The Best Salesforce Marketing Cloud Alternatives for eCommerce Stores

Salesforce Marketing Cloud (SFMC) has been the default choice for big brands for more than a decade. It’s powerful, it’s proven, and it can do almost anything. The catch is the work it takes to get it to do anything at all.

Quick answer: The best Salesforce Marketing Cloud alternatives for eCommerce stores are Bloomreach for enterprise brands that want AI personalization across every channel without SQL or AMPscript, Omnisend for growing brands that want eCommerce-focused email, SMS and push with clear pricing, and Iterable for teams that need flexible cross-channel journeys and have strong in-house data skills.

Ask an eCommerce marketer what a day on SFMC looks like and you’ll often hear the same story. A segment needs SQL. A personalized email needs AMPscript. A new journey needs a ticket to IT or an agency. By the time the campaign goes live, the moment it was built for has passed.

That gap matters more than ever in eCommerce. Shoppers browse, compare and buy in minutes, and they expect every email, text and web page to reflect what they just did. Email alone still returns $36 to $42 for every $1 spent, according to Litmus and the DMA. Personalized, well-timed messages are where most of that return comes from. A platform that slows your team down costs you revenue every single week.

Salesforce is also changing its marketing products. Its newer Marketing Cloud Next runs on Salesforce Data Cloud and uses consumption-based pricing, which can make costs harder to forecast. Marketing Cloud Engagement, the platform most brands know as SFMC, isn’t being retired. But many teams are using this moment to ask a bigger question: is this still the right platform for us?

If that’s where you are, this guide is for you.

What Are You Actually Replacing?

SFMC isn’t one tool. It’s a collection of modules, and your licence may include some or all of them. Before you compare alternatives, it helps to know which jobs you need covered.

Email Studio and Journey Builder. Sending emails and building automated journeys, like welcome series and abandoned cart flows.
Mobile Studio. SMS and push notifications.
Data Cloud (formerly Salesforce CDP). A customer data platform that joins data from different sources into one profile per customer.
Personalization (formerly Interaction Studio). Real-time web and app personalization.
Einstein. Salesforce’s AI layer, used for things like send-time optimization and product recommendations.

Many brands pay for several of these separately, then pay again for the people or agencies who know how to run them. When you look at alternatives, compare what you get across everything you use today, not just email.

A Few Terms Worth Knowing

ESP (Email Service Provider). The tool that builds, sends and tracks your emails.
Marketing automation. Triggers and rules that send the right message when a customer does something.
CDP (Customer Data Platform). A system that unifies customer data from your store, apps, loyalty program, stores and data warehouse into one profile.
AMPscript. SFMC’s own scripting language for personalizing content. It’s powerful but usually needs a developer, which is why so many teams want to leave it behind.

Some alternatives combine all of these in one platform. Others focus on email and SMS and plug into a separate CDP. Knowing which you need will narrow your shortlist fast.

Where It Sits in Your Tech Stack

Your marketing platform sits between your commerce platform and your customers. It needs to read product, order and customer data from your store in real time, and push messages out across every channel you use.

Check how each alternative connects to:

Your commerce platform, whether that’s Shopify, Salesforce Commerce Cloud, Adobe Commerce or something else
Your data warehouse, such as Snowflake or Databricks, if you run one
Your loyalty, reviews and customer service tools, so messages reflect the full customer relationship
Your analytics, so you can tie every campaign back to revenue

If you’re replatforming at the same time, for example moving to Shopify, it’s often the perfect moment to move off SFMC too. You only rebuild your integrations once.

Will It Grow With You?

Leaving SFMC is a big decision, so you don’t want to make it twice. Look for a platform that can handle your volume today and your plans for the next few years. Ask about multi-brand and multi-region support, how pricing changes as you grow, how long migration takes, and what support you get during and after the move.

Be honest about your stage too. A large enterprise with millions of customers needs very different things from a growing brand that bought SFMC early and now finds it’s paying for far more than it uses.

Our Choice for the Best Salesforce Marketing Cloud Alternatives for eCommerce Stores

We’ve chosen three platforms that eCommerce brands are moving to after SFMC:

Bloomreach
Omnisend
Iterable

Read on to find out more, or explore all the email marketing and marketing automation tech we have in our directory.

Bloomreach

Bloomreach is an enterprise marketing platform where eCommerce brands leaving Salesforce Marketing Cloud find AI that personalizes customer engagement. Founded in 2009, it now works with more than 1,400 brands, including Pandora, Benefit Cosmetics and American Eagle, and was named a Leader in The Forrester Wave: Email Marketing Service Providers, Q3 2024. Fashion brand GANNI is one of the brands that made the switch, and saw 60% revenue growth within the first three months of leaving SFMC.

Tech Stack Type: Enterprise marketing automation platform covering email, SMS, WhatsApp, web, app and search
Best for: Mid-Sized / Enterprise
Pricing: See Bloomreach’s website for pricing information

What Makes Bloomreach Great?

At the heart of Bloomreach is Loomi, its proprietary AI and the intelligence layer that understands both the shopper and the catalog. Shaped by deep eCommerce expertise, Loomi unifies product and customer data in one place, so every recommendation reflects what a shopper wants and what a brand needs to sell. It combines first-party customer data, full purchase history, real-time behavioral signals and in-session activity, connected directly to the channels a shopper is using, then decides in the moment which customers to engage, what to say, which products to show, when to send and when to hold back. That same intelligence runs across 17+ channels, so email, SMS, web and app all reflect what a shopper just did, even shoppers who haven’t identified themselves yet. Bloomreach calls this intelligence at the edge. Marketers build campaigns, journeys and reports without SQL, AMPscript or IT tickets, and most brands send their first campaign within two weeks. For brands replatforming, Bloomreach connects to any commerce platform through one standardized integration, and brands moving to Shopify get a native integration with real-time data sync. The results speak for themselves. Before switching, GANNI relied on a tech agency to run SFMC because everything was SQL-based. After moving to Bloomreach, it saw 60% revenue growth within the first three months, more than doubled its return buyer rate from 11% to 25%, and launched 10 new use cases.

AI Summary of Customer Reviews of Bloomreach

Bloomreach holds 4.6 out of 5 on G2 from more than 750 reviews. Reviewers consistently praise its personalization, especially how product recommendations and content adapt to real customer behavior, and many say the platform turns customer data into action rather than just storing it. Analytics, segmentation and reporting earn strong marks, and support is a standout theme, with users describing the team as responsive and genuinely helpful. Brands that have switched from SFMC echo this: Motorpoint reported a 50% uplift in product recommendation email performance and 40% of weekly time saved, while Golfbreaks saw a 50% to 70% productivity increase.

Omnisend

Omnisend is an omnichannel marketing automation platform built specifically for eCommerce, bringing email, SMS, web push and pop-ups together in one tool. It launched on the Shopify App Store in 2014 and is now used by more than 100,000 brands.

Tech Stack Type: Standalone email, SMS and push marketing platform
Best for: Start Up / Mid-Sized
Pricing: See Omnisend’s website for pricing information

What Makes Omnisend Great?

Omnisend is a strong fit for growing eCommerce brands that bought SFMC early and now find they’re paying enterprise prices for features they don’t use. Everything is built around eCommerce from the start, with ready-made automations for welcome series, abandoned carts, browse abandonment and post-purchase flows that you can launch in minutes. Email, SMS and push run from the same workflow builder, AI product recommendations and dynamic content personalize each send, and you can even connect ChatGPT or Claude to build campaigns and segments from a chat window. Pricing is clear and published; the Pro plan includes unlimited emails, and 24/7 live support comes with every plan, so lean teams get help without needing an agency on retainer.

AI Summary of Customer Reviews of Omnisend

Omnisend holds 4.7 out of 5 on the Shopify App Store from more than 3,100 reviews. Merchants describe it as easy to learn, with a clean editor for newsletters, forms and automations, and many credit abandoned cart flows, welcome series and segmentation with significant extra revenue. Pricing is widely seen as cost-effective, and support is the standout theme, with reviewers praising fast, patient help around the clock. The critical reviews mostly cover accounts paused during compliance checks at signup and occasional domain authentication issues, so allow time for onboarding before a big send.

Iterable

Iterable is an AI customer engagement platform built for enterprise scale. Founded in San Francisco in 2013, it’s used by thousands of marketing teams, including eCommerce and consumer brands such as Fabletics, HelloFresh and Stanley Black & Decker.

Tech Stack Type: Standalone cross-channel customer engagement platform
Best for: Mid-Sized / Enterprise
Pricing: Iterable offers custom pricing. Visit Iterable’s website to request a quote

What Makes Iterable Great?

Iterable gives marketing teams the flexibility to build complex, cross-channel journeys without relying on developers for every change. Its visual journey canvas makes it easy to map out multi-step automations with flexible branching and email, SMS, push, and in-app messages can all run within the same journey. Its AI layer, Nova, helps teams build and optimize audiences and campaigns, chooses the next best action for each customer based on their behavior, and surfaces the signals behind campaign performance. For brands with strong in-house data teams and a lot of app or subscription activity, it’s a capable platform that can scale with high volumes.

AI Summary of Customer Reviews of Iterable

Iterable holds 4.4 out of 5 on G2 from 840 reviews and 4.3 out of 5 on Capterra. Reviewers praise its intuitive interface, email builder and journey canvas, and like being able to run several channels in one journey with flexible branching. Segmentation, personalization and automation also score well. The criticisms on Capterra centre on a learning curve for advanced features, slow support responses for some users, reporting figures that don’t always match, and unexpected fees, so it’s worth asking for a clear breakdown of costs before you sign.

Find Your Perfect Salesforce Marketing Cloud Alternative

These are just our pick of the hundreds of tech options out there. You can find lots more in our tech directory.

How Do You Choose the Right Salesforce Marketing Cloud Alternative?

Before you choose, list every SFMC module you pay for today, the campaigns that drive most of your revenue and the tasks that currently need SQL, AMPscript or outside help. Then ask each vendor to show you exactly how those campaigns would run on their platform, how long migration takes, and who supports you through it. If you want enterprise-grade AI personalization across every channel, built for eCommerce and easy for marketers to run themselves, Bloomreach is built for that job. If you’re a growing brand that needs eCommerce-focused email, SMS and push with clear pricing, Omnisend is a smart switch. And if you need flexible, cross-channel journeys with a strong in-house data team, Iterable is worth a look.

If you’re looking for a deal, do check out our Deals section, as there are often email marketing and marketing automation offers in there.

Plus these blogs will offer you more advice on making the right choice:

Want to see your tech here? Get in touch.