Blog / Marketing Cloud Next

January 1, 2025 · 3 min read

Marketing Cloud Next: Overview

Marketing Cloud Next (sold as Marketing Cloud Growth and Marketing Cloud Advanced) is Salesforce’s rebuilt marketing platform, running natively on the Salesforce Platform (core CRM infrastructure) rather than the legacy Marketing Cloud Engagement stack. It represents a significant architectural shift — not a feature update, but a different product that happens to do similar jobs.

Why a new stack

Classic Marketing Cloud Engagement was built on infrastructure Salesforce acquired when it bought ExactTarget in 2013. That stack has accumulated over a decade of features, but it sits largely isolated from the Salesforce Platform, requiring connectors and synchronized data extensions to talk to Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, or Data Cloud.

Marketing Cloud Next is built directly on core Salesforce infrastructure. That means native access to CRM data, Flows, Data Cloud, and Einstein — no connector required. The trade-off is that it currently covers a narrower feature set than the full Engagement product.

Growth vs Advanced

Both editions are priced per month rather than the annual per-contact model of classic MC:

  • Marketing Cloud Growth — entry point for the new stack, includes email and SMS sends, basic automation, Einstein features, and a bundled Data Cloud license. Priced at around $1,500/month.
  • Marketing Cloud Advanced — adds higher send volumes, more advanced segmentation and reporting capabilities, and more Data Cloud consumption credits. Priced at around $3,250/month.

Both include Data Cloud as part of the bundle, which makes the per-month pricing more comparable to classic MC + Data Cloud than it first appears.

What’s different from classic Marketing Cloud

If you’re coming from Marketing Cloud Engagement, the biggest differences are:

  • No AMPscript — dynamic content is handled via Flow and merge fields, not AMPscript or SSJS
  • No Journey Builder (yet) — automation is Salesforce Flow-based, which is more powerful for CRM use cases but lacks some of Journey Builder’s channel-specific logic
  • Data Cloud is the data layer — instead of data extensions, you work with Data Model Objects and Data Cloud segments
  • Built-in CRM context — contacts live in the same org as Sales/Service Cloud, so personalization based on CRM attributes is straightforward

Who it’s for

Marketing Cloud Next makes most sense for organizations that are already Salesforce-centric — using Sales Cloud or Service Cloud — and want tighter marketing integration without managing a separate platform. It’s less suited for high-complexity email programs that rely heavily on AMPscript templating or Journey Builder’s advanced branching.

Articles in this section