Salesforce Starter Review 2025

Salesforce is one of the most powerful platforms in the CRM space, and its starter package promises to bring that same power to smaller teams.

The question is whether this promise holds up when you actually use the software.

The name “Salesforce Starter” suggests something simple and beginner-friendly. In reality, you’re getting a scaled-down version of an enterprise platform that still carries much of that enterprise complexity.

We spent several weeks putting this CRM through real-world testing to see if Salesforce Starter truly serves small business needs or if it’s just enterprise software with a smaller price tag.

Overview of Salesforce Starter for Small Business

Salesforce Starter isn’t a CRM product in and of itself. Rather than building something new for small businesses, Salesforce took its massive enterprise platform and created an entry point that supposedly fits smaller teams and budgets.

What you actually get is a business management suite that goes far beyond basic CRM functions. The platform includes modules for sales, marketing, customer service, and even e-commerce.

When you log in, you see a dashboard full of cards showing opportunities, customer cases, activities, and other business metrics. Right away, you can tell this platform wants to run your entire business—and it sort of can.

You can track leads, manage opportunities, run email campaigns, build and manage an online store, and handle customers’ cases right inside Salesforce Starter. This CRM software also lets you access your Slack channel, and it connects with thousands of other business tools to help you access more functionality.

However, with a scope this wide, it’s only natural to run into some problems.

The biggest issue is the complexity. Thanks to all these bells and whistles, Salesforce Starter is a lot harder to learn and use than most small business CRM software. The CRM’s interface is not the most user-friendly you’ll find.

What’s most surprising is the pricing. Salesforce starter costs $25 per user/month, which is a lot more than what the typical small business CRM charges. And to make it worse, you’re paying this high price and still don’t have workflow automations, a feature that much more affordable CRMs make available.

When you consider everything, it starts to seem as though Salesforce Starter is just being marketed to small businesses, but isn’t actually designed for them.

Salesforce Starter Pros and Cons

Understanding what Salesforce Starter does well and where it falls short can help you make a good decision.

Key CRM Features of Salesforce Starter

Here’s what you actually get when you pay $25 per user each month for Salesforce Starter. Keep this price in mind as you read through the features.

Here’s the breakdown of Salesforce Starter’s features:

• Core Features

  • Mobile app
    ✅ Android and iOS
  • Contact management
    ✅
  • Follow-up tracking

    

    As a small business looking to close more sales, you need to stay on top each opportunity, so you don’t lose them. Follow-up tracking is what makes that happen.
    ❌
  • Pipelines
    ✅ Unlimited
  • Duplicate management
    ✅

• Centralization Tools

  • Centralized workspace

    

    A centralized workspace is an essential small business CRM feature that lets you manage your whole business on just one page.
    ✅
  • Dashboard
    ✅
  • Number of integrations
    9,000+

• Communication Tools

  • Two-way email sync
    ✅
  • Click-to-call options
    ✅
  • Multi-channel inbox

    

    To make communications faster and easier, a multi-channel inbox stores messages you receive from various channels in one place.
    ❌
  • Meeting scheduling
    ❌

• Simple Automation

  • CRM workflows
    ⚠️ Higher plan only
  • Sales email sequences
    ✅ Via Flow Builder
  • Free web forms
    ✅
  • Browser extension for auto lead capture
    ⚠️ Only for companies, not contacts

• Customer Support

  • Email support
    ✅
  • Live chat
    ✅
  • Phone support
    ✅

• Pricing

  • Starting price
    $25 per seat/month
  • Free trial
    ✅ 30 days
  • Free plan
    ❌
  • Next paid plan
    ⚠️ Expensive ($100 per seat/month)

Let’s take a look at how these features actually work when you use them.

Contact Management

Contact management in Salesforce Starter lives in the Contacts tab, where you can add new records manually or import them in bulk. From the list view, you can assign labels, send emails, or include contacts in your marketing campaigns.

Clicking on a contact opens their full profile, which acts as a central hub for everything tied to that person. You can update personal details, add and track tasks and events, log calls, and even connect sales opportunities directly to the record.

The profile also lets you attach files, create and monitor support tickets, and see the contact’s location through Google Maps. Communication is tracked as well. You can send and receive emails from the profile and view a complete history of every interaction.

Lead Management

Salesforce Starter’s lead management module was designed to help you organize leads, qualify them, and, if suitable, convert them into sales opportunities.

The main leads page organizes all your potential customers and their data in a table and lets you send them emails or add them to your campaign list. You can switch to Kanban view to update the potential customers’ status or click on a lead to see the full profile.

Like with sales opportunities, the full profile for leads lets you manage everything about that lead, from basic information to tasks, events, call logs, emails, and more.

You can also click through to update the lead’s status. Once a lead is marked as “converted,” it turns into a sales opportunity. If the lead doesn’t qualify, you can mark it as “unqualified,” which converts it into a contact instead.

Activity Management

Salesforce Starter doesn’t put much focus on task management. Unlike many small business CRMs on the market, there’s no dedicated tab for it. Instead, tasks sit inside a pop-up called the To-Do List, which you can open from any page.

It shows all your tasks, lets you segment them with labels, and even has separate tabs for items due today and those that are overdue. Another tab within the pop-up houses all your tasks, but it doesn’t prioritize them by due date, which makes it harder to see what needs your attention first. It’s the same story if you check tasks within individual contact profiles.

Beyond tasks, Salesforce Starter comes equipped with event tracking capabilities. You can create and log meetings either in a contact’s profile or on the Calendar. But since the calendar itself is tucked away under the Sales tab, it’s not as easy to access as it should be.

In the end, Salesforce Starter’s activity management is functional but not ideal for proper follow-up tracking. Especially for an agile and fast-moving small business.

The biggest reason is that the software doesn’t nudge you to connect tasks or events to specific leads or contacts. This makes them more like generic to-do items rather than follow-up actions that help you re-engage prospects.

And while you can technically create “Follow-up tasks” in Salesforce Starter, they function more like extra to-do items to be carried out when one is complete. Not true follow-ups that guide you back to a prospect.

Pipeline Management

With Salesforce Starter, you can create as many pipelines as you need for your sales opportunities. The stages within each pipeline are customizable through Quick Settings → Sales Stages, where you can add, remove, or reorder stages to match your sales process.

This CRM also allows you to modify your lead qualification process by adding, deleting, or rearranging lead statuses.

Opportunity Management

The Opportunities module is the equivalent of deal management.

There, you can see all your sales opportunities laid out with their close dates, stage, linked account, and the team member or sales rep responsible. If you prefer a visual workflow, you can switch to the Kanban view and move opportunities through the sales cycle with simple drag-and-drop.

Clicking into any opportunity gives you the full picture. You’ll see the basics like name, amount, probability, and status, along with the current sales stage, associated account, related products, emails, files, tasks, events, call logs, and a complete activity history.

Email Sync

Salesforce Starter offers a two-way email sync using your Google or Microsoft accounts. With this, you can send emails from inside the CRM, receive messages from contacts, and store all correspondence.

If you’d rather not sync your email account, Salesforce has another method that you can use to log emails. It’s called Email to Salesforce, and it uses the BCC functionality. Simply BCC or forward a message to the email address provided by Salesforce Starter, and it’ll appear in your CRM as an email log.

Collaboration

On Salesforce Starter, you can add team members to the tool and assign tasks to them. You can also put them in charge of a lead, contact, account, or opportunity.

On top of that, the CRM lets you share your calendar with teammates and view theirs as well, which makes it easier to stay aligned on meetings and deadlines.

You can also leave notes for your team and communicate with them seamlessly by connecting to Slack.

Duplicate Management

When you open a lead record, Salesforce Starter automatically scans it for duplicates. If any are detected, you’re automatically prompted to merge them into one.

Likewise, when you’re creating a new record, the CRM software lets you know if there’s already an existing record similar to the one you’re about to create.

Centralized Workspace

On the sales tab, you can toggle split view. You have records on one side (leads, contacts, opportunities), and when you click on the record, the 360º view opens on the right side.

This way, you can create contacts, nurture leads, carry out tasks (to-do is a pop-up that you can access on all tabs), and advance sales opportunities without loading up another page.

Dashboard and Reporting

The homepage serves as a dashboard featuring cards that provide insights into your business. It includes visual reports on opportunities, content, lead status, recent records, and customer cases.

You can customize the dashboard to display a variety of reports related to sales, marketing, services, and commerce, among others.

That aside, there’s an Analytics module in the Sales tab. There, you can get real-time insights into various parts of your business.

Automations

There are no automated workflows in Salesforce Starter, but email sequences are available. You can create them with the Flow Builder on the Marketing module. Create a new campaign, select emails as the type, and choose message series.

However, the marketing module isn’t available out of the box. When you need it, you’ll activate it in settings. This takes a couple of hours to complete.

There’s a browser extension for automatically capturing leads, but it’s more suitable for capturing organizations rather than individual contacts.

For instance, if you try to capture data from a LinkedIn profile using the extension, it saves the name as “LinkedIn”, records it as an account, and links back to the profile’s URL. In practice, this feature is more useful for pulling in details from company websites than from personal profiles.

Integrations

One of Salesforce Starter’s most popular integrations is its bidirectional sync with Slack. With this, you can access your organization’s Slack channels right inside your CRM, and the CRM’s data can be accessed from inside your Slack (owned by Salesforce).

In addition, the CRM software connects with AppExchange to provide integration with 9,000+ other business applications.

Mobile App

Salesforce has mobile apps for both Android and iOS devices.

With the mobile apps, you can handle your contacts and leads, track tasks and meetings, and keep tabs on your sales opportunities. You also get access to reports and a handy dashboard with a snapshot of your business performance.

One of the standout features is the Einstein Voice Assistant, which lets you update contacts, tasks, leads, and opportunities just by speaking. There’s also the native app builder that lets you create custom apps using low-code tools.

And if you can shell out $25 per user/month for Salesforce Mobile App Plus, you’ll get higher security measures, be able to customize the app to match your brand, and even use it without an internet connection.

Ease of Use

The interface looks a bit outdated, but the bigger problem is how tough it can be to use.

Salesforce Starter has too many main tabs with multiple subtabs (or modules) within them.

If the CRM weren’t so overbloated, the learning curve wouldn’t be so steep. In fact, many reviewers on G2—where it has a 4.5/5 rating—say that the CRM is too complex.

The setup and feature bloat are some of the biggest problems with Salesforce Starter.

For example, the Commerce module lets you build a store. While useful, it does make the software more robust and unnecessarily complex. The reporting functionality is another example. There are so many report types to choose from that it’s easy to get confused and lost.

Adding to the problem is how slow Salesforce often gets. Perhaps due to housing more features than it can handle, the CRM often loads more slowly than many other CRMs on the market.

The silver lining is that each functionality has its own tab and is named accordingly. So, when you need a particular tool, you know where to start looking.

Customer Support

The level of customer support you get on Salesforce Starter depends heavily on what kind of success plan you’re on:

• Standard
• Premier
• Signature

By default, all paid users are put on the Standard Success Plan, and support here includes:

• Live chat with an AI support agent called Agentforce
• Phone calls
• Support case submissions

However, the response time is 2 days.

If you want something faster, you’ll need to get on the Premier plan, which offers a 1-hour response time but costs 30% of your net license fees. But it also includes other perks you won’t find in the Standard success plan, like:

• Developer support (up to 200 lines of code)
• Salesforce experts help with onboarding
• You get expert coaching to help with adoption

Other forms of support include self-help resources, Trailhead (online learning platform), and Trailblazer (community). These are all available to all paid users of Salesforce Starter.

Salesforce Starter Pricing Structure

The way Salesforce approaches pricing reveals a lot about who this CRM is really built for. Unlike companies that created CRMs specifically for small businesses, Salesforce simply opened the door to its enterprise platform at a lower entry point.

This strategy means you’re not getting a tool optimized for small business efficiency. Instead, you’re getting access to a scaled-down version of something built for Fortune 500 companies.

How Much Does Salesforce Starter Cost?

Salesforce Starter is simply one subscription tier of the larger Salesforce platform, and it’s especially suited for small and medium-sized businesses—or so they say.

Salesforce Starter costs $25 per user/month. It does include native tools for sales, marketing, customer service, commerce, and communication, but the price feels high compared to the market average of $10–$15 per user each month (when billed annually).

The issue is that while Salesforce Starter packs in a lot of features, most small businesses won’t actually need all of them. This makes the software feel bloated, and that extra bulk is part of what drives the cost up and the performance speed down.

But what’s more disappointing is that the CRM doesn’t offer workflow automations even at this already high price point. To get it, you’d need to integrate a separate app, upgrade to the Pro Suite at $100 per user each month, or look at another CRM altogether.

Is Salesforce Starter Pricing Affordable for Small Businesses?

The short answer: Salesforce starter is not an affordable CRM for small businesses. At $25 per user each month, Salesforce Starter asks small businesses to pay near premium prices, but the value it provides doesn’t exactly measure up to that.

When you look at what most small businesses actually need from a CRM, the list is fairly straightforward. They want reliable contact management, a clear pipeline to track opportunities, email integration that keeps communication organized, and some form of basic automation to reduce manual work.

Salesforce Starter does a good job with the first three, but it leaves out automation entirely. For small teams that are already pressed for time, this missing piece is often the most valuable part of a CRM, and its absence makes Salesforce Starter hard to recommend.

The storage cap adds to the frustration. Even though you’re paying a premium price, each user only gets 1GB of storage. This means you will regularly have to clean out files or delete records just to stay within the limit. For businesses that deal with contracts, proposals, or even just email attachments, that space disappears quickly.

Support can also be quite expensive. The standard support included with Salesforce Starter promises response times of up to two days. For most small businesses, waiting that long when something critical breaks is not realistic.

If you want faster help, you have to pay an extra 30 percent of your license fees for Premier support. That pushes your cost from $25 per user up to about $32.50 per user, and all you are really getting in return is a more reasonable response time.

One of the biggest issues is the lack of a middle ground between pricing tiers. If the Starter plan does not meet your needs—and for many small businesses, it won’t—the only upgrade path is the Pro Suite, which jumps to $100 per user each month.

Final Verdict: Is Salesforce Starter the Best CRM for Small Businesses?

After weeks of testing, we found that Salesforce Starter tries to do something that might not be possible (or even necessary). It wants to give small businesses enterprise power at a small business price. But in trying to do both, it doesn’t really succeed at either.

Sure, the platform has some good offerings. The reporting tools show you exactly what’s happening in your business. The AppExchange opens doors to thousands of integrations that can extend functionality in almost any direction. And if your team already lives in Slack, that native integration can be genuinely useful.

However, these strengths can’t overcome the problems with Salesforce Starter.

The complexity is a serious issue for small teams. You’ll spend too much time learning the system instead of selling. Simple tasks require multiple clicks through nested menus. The abundance of features means you’ll use maybe 70% of what you’re paying for. It’s like buying a commercial kitchen when all you need is a good stove.

Who should actually use Salesforce Starter? If you’re a medium-sized business that’s growing fast and planning to be much bigger soon, it might make sense. If you already use other Salesforce products, staying in the ecosystem might be valuable. And if you absolutely need those 9,000+ integrations, you don’t have many other options.

But for small businesses, Salesforce Starter asks for too much money, time, and effort for what it delivers.

According to our criteria (Value, Impact, and Speed), Salesforce Starter’s fit for small businesses is Moderate.

Best Alternative for Salesforce Starter

If Salesforce Starter feels too complex and expensive for you, that’s because it is. A better alternative is OnePageCRM.

Value: High
Impact: High
Speed: High
Pricing starts from: $9.95

OnePageCRM doesn’t try to be everything. It focuses on core CRM functions and does them really well. You get proper follow-up tracking, full email integration, and workflow automations right from the start.

OnePageCRM is also leagues ahead when it comes to usability. While Salesforce spreads functions across multiple tabs, OnePageCRM uses a single-page design. Everything you need is right there, so you won’t ever have to hunt through menus or deal with annoying, complex setups.

At $9.95 per user/month, you pay less than half of Salesforce Starter’s price. And you get the features that actually matter for small business sales, without any surprise costs or huge price jumps.