that helped build the replacement.
But, as I wrote in July, this approach has its costs. Salesforce itself warns that vibe-coding CRM functions leads to technical debt, security and compliance gaps, and lack of official support.
While AI seemingly can build a functioning CRM, there are still so many concerns. For instance:
- What happens when the vibe-coders who made the CRM leave the company?
- Who is responsible for security incidents, integrations, and governance?
- Do you have to start afresh if you have years of accumulated data and workflows?
Someone looking at Curative’s case of supposedly cutting a bill from $600,000 to “zero” might get the impression that, yes, Salesforce customers are overpaying – if they can get an equivalent service at a fraction of the price. But we really are in the early stages of this experiment, and the world’s largest companies are not taking this bet.
It’s SMBs looking to use AI as much as they can to establish themselves. Fortune 500 companies are not vibe-coding away Salesforce any time soon.
A Comparison Between Enterprise CRMs
Let’s make a comparison using public list prices. They leave out implementation, support, AI consumption, and a bunch of other metrics, but we have to start somewhere.
Per user, per month, in USD, the rates for ‘enterprise’ editions are as follows (using the new “Core” edition pricing release last week as the analog to the old Enterprise edition):
- $195 for Salesforce
- $150 for HubSpot
- $105 for Dynamics
- $40 for Zoho
On this basis, we can say that Salesforce is:
- 30% more expensive than HubSpot Enterprise
- 85% more expensive than Dynamics Enterprise
- 387.5% more expensive than Zoho Enterprise
Note: There’s also a one-time onboarding fee of $3,500 for HubSpot Enterprise.
For 100 users, billed annually, the public license comparison becomes:
- $234,000: Salesforce
- $180,000: HubSpot
- $126,000: Dynamics
- $48,000: Zoho
On a pure list-price basis, Salesforce is certainly the most expensive of the major CRM platforms – sometimes by a significant margin. But that doesn’t necessarily mean customers are overpaying.
The $234,000 annual bill for 100 Salesforce Enterprise users is between $54,000 and $186,000 more expensive than CRM rivals. This obviously makes a significant difference to small- and medium-sized businesses that are not going to be using the full breadth of Salesforce’s functionality.
But is the additional cost justified by additional value?
Final Thoughts: Salesforce is an Investment
For a large enterprise, the use of Salesforce is not just inertia from previous years. They are buying a mature platform, an enormous ecosystem of integrations and consultants, extensive customization, established security and governance capabilities, and the proven ability to support complex business processes at scale.
It’s also not as simple as comparing the per-user per-year price. A company might just use a fraction of Salesforce’s capabilities, but the remaining functionality does provide the flexibility to expand, integrate new systems, or accommodate changing business requirements – crucially, without having to migrate to another platform. You might not need Salesforce’s full functionality now, but you might wish you had it when your business was smaller, instead of having to migrate to Salesforce once you need it.
While it’s arguably true that some Salesforce customers could be paying for functionality they do not need, that does not mean that Salesforce is overpriced. Salesforce is designed to solve expensive problems. They might not be your problems yet – but they might be a few years down the line.
