We have found 57,026 companies using Salesforce as of 30 October 2026, and every one of them gave itself away in the same place: the public record that says which servers may send email for its domain. Salesforce asks customers to add its servers there so mail sent from Salesforce isn’t flagged as fake. Looking at who these companies are, two things stood out. They are mostly Microsoft businesses, three to one over Google. And about one in eight also lets HubSpot send their email, as many as use Salesforce’s own Pardot.
- Salesforce’s annual report gives no customer total; its marketing pages say “over 150,000 companies”, without saying how or when they were counted. Our 57,026 are the domains whose email record names Salesforce.
- 69% of these companies’ email records also name Microsoft 365, and 23% name Google. Among HubSpot’s email-record customers the split is closer to 3 to 2, and among Zendesk’s it is nearly even.
- HubSpot appears in the same record on 12.1% of Salesforce customers. Pardot, Salesforce’s own marketing tool, appears on 12.6%.
- Two thirds of the domains with Pardot’s email record don’t carry Salesforce’s. Pardot is turned on from inside Salesforce, so most of those are very likely Salesforce customers this list misses.
- One shared record can cover hundreds of domains: 500 financial-adviser websites use the same one. And 13% of the list hasn’t been re-checked in more than 90 days.
How many companies use Salesforce?
We count 57,026 companies (our weekly count; the dated figures below were read on 29 October). Salesforce’s annual report for the year to 31 January 2026 gives no total: it says only that “the number of paying subscriptions at each of our customers ranges from one to hundreds of thousands”. Its CRM marketing page does give one: “Over 150,000 companies, across every industry, are growing their business with Salesforce.” It doesn’t say what counts as a company or when the figure was taken; the only sources on that page are IDC market-share reports from 2020 and 2021.
Set against that claim, our coverage looks like this: about 57,000 domains with Salesforce’s own email record, plus about 13,000 more that very likely use Salesforce through Pardot (below), so roughly 70,000, a little under half of 150,000. The units differ, since one company can own several domains, so treat that as a rough reading. Ours measures something narrower than “Salesforce customers”: companies that have set Salesforce up to send email as themselves.
Unlike most of our lists, this one rests on a single kind of evidence: the line include:_spf.salesforce.com in the domain’s SPF record. The CRM itself lives behind a login. What varies is how recently we confirmed the line.
| Last confirmed | Share of the list | Rows |
|---|---|---|
| Within the last 30 days | 63.5% | 36,411 rows |
| 31 to 90 days ago | 23.4% | 13,396 rows |
| More than 90 days ago (mostly April or May) | 13.1% | 7,512 rows; overdue for a re-check |
The bottom row matters. We aim to re-check every email record monthly, and 7,512 domains, 13%, are overdue: most were last checked in April or May. Most will still have the record; some won’t. They stay in the total for now, but none of them is in the opening rows of the list below.
What we leave out
- Pardot’s email record on its own. Pardot, now sold as Account Engagement, has its own record and its own list. This is the list’s biggest gap (more below).
- Marketing Cloud’s record. Salesforce’s email marketing product can be used without the CRM. It has its own list.
- Salesforce code on websites. Commerce Cloud shops, Service Cloud chat widgets and similar each have a list of their own and don’t add to this count.
- An old page signature. 16 rows came from a page check we haven’t matched since April. They are still in the total (16 in more than 57,000), but left out of every figure here.
What Salesforce’s email record proves
An SPF record is a public list of the servers allowed to send mail for a domain. Mail from anywhere else is more likely to land in spam or be rejected. Salesforce’s own help article on SPF names _spf.salesforce.com as “the appropriate entry to include in your SPF record when sending mail from the Salesforce application”. So a company with that line has a Salesforce account that emails people in the company’s name: a rep’s follow-up, a case reply, a notification.
That is strong evidence: nobody adds it by accident, and it takes someone with access to the company’s DNS. It doesn’t say which Salesforce products a company pays for, how many people log in, or whether the account is still live, since a record can outlast the contract. A company that never sends email from Salesforce as its own domain leaves no trace here.
The Pardot gap
The clearest sign of what we miss comes from Pardot. Salesforce’s training site says that “only a Salesforce admin from within the Salesforce platform can install and enable Account Engagement” (Trailhead). So a company sending through Pardot is, almost always, a Salesforce customer. Yet of the 20,474 domains whose email record names Pardot, only 7,231, about 35%, also name Salesforce. The other 13,243 are very likely Salesforce customers this list doesn’t count. Older Pardot accounts could be linked to other CRMs, so I’d call it a strong hint rather than proof, but the direction is plain: the true number is higher than ours.
| Product | Companies | How we find it |
|---|---|---|
| Pardot (Account Engagement) | 20,405 | Pardot in the email record |
| Marketing Cloud | 4,423 | Marketing Cloud (ExactTarget) in the email record |
| Commerce Cloud | 2,711 | Page code on the shop |
| Interaction Studio | 2,572 | Page code |
| Service Cloud | 559 | Page code, such as a chat or help widget |
Salesforce customers run on Microsoft
The same SPF record that names Salesforce usually names the company’s everyday email too. On this list, 69% name Microsoft 365 and 23% name Google Workspace. That three-to-one lean surprised me, so I read the same records for other lists to see whether every list looks like this.
| Record names | Domains read | Microsoft 365 | Google Workspace |
|---|---|---|---|
| Salesforce | 57,212 (whole list) | 69.3% | 23.3% |
| Pardot | 20,474 (whole list) | 66.2% | 21.3% |
| Marketo | 10,698 (whole list) | 52.1% | 17.4% |
| HubSpot | 8,393 (1 in 16) | 51.9% | 35.4% |
| Zendesk | 16,626 (1 in 4) | 41.6% | 38.4% |
It isn’t. HubSpot’s email-record customers lean to Microsoft by about 3 to 2, and Zendesk’s split almost evenly. Marketo’s customers, though, show the same three to one as Salesforce’s, and Marketo is a separate company’s product. (Pardot shows it too, but Pardot is Salesforce’s own and a third of its domains are on this list, so it proves little.) So the lean seems to belong to buyers of this kind of sales and marketing software rather than to Salesforce alone. My guess is that many of them have an IT department that standardised on Microsoft years ago.
If you sell anything that plugs into Outlook or Teams, that is the useful part: four in five of the Salesforce customers in our sample show Microsoft 365 somewhere in their DNS: the email record, the mail servers or a verification record.
As many HubSpot records as Pardot ones
Salesforce sells its own marketing tools, so I expected Pardot and Marketing Cloud to dominate among its customers. They don’t. HubSpot’s include sits in the same email record about as often as Pardot’s does.
| Tool | In the same SPF record | Found by any evidence |
|---|---|---|
| Pardot | 12.6% | 12.2% |
| HubSpot | 12.1% | 13.9% |
| Salesforce Marketing Cloud | 3.4% | 3.4% |
| Marketo | 2.9% | 2.8% |
About one in eight run each. Marketo and Marketing Cloud are far behind, at about one in thirty each. Of the HubSpot users in the sample, about half show HubSpot’s code on their website and the rest only its email record, so this is more than a forgotten line in DNS. A common setup, as far as I can tell, is HubSpot for marketing email and forms, with leads passed to Salesforce, where the sales team works; we can see both tools on a domain but not how they connect. Looked at from HubSpot’s side, the overlap is small: about 5% of the domains with HubSpot’s email record carry Salesforce’s too. For the wider HubSpot picture, see our list of companies using HubSpot.
One email record, hundreds of domains
Most Salesforce SPF records are short and ordinary: Microsoft or Google, then Salesforce, and that is it. Thousands of companies end up with identical text that way, independently. But 74 records are specific to one organisation, with its own server addresses or private includes, and are shared word for word by ten or more domains each. Together they cover 2,089 domains, 3.7% of the list.
- 500 financial advisers and insurance practices share one record, down to the same server range and the same email-security service.
- 298 Austrian car dealerships share a record that also names Porsche Austria’s mail servers.
- 60 Danish Volkswagen and Audi dealers, and 58 US behavioural-health hospitals, each share one.
My reading is that a parent company, a dealer group or an adviser network runs one Salesforce account and sends email on behalf of each local brand. Each domain really does carry the record, so they stay on the list. But if you sell to organisations rather than websites, the Austrian dealers may be one conversation, not 298.
How well known are Salesforce customers?
Every company here was found through its email record, so the fair comparison is with other tools found the same way. For each, I took the share of its email-record customers that sit in the top 100,000 of Tranco’s ranking of busy websites.
| Customers found by the record of | Companies | Any Tranco rank | In the top 100,000 | Share in the top 100,000 |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Marketo | 10,717 | 26.6% | 894 | 8.3% |
| Salesforce Marketing Cloud | 4,444 | 30.5% | 335 | 7.5% |
| Zendesk | 63,862 | 32.7% | 4,569 | 7.2% |
| Salesforce | 57,320 | 24.9% | 3,289 | 5.7% |
| Pardot | 20,529 | 21.4% | 793 | 3.9% |
| Freshsales | 968 | 18.8% | 31 | 3.2% |
| HubSpot | 16,717 | 13.6% | 344 | 2.1% |
Salesforce sits in the middle. Its customers are nearly three times as likely as HubSpot’s email-record customers to be in the top 100,000 (5.7% against 2.1%), and clearly ahead of Pardot’s. But Marketo’s and Marketing Cloud’s customers are better known still, and so are Zendesk’s. I can’t explain the gap to Marketo from our data. It isn’t the shared records: leaving out all 2,089 of those domains only lifts Salesforce’s share to about 6%. In absolute terms, 407 Salesforce customers are in the top 10,000 and 60 in the top 1,000; both counts include salesforce.com itself.
What kind of company runs Salesforce?
Companies that sell through people. Of those whose website tells us how they sell, 78% rely on a sales team, against 43% of companies generally, and two thirds make “contact us” their main button. “Book a demo” as the main button is about ten times as common as usual. Shops and consumer brands are under-represented.
| Salesforce customers | All companies | |
|---|---|---|
| Sells mainly through a sales team | 77.6% | 43.3% |
| Main button is “contact us” | 66.4% | 45.6% |
| Sells only to businesses | 40.5% | 15.7% |
| Sells software by subscription | 30.0% | 8.3% |
| Main button is “buy” | 21.2% | 39.0% |
| Runs an online shop | 18.6% | 30.4% |
| Main button is “book a demo” | 7.2% | 0.7% |
| Main button is “start a trial” | 5.2% | 14.7% |
Their websites point the same way, though the comparison needs care: we could read 91.2% of these websites, against 70.2% across our database. Counting only websites we could read, 21.5% of Salesforce customers have a careers page against 4.1% of companies generally, about five times as often, and 7.8% publish case studies against 0.8%. Free trials go the other way: 4.9% against 12.2%. These are companies that hire and that sell with proof, which fits a CRM built around a sales team.
Which industries use Salesforce the most?
By count, professional services, retail, healthcare and finance are each about one in seven of the Salesforce customers we can place. The standout is finance. Banks, insurers, lenders and advisers make up 13% of the customers we can place in an industry, against 4% of companies generally, about three times the usual rate, and the adviser network above accounts for only a small part of that (35 of the 780 finance companies in the sample). Operations and logistics companies are three times as common too. In both, I suspect, a sale is a long relationship worth tracking: a policy, a loan, a freight contract.
| Industry | Salesforce customers | All companies | Compared with all companies |
|---|---|---|---|
| Professional services | 15.3% | 18.8% | 20% less likely |
| Ecommerce and retail | 13.5% | 19.9% | 30% less likely |
| Healthcare and life sciences | 13.4% | 12.8% | about average |
| Financial services and fintech | 13.1% | 4.4% | 3.0x |
| Education | 7.3% | 5.5% | 1.3x |
| Operations and logistics | 6.3% | 2.1% | 3x |
| Software and SaaS | 6.1% | 2.8% | 2.2x |
| Hospitality and travel | 6.1% | 12.4% | 50% less likely |
| Media and content | 4.3% | 12.0% | 60% less likely |
| Marketing and sales tech | 4.0% | 4.1% | about average |
| Developer tools and infrastructure | 3.1% | 1.6% | 1.9x |
| Cybersecurity | 2.5% | 0.5% | 5x |
| HR and people tech | 2.1% | 0.4% | 5x |
HR tech and cybersecurity are the most over-represented of all, about five times their usual share, though each rests on fewer than 150 companies. At the other end, media companies are 60% less likely than average to be here, and hotels and travel firms half as likely.
What else do Salesforce customers use?
Beyond Microsoft and the marketing tools above, one in five has verified its domain with Atlassian, the maker of Jira, and about one in twelve with DocuSign. Sending services are common: SendGrid on about one in eight, Amazon SES and Mailchimp on about one in nine each. I’m not putting a multiple on these. Every company on this list has an email record naming a sending service, and most companies in our database don’t, so anything we find in DNS looks more common here by construction. Wix and Squarespace, which we see in website code, go the other way: 2.0% and 1.6% here, against 8.2% and 4.9% across our database.
| Software | Share of Salesforce customers | Where we usually find it |
|---|---|---|
M  | 80.4% | Mail servers, email or verification record |
W  | 41.8% | Website code |
G  | 25.5% | Mail servers or email record |
A  | 19.4% | Verification record |
H  | 13.9% | Website code or email record, about half each |
S  | 12.6% | Email record |
P  | 12.2% | Email record |
A  | 11.1% | Email record |
M  | 10.6% | Email record |
D  | 8.4% | Verification record |
M  | 7.6% | Mail servers or email record |
Z  | 6.8% | Email record |
S  | 3.0% | Verification record or website code |
W  | 2.0% | Website code |
S  | 1.6% | Website code |
Zendesk is on about one in fifteen, almost always through its own email record, which usually means Zendesk sends their support replies. More on each in our list of companies that have verified a domain with Atlassian and our list of companies using Zendesk.
Where are Salesforce customers based?
We can place about one in five in a country. Of those, 46% are in the United States, against about 32% in a comparison set of 386 companies with a known country drawn from across our database, so Salesforce’s list leans American. The UK (8.3%) and Germany (7.6%) come next, each below its share of that comparison set (13.0% and 11.9%), though 386 companies is too few to read country by country. Japan, at 2%, is the only Asian country in the top ten.
| Country | Share of companies with a known country |
|---|---|
| United States | 45.8% |
| United Kingdom | 8.3% |
| Germany | 7.6% |
| Australia | 4.7% |
| France | 4.5% |
| Canada | 4.3% |
| Netherlands | 4.0% |
| Spain | 2.1% |
| Japan | 2.0% |
| Belgium | 2.0% |
How does Salesforce compare with other CRMs?
Among the CRMs we can detect, Salesforce ranks #2 by company websites. HubSpot’s bar is far longer, but not like for like. HubSpot puts tracking code and forms on websites, which we see on the page, while Salesforce’s CRM almost never shows there. Counting only the email record, HubSpot’s include is in about 134,000 SPF records by our sample, roughly 2.3 times Salesforce’s.
The other CRMs are hard to see from outside too. I suspect most of their users send mail from their own inbox and never add an email record, so read the bars as visibility, not market share.
How many companies start using Salesforce each week?
Very few that we can see so far: 0 since 6 October 2026. A company counts when Salesforce’s include appears on a domain where an earlier check had not found it; some are sites we could only read properly for the first time. We start on 6 October because a full re-scan at the end of September made thousands of long-standing records look new for a day.
Please don’t take the small number as a sign of Salesforce’s sales. It mostly reflects our timing. We aim to re-check each domain’s email record monthly, and 13% are overdue. More than two in five rows on this list were last checked at the end of September, so the next round of checks should bring the next batch. A company also has to set up email sending before it shows up, which may come some time after it signs up.
Putting the list to work
- Salesforce partners and admins for hire. Every company here has a Salesforce account that sends email as itself. Finance and logistics firms are about three times as common as usual, so those filters are a good start.
- Tools that connect Outlook or Teams to Salesforce. 69% name Microsoft 365 in the same SPF record as Salesforce.
- HubSpot and Salesforce sync or clean-up services. 12.1% carry HubSpot’s include next to Salesforce’s.
- Software for dealer groups and adviser networks. The shared records show networks running one Salesforce setup across hundreds of local domains.
With Pro you get the full list with filters for industry, country, audience and business model, and a weekly email of new Salesforce customers. Downloads run to 100,000 records a month on Pro and 1,000,000 on Business. Start with the 7-day trial, which needs no card and lets you download 1,000 records.
Claude Code users can connect our MCP server and ask the list questions in plain English:
claude mcp add --transport http agentdata https://mcp.useagentdata.com/mcpYou sign in to your AgentData account the first time it connects. Try asking for the UK financial services companies on the Salesforce list.
Where these numbers come from
We read company homepages, a few other public pages and public DNS records, including each domain’s SPF record. A company is counted when its own domain’s SPF record contains include:_spf.salesforce.com, shown in the list as “SPF record”. We also hold 16 rows from an older page signature, last matched in April 2026; they are still in the total, but left out of every figure here. We match the include exactly as written in the domain’s own record and don’t follow other includes, so a hosting company that sends through Salesforce can’t pull its own clients onto the list. Many first-seen dates on the list fall in October 2026 because of a full re-crawl; they tell you when we rebuilt the row more often than when the company started with Salesforce.
Whole-list figures, read on 29 October 2026: freshness, the Pardot overlap, everything named in the same SPF record, the shared records and the Tranco comparison. Company profiles come from one Salesforce domain in four, and other software from one in eight, chosen by hashing the domain name. Two cautions are particular to this list. Every company on it has an SPF record, so tools we find in DNS look more common here than across our database; that is why the Microsoft, marketing and Tranco comparisons are made against other email-record lists. And a domain is not always a company: the shared records mean some organisations appear many times. The total and the CRM chart are refreshed weekly; new customers appear as we find them. Salesforce’s own words come from its annual report, its CRM marketing page, its help pages and its training site; website ranks come from Tranco.