Salesforce’s new Marketing Cloud Next editions — Growth and Advanced — are built on the same foundation: Data Cloud + Core + Flow. Both unlock the promise of unified data and automation inside Salesforce. But when you peel back the layers, the differences become clearer plus the field insights from real-world implementations highlight a couple of nuances that aren’t always obvious. Here’s a detailed guide to help you navigate the editions.
1) Path Experiment: A/B Testing on Steroids
Growth: You can build flows and journeys, but if you want to run an A/B test, you’ll need a workaround. Typically that means tagging records in your segment, using a decision split in Flow, creating separate email versions, and then manually checking which one performed better. In short, there’s no out-of-the-box A/B testing in Growth today.
Advanced: Unlocks Path Experiments, so you can test up to 10 variations — channel, subject line or other content, cadence, or audience. Instead of cobbling together splits, you get a structured experiment with paths that can be randomized or weighted. Even better, you decide how to pick the winner: either manually by reviewing results or automatically* based on engagement metrics after a certain amount of time & percentage of the test audience size. For teams running regular tests, this brings real science (and a lot less guesswork) into campaign optimization.
*as of Winter’26 release
2) Einstein Engagement
Instead of relying only on Path Experiments, Advanced also opens up Einstein Engagement Scoring & Frequency. These tools let you predict how likely someone is to engage and how often they should hear from you, and then bake those predictions straight into Flow.
Einstein Engagement Frequency (EEF): Monitors historical send + response behavior to flag when someone is being oversent (risk of fatigue) or undersent (missed opportunity).
Einstein Engagement Scoring (EES): Predicts four key propensities for each person — likelihood to open, click, convert, or unsubscribe — and refreshes those scores regularly for use in segmentation or Flow decisions.
Growth: Gives you AI features such as content or segment creation along with STO, but no predictive engagement models. You can test and segment, but only through self-made, static rules and manual splits.
Advanced: Adds EEF + EES, which you can drop directly into Flow:
Suppress sends for individuals with “High Unsubscribe” risk.
Prioritize offers for “High Click” scorers.
Throttle cadence automatically when EEF flags fatigue.
This turns engagement from guesswork into data-driven optimization, making your campaigns more relevant and more sustainable. Below are a couple of visuals on how to use these in a flow – you can also build segments based on this criteria or use it in normal Flow decision splits.
3) Unified Messaging
Growth: Provides outbound email, SMS, and WhatsApp from one unified setup. You can configure a single business number, manage consent centrally in Data Cloud (via keyword opt-ins/outs or preference pages), and use Flow to orchestrate sends. Flows can also listen for engagement events — like a reply or a link click — and branch accordingly. This gives marketers the ability to automate simple two-way logic (e.g., resume a flow when a message is received) without needing external systems.
Advanced: Adds Unified Conversations, extending SMS and WhatsApp beyond campaign sends into ongoing two-way interactions. Replies don’t dead-end: they can be routed to Agentforce bots for automation or escalated to Service Cloud agents for live handling, all within the same messaging thread. Advanced also introduces send policies, allowing you to decide whether marketing campaigns should pause if a customer is already engaged in an active service or bot conversation. All interactions are written back into Data Cloud, enriching the customer profile with engagement events that can be used in future targeting and flows.
4) Campaign Designer (Beta)
Growth: Helps you generate a campaign brief, audience segment, and draft content using AI, but from there it’s on you to assemble the pieces. Marketers need to manually connect the audience, content, and channels into a working flow. It’s a faster starting point, but the orchestration still has to be stitched together by hand.
Advanced: Takes it further with the Campaign Designer (Beta). You begin with a prompt for a campaign brief, and the system not only creates the brief, campaign, and suggested content, but also builds out the campaign flow itself. That means emails, SMS, and other touchpoints are automatically dropped into Flow with draft copy aligned to your brand tone. Marketers can then review, adjust, and publish. In short: Growth gives you the pieces, Advanced puts them together for you.
5) Data Cloud at the core: Unified Individual vs. Unified Account
Growth: Comes with Unified Individual, a stitched profile that consolidates activities and attributes for each person (clicks, purchases, web visits). Perfect for B2C and one-to-one personalization.
Advanced: Adds Unified Account, which aggregates data and engagement at the account level that is essential for B2B and B2B2C orgs practicing account-based marketing. Today this functionality is mostly used to allow for not only Person but also Account Scoring in Advanced (see next point), however as you will learn from the field insights a little later, it will also come in handy for some Person Account implementation challenges and I personally do wonder, if it will be opened up for segmentation in the future.
6) People & Account Scoring
Growth: Supports People Scoring. Unified Individuals can be scored with Engagement (behavioral) and Fit (profile-based) scores, helping segment and prioritize leads or contacts.
Advanced: Adds Account Scoring — rollups of engagement, fit, and intent across all individuals within an account thanks to the Unified Account. This enables true account-based campaigns, letting marketers tailor journeys and outreach based on overall account health and buying signals.
7) Flow as the automation engine
At the heart of both editions is Salesforce Flow. This is the core automation engine that powers every campaign journey whether you’re sending a single email, orchestrating an SMS reminder, or branching based on engagement. Flow gives marketers a common canvas to design journeys while staying close to the same tool admins already use across Salesforce.
Growth: With Growth, Flows can include wait steps, decision splits, and channel sends (email, SMS, WhatsApp), along with record creation or update steps so you can build solid outbound campaigns. It’s powerful enough to run most everyday marketing programs.
Advanced: The Flow canvas is the same, but the experience is much richer thanks to the additional tools it unlocks:
Path Experiments let you test up to 10 variations within Flow and automatically declare a winner, moving beyond manual splits.
Einstein Engagement Scoring & Frequency bring predictive intelligence right into Flow. You can branch paths based on a person’s likelihood to click or unsubscribe, or throttle sends if someone is flagged as over-contacted.
Unified Conversations means responses to SMS/WhatsApp don’t dead-end: Flow can resume based on replies, clicks, or even handoffs to agents.
The result: Growth gives you the building blocks for automation, but Advanced turns Flow into a real optimization engine — blending orchestration, experimentation, and predictive intelligence in one place.
Field insights from implementations
So far, the differences we’ve outlined are officially documented by Salesforce — Path Experiments, Campaign Designer, Account Scoring, etc. But once we started actually implementing, we uncovered a few nuances that aren’t spelled out clearly in the edition comparison guides. These surfaced during testing and hands-on work with Advanced orgs, and they’re worth calling out if you’re planning your roadmap.
Engagement & consent roll-ups. Out of the box, engagement and consent roll-ups only surface on Leads and Contacts. However, if you’re on Advanced with Unified Account, you can configure a Data Cloud related list to surface the same roll-ups on a Person Account page layout. This makes consent and engagement data far more actionable in B2C setups. For further information see François’ article here on how to surface consent data for Person Accounts.
Engagement Signals. Signals are the glue between Salesforce and Marketing Cloud Next. They fire when something happens in Salesforce — for example, a case is opened, escalated, or closed, or a donation is processed. These can trigger a Flow in Marketing Cloud Advanced to kick off a message or journey. One important caveat: Signals only work if the Unified Individual already exists. (See the “how-to” article here.). We’ve also heard 🤞 (#forwardlookingstatement) that Salesforce plans to open up CRM-triggered flows more broadly in the future – enabling triggered marketing messages that don’t depend on a Unified Individual at all.
How to choose
Growth: Best if you’re consolidating tools, standardizing consent, and piloting your first Data Cloud-powered journeys. It gives you a solid starting package of profiles, credits, and sends — enough to get live quickly, test use cases, and build confidence without overinvesting.
Advanced: Designed for teams that want to push further. Beyond predictive engagement (scoring & frequency), structured experimentation, conversational messaging, Campaign Designer, and account-level intelligence, Advanced also comes with a higher native credit package. For organizations with high-volume sends, complex automation, or account-based marketing needs, Advanced becomes less about “nice-to-have” features and more about making scale sustainable.
Final thought
Both editions move you toward a Salesforce-native, data-driven marketing future. The real decision isn’t if you’ll get value: it’s how fast you need Advanced’s richer toolkit of AI, scoring, and account-level optimization. Growth will get you started; Advanced ensures you don’t outgrow your edition when experimentation, predictive intelligence, and scale become business-critical. You can always get started with Growth and move into Advanced at a later stage.