Wouldn't you know it. No sooner do I finish our series on Professional vs Enterprise Edition, and Salesforce goes and makes changes to the its licensing tiers. Oh well. Such is the nature of technology.
Most of the changes are geared towards making Professional a much more more alluring option for those budget conscientious consumers.
However, nothing in life is free. With these changes come changes in the pricing structure.
Professional $75/Seat (Formerly $65)
Enterprise $150/Seat (Formerly $125)
Ultimate $300/Seat (Formerly $250)
Performance (Retired. No longer offered to New Clients)
With the new features (see images below), and the new pricing, comes new branding. Professional is now Lightning Professional Edition, Enterprise is now Lightning Enterprise Edition, etc. But don't let the name fool you. These changes apply regardless if you're still using Salesforce Classic or the new Lightning Experience.
As you can see from the images below the new licensing structure puts Service Cloud Seats at the same price as the Sales Cloud Seats.
From our perspective this change essentially drops off Performance and shifts everything. Lightning Professional becomes more like the old Enterprise, Lightning Enterprise becomes more like the old Ultimate, and Lightning Ultimate becomes like the old Performance edition. But it's not a 100% shift. There are some limitations. For instance, in the new professional edition you can only create 3 record types per object and you can only create two custom profiles per license type. Still, that just might be enough for those that need a bit more flexibility than the old professional edition provided but still not the whole kit and caboodle that Enterprise has to offer.
For new customers this licensing structure starts May 1, 2016. For existing Salesforce customers your existing licenses will be converted over to the new licensing structure at the same time and you will gain all the new features and functionality from the new structure. The price change shouldn't impact existing agreements but will when your contract comes up for renewal.
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