SAS Marketing Automation vs Salesforce Marketing Cloud comparison

Salesforce and SAS are both solutions in the Marketing Automation category. Salesforce is ranked #1 with an average rating of 8.5, while SAS is ranked #18. Salesforce holds a 11.6% mindshare in MA, compared to SAS’s 1.5% mindshare. Additionally, 98% of Salesforce users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 100% of SAS users who would recommend it.

Salesforce Marketing Cloud

Read 62 Salesforce Marketing Cloud reviews

4,581 Views
3,115 Comparison Views

98% willing to recommend

SAS Marketing Automation

Read 2 SAS Marketing Automation reviews

455 Views
350 Comparison Views

100% willing to recommend

Salesforce Marketing Cloud

SAS Marketing Automation

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Jan 6, 2025

SAS Marketing Automation and Salesforce Marketing Cloud compete in the marketing solutions category. Salesforce Marketing Cloud has an advantage with its advanced features and perceived value despite SAS's favorable pricing.

Features: SAS Marketing Automation offers predictive analytics, customer segmentation, and campaign optimization tools. Salesforce Marketing Cloud provides superior integration capabilities, customization options, and adaptability to diverse marketing needs.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: SAS Marketing Automation is known for a straightforward deployment process and efficient support resources. Salesforce Marketing Cloud offers extensive support and training programs, which improve implementation efficiency despite a more involved setup process.

Pricing and ROI: SAS Marketing Automation is more cost-effective with lower initial setup costs and good ROI through targeted analytics. Salesforce Marketing Cloud has higher setup costs but offers significant returns due to comprehensive features and customization, justifying the investment for long-term value.

To learn more, read our detailed SAS Marketing Automation vs. Salesforce Marketing Cloud Report (Updated: December 2025).

Buyer's Guide

SAS Marketing Automation vs. Salesforce Marketing Cloud

December 2025

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Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:

Categories and Ranking

Salesforce Marketing Cloud

Ranking in Marketing Automation

1st

Average Rating

8.4

Reviews Sentiment

7.1

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Social CRM (2nd), Marketing Management (1st), Social Media Management Solutions (2nd)

SAS Marketing Automation

Ranking in Marketing Automation

18th

Average Rating

7.6

Reviews Sentiment

6.6

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Mindshare comparison

As of February 2026, in the Marketing Automation category, the mindshare of Salesforce Marketing Cloud is 11.6%, down from 22.7% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of SAS Marketing Automation is 1.5%, down from 1.9% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Marketing Automation Market Share Distribution
Product	Market Share (%)
Salesforce Marketing Cloud	11.6%
SAS Marketing Automation	1.5%
Other	86.9%

Marketing Automation

Featured Reviews

GauravSingh2

Senior Consultant at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees

Targeted email journeys have boosted campaign insight and now need better data access and support

I feel that Salesforce Marketing Cloud can be improved in how the data views are accessed; it would be better to have something more physical. With data extensions, you can view them directly, but for data views, it is very difficult as you can only send it out or load it into data extensions. Improvements can also be made in the connections to different external tools such as Azure or AWS.Customer support can be improved in Salesforce Marketing Cloud, as sometimes it is not clear what the issue is or how to approach solving it, and it also takes time to resolve issues.

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reviewer1549071

Senior Solution Architecht at a comms service provider with 10,001+ employees

Highly customizable but should have more out-of-the-box features

The product is highly customizable, but the marketing and business teams want a lot of things to be built out of the box. A lot of features that could be out of the box aren't there. The main concern is to keep the system in such a way that it provides you with some out-of-the-box features and some customizable features as well. An example would be stratification or stratified sampling of customers. It's something that is not part of the product. It's something I have built using this product. If something like this is available out of the box as part of the product, you don't have to particularly manage that. For the outbound campaigns, there should be dynamic offer or treatment assignments.

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Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:

Pros

"The most valuable feature is the 'Accelerators', which are expert-taught subject matter webinars on items such as personalization of emails and SMS to contacts and prospects."

"The notification system for customer alerts, including the integration of various communication channels such as email, SMS, and mobile push, is excellent."

"Salesforce is constantly evolving and have a good release cycle."

"Salesforce Marketing Cloud's journey builder is very easy to handle and quickly sets up a journey for clients who use a lot of communication."

"We haven't had any issues with integration."

"This is a very powerful and scalable solution."

"You can schedule reports, there's a lot of supporting tools, and you have access to all that information."

"We use Marketing Cloud for marketing campaigns and engaging customers. It is a business-focused application for a specific area of business, which is acquiring customers."

More Salesforce Marketing Cloud pros

"You can enable it for business users or marketing users to use it in a self-service way. So, the technical team is needed to build the features or processes, and then those processes can be used in a self-service way by your non-technical users."

"SAP Marketing Automation is user-friendly. The interface is nice and clear. You can see the different diagrams and define various filters and targets. You can also export the customer information you collect to make the campaign. It's easy to understand how this information is entered. There are also a lot of platforms that show the results of campaigns. You can customize your data and define different reports, but SAS also provides a standard report."

Cons

"Marketing Cloud should change the script language that it uses because it's not good. It's tricky and difficult to develop."

"Salesforce Marketing Cloud could improve by having more graphical options because a lot of tables are now only numbers and percentages and data. I prefer graphs, lines, and pie charts. I know there are ways to receive this from Salesforce Marketing Cloud. It doesn't play a huge role in my daily work to invest the time to figure it out. I feel that it would be time wasted. They could make the graphical options easier to find and use in the future."

"The pricing is a bit high."

"They can perhaps simplify the dashboards. In my opinion as an end-user, reports could also be simplified, but it also depends on how your company is set up. It depends on how the processes are set up within your company natively. It is linked to the way you do business. So, it varies."

"Query Studio in Salesforce Marketing Cloud needs to be improved because not all queries are supported and we cannot debug the AM Script or SSJS code, which makes code debugging manual."

"Technical support is good but could be faster, maybe more knowledgeable, and more customer friendly."

"It should contain artificial intelligence, in my opinion."

"The data extension tools are not very user-friendly."

More Salesforce Marketing Cloud cons

"The product is highly customizable, but the marketing and business teams want a lot of things to be built out of the box. A lot of features that could be out of the box aren't there. The main concern is to keep the system in such a way that it provides you with some out-of-the-box features and some customizable features as well."

"You need to buy connectors to integrate Marketing Automation with various suppliers. For example, if I want to see the data through Power BI, I need a connector to see the data directly. Otherwise, you need to do everything manually. You have to download information from SAS and then save a text file, and then I can import it into Power BI. I would like Marketing Automation to have this native functionality without the need to pay more for connectors."

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The solution is a bit expensive."

"Salesforce Marketing Cloud is a highly expensive solution, it needs to be less expensive. We are on an annual license to use the solution."

"We did a yearly license. We negotiated and got a great deal. I don't think we would have gotten far with the regular price, but they negotiated, so it was worth that."

"The licensing cost for the solution is on a yearly basis."

"Its licensing is on an annual basis. Customers are okay with its licensing cost, and they don't find it expensive."

"It's normal pricing."

"I don't know if my company pays for Salesforce Marketing Cloud monthly or yearly. It's a SaaS, so it's a recurring cost, but I have no information on its price."

"On a scale where one is the lowest and ten is the most expensive, I rate the solution an eight out of ten."

More Salesforce Marketing Cloud pricing and cost advice

"I'm not aware of the full cost. The financials are not with me. In terms of additional costs, there are always OpEx and CapEx. That's one way to look at it. You also need separate hardware to deploy the product."

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

12%

Manufacturing Company

10%

Computer Software Company

Healthcare Company

No data available

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	19
Midsize Enterprise	14
Large Enterprise	31

No data available

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Salesforce Marketing Cloud?

Datorama is part of Salesforce Marketing Cloud, which is quite a valuable feature that provides customer analytics.

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Salesforce Marketing Cloud?

I did not work on any pricing or implementation aspects but learned on my own when dealing with Revenue Cloud products.

See all answers

What needs improvement with Salesforce Marketing Cloud?

See all answers

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Comparisons

HubSpot Marketing Hub vs Salesforce Marketing Cloud

Compared 18% of the time

Marketo vs Salesforce Marketing Cloud

Compared 12% of the time

Adobe Campaign vs Salesforce Marketing Cloud

Compared 6% of the time

Oracle Eloqua vs Salesforce Marketing Cloud

Compared 5% of the time

Zeta Marketing Platform vs Salesforce Marketing Cloud

Compared 4% of the time

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Marketo vs SAS Marketing Automation

Compared 21% of the time

Act-On Software vs SAS Marketing Automation

Compared 20% of the time

Right On Interactive vs SAS Marketing Automation

Compared 18% of the time

Oracle Eloqua vs SAS Marketing Automation

Compared 15% of the time

More SAS Marketing Automation Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Salesforce Marketing Cloud

January 2026

Download Salesforce Marketing Cloud product report

Buyer's Guide

Marketing Automation

January 2026

Download SAS Marketing Automation product report

Also Known As

ExactTarget

SAS Campaign Management

Overview

Salesforce Marketing Cloud is a comprehensive marketing automation platform that enables businesses to create personalized and targeted marketing campaigns across multiple channels.

With its robust set of tools and features, marketers can easily manage and automate their email marketing, social media advertising, mobile messaging, and customer journey mapping.

The platform offers advanced segmentation capabilities, allowing marketers to segment their audience based on various criteria and deliver tailored messages to each segment.

Additionally, Salesforce Marketing Cloud provides powerful analytics and reporting features, enabling marketers to track the performance of their campaigns and make data-driven decisions.

With its user-friendly interface and seamless integration with other Salesforce products, Marketing Cloud offers a seamless and efficient marketing automation solution for businesses of all sizes.

Salesforce

SAS Marketing Automation lets you get more campaigns out the door in an automated, trackable and highly repeatable fashion. You can quickly define target segments, prioritize selection rules, select communication channels, schedule and execute campaigns, analyze campaign results and easily make adjustments to improve future campaign performance.

SAS

Sample Customers

American Express, Financial Conduct Authority, KPN, Merck KGaA, Peterborough City Council, The Chapar, ADP, Financial Times, Stanley Black & Decker, SureFlap, Western Union, Philips

Staples

Buyer's Guide

SAS Marketing Automation vs. Salesforce Marketing Cloud

December 2025

Free Report: SAS Marketing Automation vs. Salesforce Marketing Cloud

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