| Functionality | 4 <p>Loops focuses on delivering email marketing essentials for startups. This includes excellent functionality for creating email series, developer-friendly APIs for sending transactional emails, and simple functionality for managing mailing lists. However, this means that compared to other marketing tools, Loops lacks a lot of functionality, e.g. running A/B tests, creating custom forms/ surveys, analytics.</p> | 8 <p>Salesforce Marketing Editions is a powerful, highly customizable marketing tool with a strong focus on CRM and customer segmentation. It’s a heavyweight platform, packed with features, but leans more toward data-driven marketing than sleek design.</p><p><br></p><p>You get the essentials – marketing automation, email marketing, and deep CRM integration – but there are some notable gaps:</p><ul><li>No modern, visually polished email templates</li><li>No built-in landing page builder</li><li>No native SMS sending (SMS requires an integration)</li></ul><p><br></p><ul><li>If you need a marketing tool that’s tightly connected to Salesforce and built for segmentation, it delivers. But if design and ease of use matter most, you might find it lacking.</li></ul> |
| Ease of Use | 8 <p>A limited set of features, combined with ample, step-by-step guidance in the platform means Loops is intuitive and easy to use. For example, compared to most other tools, it is refreshingly simple to build a email series to new users.</p><p>However, as it's been designed for startups, do note that Loops is still more technical in nature, offering features like components for designing emails and requiring knowledge of coding for transactional emails/ certain customizations (e.g. dynamic images), which may be a bit daunting for non-technical users.</p> | 3 <p>Salesforce Marketing Editions is not particularly beginner friendly - we'd recommend it to those with previous Salesforce or CRM experience, simply because its marketing automation functions also rely heavily on the same interface.</p> |
| Look and feel | 8 <p>Loops is a simple, modern, uncluttered interface that is a joy to use. Key functionality and info are extremely easy to locate, and page loads are also lightning fast.</p> | 6 <p>While relatively straightforward to navigate, the interface does not deliver delight. This is mostly due to the fact that many buttons and fields feel crowded - unless you know your way around Salesforce software already, this may be hard to wrap your head around.</p> |
| Customisability | 2 <p>Loops only offers basic customisability. For example, you can only create segments based on their properties/ engagement with your campaigns - but not based on how they interact with your website/ app, nor bring in custom events.</p><p>For client-facing assets, compared to traditional drag-and-drop email builders offered by most marketing automation platforms, Loops's Notion-like editor only allows you to make light stylistic & formatting changes to emails. You're also unable to customise signup forms to collect info besides data.</p> | 9 <p><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">Salesforce Marketing Editions offers some of the best customisation options we've seen. Specifically, it offers: </span></p><ul><li><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">Analytics customisation, allowing you to see the key details for key customer segments </span></li><li><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">Email customisation, based on customer behaviour and traits </span></li><li><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">Flow customisation, allowing you to build complex and conditional flows. </span></li></ul> |
| Ease of Setup | 8 <p>Because of its simple and intuitive interface, Loops is extremely easy to setup. Basic setup is blazingly fast (less than 10 minutes), and fully customizing should take less than 2 hours, with minimal help from customer support and self-serve help materials.</p> | 3 <p>Salesforce Marketing Editions offers a self-serve free trial, but setup takes time – expect at least 45 minutes just to get started.</p><p>Even basic tasks, like setting up automations or email campaigns, take more steps than most other marketing platforms, since there are more fields to fill out. Full customization and implementation can stretch to weeks or even months. And, just like with Salesforce CRM, you may need dedicated consultants or technical experts to handle data migration.</p> |
| Customer Support | 8 <p>Loops offer high-quality, sincere support. Within the app, you can directly email or book in 20-minute calls with Loops' Founders. Personalised live chat with Loops' developer team is also available during US business hours.</p> | 8 <p>Depending on your subscription level, different customer support channels are available.</p><p>Phone support is offered to most customers, and live chat is offered to limited segments of customers. Online support (i.e., via email) is always available.</p> |
| Integratability | 6 <p>For now, Loops only offers a slim set of core integrations required by startups e.g. Stripe, Webflow, Segment, HubSpot, Zapier. It's still missing common integrations seen in the category, e.g. with ecommerce platforms like Shopify. However, it does have a high-quality API for any custom integrations, especially with your own application.</p> | 5 <p>Salesforce Marketing Editions doesn’t quite live up to Salesforce’s reputation for integrations. While the broader platform connects well with other tools, Marketing Editions has more limitations. If you rely on multiple apps, it’s worth double-checking whether Salesforce Marketing Editions supports the integrations you need before committing.</p> |
| Ease of Migration | 6 <p>You can export your list of audience (contacts) into CSV format via self-serve. However, since Loops doesn't have a dedicated reporting module, it doesn't seem possible export campaign performance data out of Loops. Other info can be exported via Loops' API.</p> | 8 <p>Salesforce Marketing Editions offers solid export options – you can easily export contacts as CSV files, as you’d expect.</p><p>If you ever need to handle data portability requests for compliance reasons, Salesforce Marketing Editions provides a clear process for exporting all customer-related information, making it easier to stay on top of data protection requirements.</p> |
