SharpSpring Pricing – Which Plan Should You Pick?

SharpSpring pricing is not a new topic on this blog. If you’ve been an avid reader of our CRM review articles, then I bet SharpSpring pricing is already a familiar subject.

Our comprehensive SharpSpring review article explored the brief details about the software packages plus their corresponding costs.

However, while the article explains the SharpSpring’s features quite thoroughly, the pricing information is fairly light. SharpSpring is an extensive marketing automation and customer relationship management system, whose array of pricing options might seem confusing at first, especially to newbies and beginners.

So, to help you out, here’s a detailed review of the SharpSpring pricing strategy. This article goes beyond the basics to discern between the pricing options for SMBs, agencies, and enterprises, as well as their accompanying package features.

In the end, therefore, you should be able to identify an appropriate pricing plan for your business or agency, plus get a good picture of what you can expect to pay over the long haul.

Now, to start off, let’s revisit what SharpSpring is all about to jog our memory…

What Is SharpSpring?

Ok, I’ll admit that describing SharpSpring is not as simple as it might seem. While the company fundamentally calls itself a complete sales and marketing platform, the last couple of years have seen it morph into something a bit more complicated than that.

What do I mean?

Well, let’s face it. “Sales and marketing solution” is what we’d say about most of the standard software options in this segment. SharpSpring, on the other hand, has numerous tools that go beyond these boundaries.

Going by our review findings, SharpSpring seems to be a cocktail of sorts. It combines email marketing with marketing automation, social media marketing, blogging, advanced contact tracking, customer relationship management, plus on-site engagement via web forms and landing pages. All these features are offered in varying scales to cater to different user segments.

So, the fact is, SharpSpring is essentially a multi-faceted cloud-based platform for omni-channel marketing, customer relationship engagement, automated interactions, and intelligent multi-device tracking. It seeks to help small, medium-sized and large online-based businesses attract leads, qualify them, then ultimately convert them into loyal customers.

Introducing SharpSpring

Now, when we dive deeper than that, it turns out the precise target market is far more specialized.

At the lowest level, to begin with, we have small and medium-sized businesses. SharpSpring facilitates fairly large sales and marketing teams with a wide range of tools for engaging up to 20,000 contacts at once.

Beyond that, we get to the agency level. And as you’ve guessed already, this is the part of SharpSpring that’s built specifically for digital marketing agencies. They get multiple tools for managing and rolling out automated omni channel campaigns on behalf of their customers.

So, of course, you can bet SharpSpring for Agencies is more advanced and costlier than SharpSpring for SMBs.

On the plus side, regardless of which package you choose for pricing, you’re going to get the same sensational ease of use that you need when you’re trying to expand and grow your business. For instance, Sharpspring pricing at every level comes with things like unlimited support, campaign tracking, and so much more.

If you’re looking for a convenient marketing automation tool that’s ideal for bigger companies,a nd you’re not too worried about budget, then this could be the solution for you.

Sharpspring Features

The platform doesn’t stop there though. SharpSpring happens to extend its capabilities further and into the territory of established large businesses. The precise package name here is SharpSpring for Enterprises and it offers custom plans to excessively large teams.

Hence, SharpSpring is more or less the type of solution you’d consider if you want to:

• Host your agency’s clients on a multi-client management console, from where you could proceed to run automated campaigns via email, social media, web forms, landing pages, and blogs.
• Embed advanced digital marketing automation with customer relationship management systems, content management systems, form builders, etc.
• Streamline multiple sales teams, marketing teams and their operations using an all-in-one system.
• Keep tabs on both your digital marketing strategies and lead engagement efforts, by relying on real-time intelligent analytics.
• Leverage artificial intelligence to identify, target, and successfully convert leads based on accurate behavior-based insights.
• Automate the bulk of your repetitive CRM and marketing tasks so you can focus on other business activities, or perhaps enhance your agency-client relationships.

With such a wide variety of use cases, it’s now understandable why SharpSpring has taken the time to group its product options. SharpSpring for SMBs, SharpSpring for Agencies, and SharpSpring for Enterprises is a much more organized setup as opposed to having all-inclusive product packages.

And yes, we’ll go through every single one of the plans shortly.

But, before that, have you ever wondered who currently uses this platform?

Pros and Cons of SharpSpring

SharpSpring Pros

• SharpSpring is cost-effective if you’re dealing with a large team of users.
• Every single SharpSpring pricing plan accommodates an unlimited number of users.
• The features and customer support are unlimited for all users.
• SharpSpring combines advanced customer relationship management features with solid marketing automation capabilities.
• SharpSpring comes optimized for three different usage scales – small and medium-sized businesses, marketing agencies, plus enterprises.

SharpSpring Cons

• SharpSpring can be costly to individual users, solopreneurs, freelancers, and startups.
• SharpSpring doesn’t allow you to pay for only selected features. It’s either you get all or nothing.
• SharpSpring doesn’t offer a free trial or a free package option.
• SharpSpring limits its contact volume.

SharpSpring Pricing – Target Market

Although SharpSpring is not exactly the most popular intelligent marketing or CRM automation platform, it has managed to attract quite a decent volume of users.

According to published industry reports, there are currently close to 8,000 companies actively using SharpSpring for their automated campaigns. Most of them are in the marketing and advertising industry, while computer software and IT come second and third respectively.

How big are the companies though?

Well, if you’re curious about the sizes of the teams here, it turns out SharpSpring is pretty popular among businesses whose workforce volume falls anywhere between 10 and 50. That translates to small to mid-sized companies with average annual revenues of $1 million to $10 million.

And while SharpSpring continues to grow globally, more than half of its users are based in the U.S. The rest are purchasing its cloud-based tools from the UK, Canada, Netherlands, Brazil, Spain, South Africa, etc.

That said, here are some of the prominent agencies and companies that have been investing heavily in SharpSpring:

• Search Revolutions, LLC
• PlanStartGrow
• Lighthouse Marketing Services, Inc.
• GetIT Comms
• FunnelBud
• Easyfish Marketing
• Demodia GmbH
• Brytons Home Improvement
• Biznet Digital
• Bright Dials
• ProShred Security
• IntelliCheck
• Shaw Floors
• WellCare
• PraxAir
• Hyundai
• Staples

SharpSpring’s Pricing Strategy

Well, if you’re a blogger, startup business, solopreneur, or freelancer, the bad news is, SharpSpring isn’t that cheap. And no, sorry to say, but you don’t get a free pricing plan here. Not even a free trial for a limited period of time.

The best you can hope for here is a free demo. Otherwise, you should expect to start at $550 a month.. Take a look at the screenshot below for the latest pricing.

Don’t get me wrong though. The SharpSpring pricing strategy is not all doom and gloom. On the bright side, at least you’re guaranteed a full set of features and unlimited support.

Yes, that’s right. SharpSpring generously offers every single user all its marketing automation and customer relationship management tools. What’s more, each plan accommodates an unlimited number of users.

This basically means that for just $550 a month, you could go ahead and comfortably introduce a team of over 55 colleagues. And with that, the cost would drastically drop to a paltry $10 per user.

If you’re running a company with multiple agency partners, then you get the value of being able to share your blog builder and dynamic forms with countless coworkers, without having to issue them an individual visitor ID. This makes a big difference for any company trying to track things like Google adwords and form performance with a large team.

Not bad, not bad at all. Especially for a robust solution that combines email marketing, social media marketing, CRM, marketing automation, intelligent multi-device tracking, web forms, and landing pages on one platform.

Sadly, just when things appear to be looking up, it turns out there’s one major caveat. While SharpSpring is kind enough to offer unlimited users, unlimited features, and unlimited support, it restricts the volume of contacts. The entry-level plan supports not more than 1,500 contacts, with the subsequent one stretching to 10,000 contacts.

The terms only start changing when we get to the Agency level of SharpSpring’s pricing. Its packages are costlier with slightly more features, while Enterprise level users end up paying the highest rates.

Now, let’s find out the specifics by exploring each of the three options- SharpSpring Pricing for SMBs, SharpSpring Pricing for Agencies, and SharpSpring Pricing for Entrepreneurs:

SharpSpring Pricing Schedule For SMBs

SharpSpring mainly seeks to serve small to medium-sized businesses. And since the needs of this market segment are pretty standard, SharpSpring offers businesses a range of plans to choose from right off the bat.

But get this. The best thing about all the plans here is their unrestricted features. Although this package is essentially the entry-level option, SharpSpring for SMBs comes with pretty much everything you’d need to run your automated campaigns.

When it comes to email marketing, for instance, each plan here comes with automated trigger emails, email marketing workflows, smart mails, up to 5MB of attachments, after-the-click behavioral-based email tracking, transformative email analytics, test emails sending, lead nurturing campaigns, a HTML Editor, custom merge variables for personalized email marketing, customizable HTML templates, a drag-and-drop template designer, responsive email design, dynamic email marketing automation, plus quick designer for email marketing.

Then automations allow you to track leads across multiple devices, turn abandoned shopping carts into redeemed transactions, engage your web visitors with content designed just for them, set up easy third-party integrations in the marketing automation platform, keep leads hot with triggers and filters, update your team directly with email and text alerts, create rich personas to tailor your campaigns, supercharge marketing automation with dynamic lists, focus your campaigns with lead scoring, improve conversion rates with lead nurturing, as well as build visual automation workflows.

SharpSpring’s web forms, on the other hand, give you the power to assign personas at form submission, test your web form automations, preview web forms before posting, link via CMS integrations, create eye-catching call-to-action buttons, add a Postback URL to sync information instantly, get live leads with Webex and GoToWebinar, use automated web form filling software, Generate custom reports to track and display web form performance, edit forms using the drag and drop form builder, Collect detailed information via custom fields, as well as integrate native and third party form builder software.

Then when it comes to social campaigns you get to show end-to-end social ROI, trigger automations based on social activity, identify hot leads and brand advocates, monitor conversations that matter, post once across an unlimited number of accounts, manage all your social media accounts, post instantly or schedule ahead, plus look at all of your planned content.

The platform further combines that with customer relationship management tools that allow you to track touch points with lead memberships, customize fields, deal stages, reports, and filters, view your progress and accurately forecast future performance, display a timeline of significant events for each contact, score leads based on engagement, page tracking, fit and completeness of information, enjoy conversations on multiple platforms with social links on contact pages, attach reminders to opportunities and contacts, empower your team with social notes, use the simple drag-and-drop interface to move opportunities across deal stages, create custom deal stages to track the progress of an opportunity, as well as schedule personalized follow up emails from your sales team.

Here are the SharpSpring pricing plans that accompany these features:

• 1,500 Contacts: If you’re a small business with up to 1,500 contacts, you could leverage SharpSpring for $550 a month. This gives you unlimited support and training, as well as an unlimited number of users.
• 10,000 Contacts: This is still a plan for small businesses. But, unlike the former, it accommodates up to 10,000 contacts for a higher monthly subscription fee of $850. Thankfully, however, at least it maintains an unlimited number of users plus unlimited customer support.
• 20,000 Contacts: This is the costliest of the three. And since it’s reserved for up to 20,000 contacts, it should perfectly serve a typical medium-sized business. The accompanying pricing is $1250 a month for an unlimited number of users and unlimited customer support.

The plan options don’t end there though. It turns out there’s an extra onboarding plan you could purchase to supplement any of the three packages as you get started. The pricing, however, starts at a whopping $1,800.

But then again, that’s just a one-off cost. Plus, SharpSpring’s experts will proceed to hold things down for you for about 60 days. This translates to about 2 months of learning the ropes from professionals, and having them help your team members develop their individual CRM and marketing automation skills.

SharpSpring Pricing Schedule For Agencies

This is the point where the package features drastically change. While the three plans we’ve just explored are optimized for businesses, the SharpSpring pricing schedule for agencies offers plans that are specially built to serve marketing agencies.

Come to think of it, I’d say this is quite a commendable move from SharpSpring, considering web-based agencies are predominantly neglected by marketing automation solution providers.

That said, the tools offered here are slightly different compared to the SharpSpring pricing plans for SMBs. The Agency package basically supplements what SMBs get with agent-specific management features.

SharpSpring’s objective here is to grant digital marketing agencies a foundation for not only hosting and serving their clients accordingly, while maintaining autonomous-like control of the entire agency framework.

So, in other words, agencies get the privilege to manage their own independent business systems (including their service pricing and branding) while riding on SharpSpring and its accompanying campaign tools.

Now, one thing you’d expect from such a setup is the ability to integrate clients into your agency account. And that’s precisely what SharpSpring delivers, consequently helping you manage customers efficiently.

Every single agency account comes with one login screen, from where you get to access a rebrandable web-based interface. Bringing clients on board is as simple as adding them to your account, and then setting up a personalized access point for each individual. This should subsequently streamline all your client operations plus activities.

And in case your clients prefer leveraging tools from another CRM software, SharpSpring has still got you covered. It integrates with a wide range of third-party form builders, as well as CMS and CRM platforms to save you the trouble of convincing your clients to migrate.

There’s a wide range of pre-built app integrations, plus a dynamically robust API with extensive flexibility.

But, don’t get me wrong. SharpSpring doesn’t entirely rely on third-party solutions when it comes to client CRM. It’s fully capable of hosting your clients within its own built-in CRM.

And in the event of any challenges or difficulties along the way, you can go ahead and capitalize on the unlimited support provision. SharpSpring’s tech support team is accessible via multiple channels, and they are widely praised for being responsive. They can quickly help you get your agency and client systems up and running.

Otherwise, the alternative option here would be self-assistance through tutorials. And SharpSpring happens to be extremely reliable at that too, since it comes with numerous resourceful videos for agencies.

Now, with these and many other agency-specific features, SharpSpring for Agencies is understandably pricier than its alternate SMB package.

But, don’t expect to find a detailed pricing schedule. There are no standard SharpSpring pricing plans for agency users. You are, instead, required to contact the company directly for your own custom quote.

In the end, however, at least you get to keep the bulk of your client earnings. SharpSpring even lets you specify your agency fees without committing you to a long-term contract. Then ultimately, you should be able to retain about 75% of the total revenue you make from the services.

Well, that’s an admittedly generous figure, and far more favorable than the rates most of the other agency automation solutions charge.

SharpSpring Pricing Schedule For Enterprises

SharpSpring for Enterprises, on the other hand, comes with plans that are a lot like SharpSpring for SMBs, but optimized for large teams.

In other words, this is the SharpSpring pricing level where you get to purchase unlimited features- unlimited templates, unlimited social accounts, unlimited training, plus unlimited users.

And since enterprise teams usually come with numerous users, SharpSpring doesn’t stop at unlimited user privileges. You should also be able to manage your teams using dynamic user roles and detailed audit logs.

The interface itself is rebrandable and it goes ahead to provide multiple logins, instant notifications, white-labeled sending domains, dedicated IP address, as well as sales and marketing email templates.

Another commendable thing about SharpSpring for Enterprises is its great user experience. The hefty pricing should get you specialized customer support plus onboarding, so your teams could have an easy time with the multiple marketing and sales tools.

As a matter of fact, SharpSpring even offers you a dedicated account manager as soon as you sign up. They’ll help you set up the entire system and customize it based on your company’s structure, operations, and campaign goals.

It doesn’t end there though. Your sales and marketing teams also get to benefit from unlimited training and personalized guidance. They’ll be free to get in touch with SharpSpring’s agents via phone, email, or chat, for quick assistance.

It’s worth noting, however, that SharpSpring doesn’t offer any pricing info on its Enterprise package. That means you won’t find a schedule of plans here. The only option you have is contacting SharpSpring directly for a custom quote.

Who Is SharpSpring Best For?

Ultimately, when you’re shopping for the best automation and CRM tool, you need to think carefully about the kind of business you’re trying to run, and what solution is most suitable for you. Every tool online, from Marketo, to Google Adwords, has a specific target customer in mind. While you can always add functionality to various tools with things like Zapier and third party integrations, it’s easier to choose a service that delivers everything you need at once.

SharpSpring, in our opinion, is best suited to small agencies, and mid-sized companies that need to share their blog building solution with multiple employees at once. If you’re working on dynamic content within a website with a team of experts, then you can rely on this multi party CRM integration to keep everyone connected on the same page.

With so much support for teams within this page builder, for everyone from in-office employees to freelancers on linkedIn, it’s much easier to get work done without having to rely on gmail messages. What’s more, although the workflow builder is advanced, it comes with a very small learning curve. You can even update and enhance your marketing plans from your phone with apps for Android available online.

SharpSpring probably isn’t going to be the builder of choice for small companies who have a limited budget to work with. The pricing model at first glance makes this tool seem extremely expensive. However, the truth is that it’s actually just designed for a different kind of company – one that needs to combine multiple users in the same place.

If you went to any other SaaS solution on the web today, like HubSpot or Salesforce, and tried to get the functionality spread across multiple users, then you’d actually pay a lot more than you would with SharpSpring for your marketing campaigns.

Is SharpSpring ideal for everyone? Absolutely not. However, the pricing that you’ll see on this solution clearly indicates that there’s more to this service than you might think. Don’t get carried away thinking that SharpSpring is the most expensive CRM on the market. The truth is that it just prices things a little differently.

SharpSpring Pricing – Verdict

Many factors come into play when you’re evaluating the cost of a platform with as many tools as SharpSpring. While some people might consider it to be a reasonably-priced solution, others feel that SharpSpring’s pricing is a bit on the high side.

You could also argue that competitors like Brevo are cheaper and much more generous when it comes to free packages.

And that would, admittedly, be a fair argument, I have to say. But then again, it’s not conclusive. Far from it to be honest.

You see, although SharpSpring’s pricing might seem to be alarmingly high at first, closer scrutiny of its plans’ costs plus their corresponding package features could change your mind.

SharpSpring happens to be one of the few CRM and marketing automation software that doesn’t hold anything back. It throws in all the features regardless of your plan’s pricing.

And that’s the principal pricing difference between SharpSpring and the likes of Brevo.

Nonetheless, however, I admit that this software solution isn’t for everyone. Although it does a good job of serving SMBs, agencies, and enterprises, SharpSpring’s pricing is a bit restrictive to the lower market segments.

Solopreneurs, small startups, freelancers, and bloggers can’t possibly afford to invest at least $550 a month in a marketing solution. The ROI simply wouldn't add up.

Now, compare that with large teams. For at least $550 a month, you get to collaborate with as many team members as you’d like. And that’s the sweet spot here. Basically, SharpSpring’s pricing per user decreases as you expand the size of your team.

Therefore, all things considered, SharpSpring is only economical for large sales and marketing teams.