# Salesforce Agentforce AI agents embedded within the Salesforce CRM ecosystem ## About Salesforce Agentforce Agentforce is deeply tied to the Salesforce ecosystem, requiring an existing Salesforce subscription as a prerequisite. At $125-$550/user/month on top of CRM costs, it is designed for companies already invested in Salesforce. Sistava is a standalone platform that works with any stack, costs a fraction of the price, and does not require a six-figure CRM commitment. ## Platform details - Pricing: Requires Salesforce subscription. $2/conversation or $125-$550/user/mo. Flex Credits: $500/100K. - Founded: Agentforce launched September 2024 (Salesforce founded 1999) - Funding: Publicly traded (NYSE: CRM). ~$280B market cap. - Last reviewed: 2026-03-22 ## Official website - [Visit Salesforce Agentforce](https://salesforce.com) ## What does Salesforce Agentforce actually do? Salesforce Agentforce is the AI agent layer built on top of the Salesforce platform. It runs agents that handle customer service conversations, sales prospecting, marketing tasks, and internal employee questions, with deep access to Salesforce CRM data through the Data Cloud and Atlas reasoning engine. The product is positioned as digital labor that augments human Salesforce users. Agentforce ships pre-built agents for common scenarios like Service Agent, Sales Development Agent, and Personal Shopper, plus a builder for custom agents. Each agent uses Salesforce's metadata, flows, and Apex actions, which means it inherits the security, audit, and compliance surface enterprises already trust for their CRM data. The trade-off is that Agentforce is fundamentally a Salesforce feature. The value compounds when the customer already runs Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, or Marketing Cloud as their system of record. Sistava sits in a different lane: standalone AI employees for teams that do not run Salesforce and do not want to. The two products rarely compete on the same shortlist. ## How much does Salesforce Agentforce cost? Salesforce now offers three pricing models for Agentforce and the choice matters more than the headline number. The Conversations model lists at 2 dollars per conversation, defined as any interaction within a 24-hour window. The Flex Credits model is 500 dollars for 100,000 credits, where each standard action costs 20 credits or about 10 cents. The per-user Foundations option starts at 125 dollars per user per month. Real total cost depends entirely on volume and use case. A customer service team handling 10,000 conversations per month under the Conversations model lands at 20,000 dollars per month before any Salesforce platform fees. Flex Credits and Conversations cannot be combined in the same org, so customers commit to one model and live with the consequences. Sistava prices simply by tier with no per-conversation meter and no flex credit math. For a founder who wants predictable monthly spend on AI work, the contrast is sharp. Agentforce makes sense for organizations who already pay six figures per year to Salesforce. Outside that context the model is hard to evaluate. ## When does Salesforce Agentforce beat the alternatives? Agentforce wins when the customer is a heavy Salesforce shop with mature CRM data, established flows, and a Salesforce admin team that can build agents the same way they build Lightning components. The integration with Data Cloud, the reuse of existing Apex code as agent actions, and the unified security model are real advantages that no third-party tool can replicate. It also wins for customer-facing service agents at large volume. The Conversations model is built for external customer interactions, and when the support center is already running on Service Cloud, plugging Agentforce in is a smaller change than adopting an entirely new agent platform. The agents inherit case routing, knowledge articles, and SLAs that already work. Agentforce loses outside the Salesforce footprint. For a small team without an existing Salesforce contract, the cost to adopt the underlying platform is the real bill. Sistava ships standalone, integrates with the tools small teams actually use, and does not assume a CRM exists at all. ## Where does Salesforce Agentforce fall short for small teams? Agentforce is built for enterprises and the friction shows on smaller deployments. The product assumes a Salesforce admin or developer is available to wire agents into flows, define actions, configure data permissions, and tune the topic models. A founder without Salesforce expertise faces a steep learning curve before the first agent does anything useful. Pricing is also opaque at small scale. The Conversations model can balloon quickly with chat-heavy workloads, and the Flex Credits model requires modeling how many actions each agent run consumes. Salesforce has revised the pricing structure several times since launch, which makes long-term budgeting harder for teams that need stable monthly costs. Sistava aims at the exact gap. A solo founder or five-person team can hire an AI employee in a few minutes, see what it produces, and pay a predictable subscription. There is no admin layer, no flow builder, and no CRM dependency. The agents are pre-configured for the work small teams actually need done: sales, marketing, customer support, operations. ## How does Salesforce Agentforce handle integrations? Agentforce integrations are excellent inside the Salesforce ecosystem and limited outside it. Inside, agents can call any Apex action, query any Salesforce object, and use any registered Flow as a tool. Data Cloud unifies external data sources for grounding, and MuleSoft connectors extend reach into ERP, marketing, and finance systems. For a company that has already invested in MuleSoft, that reach is significant. Outside that ecosystem, integrations require explicit MuleSoft connectors or custom Apex callouts. Connecting Agentforce to a non-Salesforce stack is possible but rarely cheap or fast. The platform expects the customer to bring data and workflows into Salesforce first, then build agents on top. Sistava takes the opposite approach. AI employees connect directly to the tools small teams already use, through a registry of integrations and browser-based actions, without assuming a central CRM. For teams running on Notion, Google Workspace, Stripe, and a handful of SaaS tools, that direct connection is faster to set up and easier to maintain. ## Comparison - [Compare Salesforce Agentforce with Sistava](/en/compare/enterprise/salesforce-agentforce) — See the two platforms side by side when you are ready to evaluate them.