Salesforce is the CRM enterprise teams know best — and it's the platform Pact most often replaces, because the typical Salesforce deployment includes Marketo (or Pardot) for marketing, Gainsight for CS, and OneTrust for consent. Pact is one platform, one bill, and one data model for all four.
Salesforce is best at
The category-defining enterprise CRM with the deepest ecosystem and the most analyst-recognised feature surface.
Pact's wedge
One platform — CRM, marketing, CS, consent — versus a Salesforce-stack of four contracts and an integration team to make them talk.
Capability comparison
| Capability | Salesforce | Pact |
|---|---|---|
| Multi-product surface | CRM is the platform; Marketing Cloud, Service Cloud, and Consent live in separate products with separate data models and separate purchase orders. | CRM, sequences, journeys, consent, audit, and ETL all live in one substrate, one schema, one bill. |
| Time to first send | Three weeks median for a new tenant: data model decisions, custom-object setup, profile / permission set wiring, MC sender setup. | Under an hour. Sign up, import a CSV, send. SSO and SCIM are toggles, not implementation projects. |
| Customization depth | Apex, Flow, Visualforce, LWC, and a 20-year-old metadata model. Practically limitless — at the cost of dedicated admins and a dev sandbox lifecycle. | Workflow builder, custom roles, custom fields, custom segments. No DSL. We won't pretend we match Apex for true edge cases — but most teams' edge cases are templates we already ship. |
| Consent + audit | Consent lives in OneTrust (or a custom build); audit is configurable but heavy. Pulling cross-system evidence is an annual engineering project. | Consent center is a first-class surface with an immutable, exportable ledger. Audit evidence is a one-click NDJSON export, tenant-scoped. |
| Real-time event stream | Platform Events + CDC, with significant setup. Latency is measured in seconds-to-minutes in practice. | Server-Sent Events into every list and dashboard; the UI updates as the database mutates, no refresh. |
| AI cost transparency | Einstein AI is per-conversation pricing layered on top of seat pricing; usage telemetry is in a separate console. | AI usage ledger per call: model, tokens, cost, surface that triggered it. Set caps. Alert on anomalies. Bring your own LLM key on Scale. |
| Pricing predictability | Enterprise + Marketing Cloud + Service Cloud + Consent partner list-price exceeds $400/user/month at the typical mid-market shape, before discounting. | $99/user/month for Pro covers everything in the comparison. Team is $199 for per-seat billing + BYOK + HIPAA. See live calculator at /pricing. |
| Ecosystem & partner depth | AppExchange has 7,000+ partners. If you need an obscure vertical integration, Salesforce probably has it. | API + webhooks + Zapier + native warehouse sync. We don't pretend to match AppExchange depth — but most teams use 4 apps from it, not 70. |
The takeaway
The teams that switch to Pact aren't replacing Salesforce alone — they're collapsing Salesforce + Marketo + Gainsight + OneTrust into one platform. The cost story works because the comparison is stack-to-stack, not seat-to-seat.
Pact ships with command-K everywhere, server-sent updates, time-travel dashboards, AI inbox, and consent-aware composition. None of these are upsells; they're how the product works on day one.
Schema-aware import preserves field history, owner mapping, consent state, and the audit chain. White-glove migration on Scale; the in-product CSV importer covers 90% of cases on lower tiers.
Where Salesforce wins
Honest about where Salesforce is the better choice. If your shape matches one of these, we'll be the first to recommend you stay.
Compare against another stack
The /pricing calculator drags in vendor list prices and shows the order-of-magnitude story for your team's shape — no procurement call required.
Last reviewed: 2026-06-15
American English · concessions backed by shipped functionality
Closes DP-014