Marketing Cloud Growth vs Advanced Edition: Which is Best?

Both Marketing Cloud Growth and Advanced Editions help you manage campaigns, track results, and connect with your customers. In this article, we’ll break down how they compare so you can make the right choice for your business.

Leveraging Salesforce’s ‘on-core’ structure

We’ll start by acknowledging both Marketing Cloud Growth and Advanced Editions are built natively on Salesforce’s core platform, known as Einstein 1. This native integration ensures seamless connectivity with other Salesforce tools and third-party systems, streamlining your marketing operations. 

Unlike earlier platforms like Marketing Cloud Engagement and Marketing Cloud Account Engagement, which were integrated into Salesforce over time, Growth and Advanced Editions have been developed from the ground up within the Salesforce ecosystem. This design enhances data consistency, real-time insights, and operational efficiency, making your marketing efforts more cohesive and easier to manage.

In short, you’re off to a great start with either option!

What is Salesforce Marketing Cloud Growth Edition?

Salesforce Marketing Cloud Growth Edition is designed for growing businesses that want to streamline their marketing efforts with the essentials.

• Campaign management: With Growth Edition, you get tools to manage multi-channel campaigns, making it easy to handle email, social media, and web marketing from one place.

• Communication channels: Growth supports key channels like email, social, SMS, and web, so you can reach customers where they spend their time.

• Data analytics: It includes basic analytics to help you monitor engagement, see what’s working, and make adjustments.

• Content creation and management: Growth offers tools for creating emails, social media posts, and web content, so you can quickly create professional campaigns.

• AI functionality: Leveraging Data Cloud, Growth has Einstein AI capabilities such as dynamic segment creation, and smart insights into customer engagement. 

In short, Growth Edition is great for companies needing a strong foundation in marketing automation. It has all the essentials and works seamlessly with Salesforce’s CRM, making it easy to keep your customer data connected.

What is Salesforce Marketing Cloud Advanced Edition?

Salesforce Marketing Cloud Advanced Edition is packed with powerful features for larger businesses that need more depth and customisation.

• AI-powered tools: Advanced Edition includes even more advanced Einstein features, helping to predict customer behaviour and personalise their experience automatically.

• Campaign management: It provides more flexibility to build complex, multi-channel journeys with custom paths (including experimentation!) and real-time adjustments.

• Communication channels: Advanced offers cross-channel campaigns, including two-way SMS, push notifications, and advertising, in one seamless workflow.

• Data analytics: Advanced Edition gives you more data tools, including predictive insights, and the ability to unify and leverage data across platforms.

• Content creation and management: Advanced makes it easy to test and improve your content. You can run A/B tests and build complex multi-step journeys.

• Enhanced reporting: With multi-channel analytics, Advanced enables you to track customers in a unified view, for a better understanding of engagement and conversions.

If your marketing is more complex or if your business has high growth targets, Advanced Edition is likely the best choice. It offers the deep customisation and intelligence that enterprises need to make a real impact.

Account Engagement Growth customers can leverage Growth Edition features directly in their account, while Account Engagement Plus, Advanced, and Premium have access to Advanced features.

Key feature comparison: Marketing Cloud Growth vs Advanced

Here’s a quick comparison of how Growth and Advanced Edition stack up:

This table shows a summary of the main features of each edition, highlighting where Advanced goes further to support more complex needs. For a more granular breakdown of Growth vs Advanced Edition along with pricing, head to the Salesforce website.

AI capabilities in Marketing Cloud Advanced Edition

Both Growth and Advanced editions also come with Agentforce campaigns, an agent to help brief, build, and draft emails using generative AI prompts. However, if you’re after a personalised, data-backed approach that keeps pace with customer behaviour, Advanced Edition’s AI tools will make a real difference.

• Predictive analytics: AI tools look at past customer actions to predict what they’ll do next. This helps you personalise their experience and keep them engaged.

• Journey automation: AI makes it easy to set up journeys that automatically adapt based on what your customers do, ensuring each interaction is relevant.

• Enhanced personalisation: Whether it’s product recommendations or tailored messages, AI helps deliver the right message to the right person at the right time.

Campaign management capabilities

Both Growth and Advanced Editions help you manage campaigns, but Advanced offers more control.

• Growth Edition is straightforward, with tools for handling core channels like email, social, SMS, and web. It’s a solid choice for businesses needing simple, effective workflows to reach customers on multiple channels.

• Advanced Edition goes further by letting you design complex, multi-step customer journeys. With features like real-time adjustments and custom triggers, Advanced can support large campaigns tailored to specific behaviours and goals. What’s more, Advanced features path experimentation, meaning you can A/B/C test journeys!

If you need flexibility to create detailed, customised campaigns, Advanced Edition is the clear choice.

Communication channels supported

A key difference between Growth and Advanced is the number of communication channels each edition supports.

• Growth Edition supports core channels - email, social, SMS, and web - giving you the basics to connect with customers where they’re active.

• Advanced Edition adds more options, including two-way SMS, mobile notifications, and IoT, for a truly omnichannel strategy that ensures you reach customers wherever they are. In 2025, we’re expecting to see direct messaging apps, such as WhatsApp.

For a brand looking to be present across all major channels, Advanced Edition offers the reach you need.

Consent and privacy management

Both editions include privacy tools, but Advanced has more features to manage data privacy.

• Growth Edition includes basic consent and privacy tools to keep your marketing compliant with laws like GDPR.

• Advanced Edition offers enhanced privacy controls, letting you manage data permissions more closely and ensure customer information is handled correctly.

Being on Salesforce’s core platform, both Growth and Advanced benefit from Salesforce Data Privacy Centre capabilities, supporting compliance with major regulations.

Content creation and management

Content is the backbone of your campaigns, and both editions offer tools to create and manage it, though Advanced goes deeper.

• Growth Edition covers the essentials, with branded email and social templates to help you launch polished campaigns.

• Advanced Edition offers predictive insights for A/B testing, so you can test different content versions and learn what works best with your audience. This feature is invaluable for refining your messaging and optimising performance.

For teams that want to improve messaging with data-backed insights, Advanced’s content tools offer a valuable edge.

Data analytics: Insights and predictive capabilities

Both editions include data analytics, but Advanced offers predictive analytics for even more insights.

• Growth Edition allows you to track engagement and measure campaign performance, helping you understand what your audience wants.

• Advanced Edition goes further, with real-time insights, predictive modelling, and Data Cloud integration that gives you a 360-degree view of your customers. These tools help you make smarter, data-driven decisions.

Lead scoring

Having the ability to score and surface prospects who are most interested in your business is a must-have for any premium automation tool. Here's how Growth and Advanced differ:

• Growth Edition includes 'People Scoring', which is standard lead scoring that helps identify your most engaged prospects so these can be prioritised for conversion.

• Advanced Edition goes a step further with Predictive Scoring, which taps into AI to understand which prospects are most likely to convert.

For enterprise businesses, predictive scoring eliminates any manual modelling or guesswork, allowing you to increase conversion rates for marketing-qualified leads. It's far superior to standard lead scoring.

Which Edition is right for your business?

Choosing between Growth and Advanced Editions depends on your goals and how complex your marketing needs are.

• Growth Edition is perfect for small to mid-sized businesses that want an easy, efficient way to manage their marketing campaigns.

• Advanced Edition is best for large brands or fast-growing companies that need advanced tools, deep insights, and flexibility to build tailored customer journeys.

Whether you’re just starting or ready to scale up your marketing with Salesforce, choosing the right edition is just the beginning. Implementing a platform as powerful as Marketing Cloud can feel overwhelming, especially when resources are stretched and you need to see ROI as soon as possible. 

At MarCloud, our team of Salesforce experts can support you in every step, from setup to best-practice strategies, so you can start getting results faster. Contact us today to learn how we can help your team hit the ground running and make the most of your Marketing Cloud investment.