Engine9

Developer:

Salesforce

Plugin Features

About

Salesforce is one of the largest and most widely-used CRMs in any sector. It is a complex but powerful platform with a variety of custom installations - called deployments - for a variety of specialized uses, such as for nonprofits. It has a vast ecosystem of plugins, customizations, and consultants available, making it a highly-customizable platform for marketing operations.

Use this plugin to:

Users can import nearly any type or volume of data from Salesforce into Engine9, including custom fields and custom objects. This includes messaging data from specialized Salesforce modules such as Pardot and Marketing Cloud.

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Users can build targeting lists in Engine9 for use in Salesforce.

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Users can use Engine9 lifetime value and message attribution models to analyze long-term ROI calculations and source-code-based revenue attribution.

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Shared Data

What data is shared between this plugin & engine9

Any type of data that represents an outbound communication, such as an email, text message, or digital ad.

Any type of data that represents a person, including about their origin, interaction, membership in segments, and donation history.

Any type of data that represents a donation or monetary gift. Common fields imported from ActBlue include: amount, timestamp, source code, referring page, recurring status, donor ID, refunds, and tandem amounts.

How to integrate this plugin:

Set up an API connection between Engine9 and Salesforce.
Engine9 will import data from Salesforce at regular intervals.

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What we love and don't love so much

Why we value this plugin and things that are not so great.

Pros

Data access - getting data out of Salesforce is standardized, easy, and scalable. Almost all accounts have bulk API access, and high enough limits.
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Standards – lots of people use Salesforce, it’s the 21st century version of 20th century IBM’s “No one got fired for picking IBM”
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Cons

‍Cost at scale - for a few tens of thousands of contacts, pricing is fairly good. Once you get into millions, with custom objects and lots of custom transactional data, the price leaps up. It’s not unusual to see a $1M+ implementation of Salesforce – but their marketing has people convinced it costs that much to do things “right”, which is just not true in 2025

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Nonstandard customizations - while core contact data is really good, it quickly drops off to custom implementations of fields and objects, typically done by a high priced Salesforce consultant that left years before, leaving a huge amount of code debt that organizations feel beholden to.
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Really weak integrations with other Salesforce owned companies, such as Salesforce Marketing Cloud - one might expect it to be trivial to just send an email to a list of contacts – but the weakness of SFMC combined with the confusing integration makes it non-trivial.
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Really dodgy implementations of plugins from their marketplace - the flexibility of Salesforce provides enough rope for people to hang themselves with, and they do so with wild abandon. From extremely complex custom rules and objects, to just old Apex code, marketplace apps

Pros

Cons

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