If you've shopped Salesforce-native texting, you've almost certainly hit 360 SMS App on the AppExchange. It's a mature product with a real footprint inside Salesforce orgs. But a lot of teams I talk to end up there for one reason — "it lives inside Salesforce" — and then quietly resent the math once every rep who needs to text has to be a licensed user.
Full disclosure: I work for ReadySMS, so I'm not a neutral referee. I'll be specific about where 360 SMS App is genuinely the better pick, and where it isn't. I won't quote their pricing, because their packaging changes and you should confirm current numbers on their site or the AppExchange listing. What I can do is lay out the structural differences, because those don't change much.
Where 360 SMS App is genuinely strong
Let me start here, because if you're deep in Salesforce, this matters more than anything I'm about to say.
- It's truly native to Salesforce. Messages, opt-outs, and conversation history live on standard and custom objects. No middleware, no sync lag, no "which system is the source of truth" arguments.
- It rides your existing Salesforce automation. Flows, Process Builder, Apex triggers — if your team already orchestrates everything through Salesforce, 360 SMS slots into that without you rebuilding logic somewhere else.
- Admins who live in Salesforce already know the model. Permissions, page layouts, reporting — it all behaves like a Salesforce app, because it is one.
If your entire revenue motion runs on Salesforce, your data team guards that object model like a vault, and texting is one feature among many you want inside the CRM — 360 SMS App is a defensible choice. Don't let me talk you out of a clean architecture.
The friction shows up somewhere else: cost structure.
The seat tax problem
Salesforce-native SMS apps tend to inherit Salesforce's pricing philosophy: pay per user, per month, often on top of the Salesforce license that user already costs you. That's fine when ten managed reps text from inside the CRM. It gets expensive fast when texting is a high-volume, many-hands activity — front desk, dispatchers, a seasonal outbound team, a support queue.
The structural issue isn't the per-seat number itself. It's that per-seat pricing decouples your bill from the thing that actually costs money — sending messages. You can pay for a full month of seats and send almost nothing, or send a ton and feel like you're getting a deal, and the bill barely moves either way. For a lot of texting workloads, that's the wrong meter.
ReadySMS meters the thing you're buying: outbound segments. No per-seat tax on the messaging itself. You add the people who need to send, and you pay for the messages they send.
What a segment actually costs
Here's the part where I show real numbers, because "cheaper" with no math is marketing noise.
ReadySMS charges per outbound segment plus a flat $0.0045/segment carrier pass-through, billed separately and not marked up:
| Tier | Volume / month | Per segment | + carrier | All-in |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Starter | 0–50,000 | $0.0155 | $0.0045 | $0.0200 |
| Growth | 50,000–500,000 | $0.0125 | $0.0045 | $0.0170 |
| Enterprise | 500,000+ | $0.0028 | $0.0045 | $0.0073 |
So registered SMS lands around two cents all-in at Starter volume and drops from there. A worked example:
A 175-character promo with one emoji is 3 unicode segments (emoji drops the limit to 70 chars/segment). A 5,000-contact blast on the Starter tier:
5,000 × 3 × ($0.0155 + $0.0045) = $300.
Drop the emoji and tighten the copy to 160 GSM-7 characters and it's one segment: 5,000 × 1 × $0.0200 = $100 for the same audience. That's the kind of decision you can make line-by-line when your bill is metered on messages, not seats. (More on that in reducing SMS costs.)
10DLC, done for you
If you're sending application-to-person SMS to US numbers, you need A2P 10DLC registration — brand and campaign — or carriers filter your traffic. This is true on any platform, Salesforce-native or not. The difference is who does the work.
ReadySMS handles the whole thing in-app: brand registration (~$10/mo carrier fee), campaign registration (~$20/mo carrier fee), approval typically in 4–7 business days. You don't file with a registry yourself or assemble the paperwork. If you've never touched this, the 10DLC explainer walks through why it exists.
On top of registration, the compliance stack is built in rather than bolted on:
- Automatic STOP/opt-out handling that propagates across campaigns, so an opt-out sticks everywhere — not just in one list.
- Quiet-hours enforcement based on the recipient's local time, which trims TCPA exposure.
- Litigator and DNC scrubbing before send, with a standalone scrub at $0.005/contact against known TCPA-litigator and DNC-complainer lists.
- Consent attestation capture for bulk and API sends, building an audit trail.
None of this makes you lawsuit-proof — compliance is ultimately the sender's responsibility — but at $500–$1,500 of statutory exposure per offending text, screening for half a cent a contact is cheap insurance.
The GoHighLevel angle (and who this isn't for)
Here's an honest fork in the road.
ReadySMS's deepest integration is with GoHighLevel, not Salesforce. It connects via OAuth with two-way message sync mapped per location/sub-account, which is why agencies use it to keep client texting isolated. If you're a GHL agency or you've been weighing whether to standardize on GHL instead of Salesforce for client work, that native integration is the real draw — see the GHL SMS setup guide.
So let me be straight: if your messaging logic absolutely must execute inside Salesforce Flows on Salesforce objects, ReadySMS is not a drop-in replacement for 360 SMS App. We don't pretend to be a native Salesforce app.
Where ReadySMS fits Salesforce-shaped buyers is when one of these is true:
- Texting is high-volume and many-handed, and per-seat licensing has gotten silly relative to message volume.
- You want a clean two-way inbox plus bulk campaigns without re-architecting Salesforce automation around an SMS vendor.
- You're already drifting toward GHL for parts of your stack and want one messaging layer across it.
- You need outbound voice too — and you'd rather not buy a second tool.
That last one is worth its own section.
SMS and a power dialer in one place
360 SMS App is, by design, an SMS app. If your team also dials, you're buying voice separately. ReadySMS includes an outbound Power Dialer, which matters for any team running speed-to-lead.
| Plan | Price | Agents | Minutes | Per-min after |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Free | $0/mo | 1 | 500 included | $0.06 |
| Pro | $29/agent/mo | up to 3 | — | $0.05 |
| Team | $69/agent/mo | unlimited | — | $0.0375 |
The Team plan adds speed-to-lead auto-dial on new leads, lead routing, and manager monitoring (transfer/barge/whisper), plus voicemail drop and auto-text across plans. Minutes bill in 6-second increments.
The combination that actually moves numbers: a new lead comes in, fires an instant SMS, and triggers an auto-dial inside the first five minutes — the window where contact rates are dramatically higher than an hour later. Doing that across two disconnected vendors is where speed-to-lead promises quietly die. (If voice is your priority, the PhoneBurner and Aircall comparisons go deeper on dialer-first setups.)
How to actually decide
Skip the feature checklist and answer three questions:
- Does your texting logic have to run inside Salesforce objects and Flows? If yes, stay native — 360 SMS App earns its place. If it just needs to reach Salesforce data, a two-way inbox plus exports may be plenty.
- Is your bill tracking message volume or seat count? Estimate monthly segments, multiply by an all-in tier rate above, and compare to per-seat licensing across everyone who needs to text. The gap tends to widen the more people send.
- Do you dial as well as text? If yes, one platform for both removes a whole vendor and a whole integration headache.
The practical takeaway
360 SMS App is a solid, mature, genuinely native Salesforce texting app — and if your world runs entirely on Salesforce objects, that nativeness is worth paying for. ReadySMS is a better fit when texting is high-volume and per-seat pricing has stopped making sense, when you want registered SMS at transparent per-segment rates with 10DLC handled for you, or when you need a power dialer in the same place — especially if GoHighLevel is anywhere in your stack.
You can sanity-check the math without committing: there's a cost calculator, full pricing is public, and you get 20 free test sends plus a $25 credit when you submit 10DLC registration — pay-as-you-go, no contract. Run a real campaign against a real segment estimate, compare it to your current seat bill, and let the numbers decide.