Agentforce
The new Salesforce editions: what Core, Advanced and Max change for your budget
On September 3, 2026, Salesforce collapsed its edition sprawl into three tiers, Core, Advanced and Max, and bundled Agentforce, Slack, Tableau Next and a pool of Flex Credits into each. This is what each tier costs, what it replaces, what is tier-gated, and the credit arithmetic the bundle makes easy to under-budget.
For about eighteen months, quoting Salesforce meant reconciling a small zoo of names. Enterprise, Unlimited, the Agentforce 1 Edition, a $125 per-user add-on, a $150 Industries add-on, two consumption meters, and a free on-ramp through Foundations.
On September 3, 2026, Salesforce cleaned house. The new lineup is three tiers, Core, Advanced and Max, and each bundles Agentforce, Slack, Tableau Next, enterprise-grade security and the Premier Success Plan into one subscription, with a pool of Flex Credits included.
The pitch is simplicity, and on the procurement side it delivers: one SKU instead of a licence plus three add-ons plus a credit pre-purchase. But simpler to buy and cheaper are different claims, and the restructure moves real money around.
The middle tiers cost more than what they replace. The bundle is mandatory, so you pay for Slack and Tableau Next whether you deploy them or not. And the included credits are large enough to feel generous and finite enough to run out.
Prices and inclusions change. Treat the official pricing page as the source of truth and this as the orientation.
The three tiers and what each costs
At list price, per user per month, billed annually:
- Core: $195 per user per month, with 500,000 Flex Credits included. The entry tier, positioned as the replacement for the legacy Enterprise Edition, and priced up from the prior $175.
- Advanced: $395 per user per month, with 1,000,000 Flex Credits. The middle tier, replacing the legacy Unlimited Edition, which listed at $350.
- Max: $550 per user per month, with 2,750,000 Flex Credits. The top tier, replacing the Agentforce 1 Edition. The per-user price is unchanged from Agentforce 1, but the credit allocation jumps from 1 million to 2.75 million per org.
Salesforce wraps each tier in a “value” number. Max is “nearly 60% more value than the Agentforce 1 Edition, at no additional cost”, Core is “70% more” than legacy Enterprise, Advanced “more than 50% more” than legacy Unlimited. Read those for what they are: arithmetic that sums the list price of everything now in the bundle.
Nobody buys 70% of a package. They buy the two or three capabilities they will turn on. The question is not how much value is in the box. The question is how much of the box your org will run in year one, and whether the included credit pool covers the agent volume you are planning.
One structural change is worth naming. The flat-rate world is receding. The old model let you buy a plain Enterprise licence and bolt Agentforce on as a $125 add-on for the users who needed it.
In the new model, Agentforce is bundled into every tier and metered through the included credits. Cleaner, but the consumption meter is no longer an optional concern for a subset of employees. It is the engine under every edition. If you have never had to think about credit burn, you do now.
What replaces what
The transition story decides whether your renewal is a like-for-like swap or a step up in spend.
Core replaces Enterprise. If you were on Enterprise for core CRM and had not adopted Agentforce, this is where you land, now paying for bundled AI, Slack and analytics you may or may not use.
Advanced replaces Unlimited.
Max replaces the Agentforce 1 Edition. Existing Agentforce 1 customers can move to Max at no extra cost, and Salesforce frames the upgrade as adding up to $500 in value, largely because the credit pool nearly triples at the same price.
A subtlety the announcement glosses over: the legacy editions do not vanish. They persist in Salesforce’s edition-limit documentation, and Salesforce avoids the word “migration”, describing this instead as a multi-year, natural transition.
Practitioner reaction to the naming has been mixed to positive. A plain Core, Advanced, Max ladder reads as a capability progression in a way that Enterprise, Unlimited and Agentforce 1 never did. Keeping the old editions alive, though, adds documentation complexity for anyone maintaining orgs across the boundary. Simpler to buy new. Not necessarily simpler to administer old.
What is in the bundle, and what is tier-gated
Every tier includes the same foundation: Agentforce and out-of-the-box AI, Slack with Slackbot, embedded agentic analytics through Tableau Next, enterprise-grade data security, and the Premier Success Plan. That is the mandatory core of all three, and the part you cannot decline.
Above that, capabilities are tier-gated. The clearest published breakdown is for the Agentforce Sales family.
Momentum, which captures activity data and keeps CRM records updated without rep data entry, is included in all three tiers.
Sales Programs, the structured, repeatable playbooks and incentives for consistent execution across the deal cycle, is included in Advanced and Max, not Core.
Max for Sales layers on the heavy items: Agentforce for Sales, unmetered Agentforce Coworker access per rep, Salesforce Spiff for commissions, Sales Planning for territories and quotas, Salesforce Maps, Slack Enterprise+, and additional Tableau Next capabilities.
On the Service side, the Agentforce Help Agent lands in Advanced and Max, and the Service Rep Assistant, with unmetered Coworker access and the full service-agent template library, is a Max inclusion. Agentforce Industries gets the same three-tier structure with less published tier-by-tier detail. If you are an Industries customer, get the specific inclusion list in writing before you model anything.
The word doing the most work is unmetered. Coworker access at the Max tier is unmetered per rep, which is a different cost shape from the consumption meter that governs everything else. Which brings us to the part of the bundle that will decide your bill.
The credit arithmetic the bundle hides
The Flex Credits in each tier are not a footnote. They are the mechanism by which your agents cost money, and the bundled allocation is a budget you can blow through.
The mechanics have not changed from the Flex Credit model introduced in 2025. Credits are consumed per action, a discrete function the agent performs such as retrieving a record, answering from knowledge, or running a Flow. A standard action consumes 20 credits and a voice action 30.
Salesforce prices a top-up pack at roughly $500 per 100,000 credits, which sets the reference value of the included pools: Core’s 500,000 credits is about $2,500 of consumption, Advanced’s 1 million about $5,000, Max’s 2.75 million about $13,750, per org, per term.
Now turn that into agent volume. At 20 credits per standard action, and assuming a customer-facing interaction runs three to five actions end to end:
- Core’s 500,000 credits cover roughly 25,000 five-action interactions across the whole org for the term, about 5,000 a month. A pilot-to-early-production budget, not a contact-centre-at-scale budget.
- Advanced’s 1 million credits roughly double that, to about 50,000 five-action interactions per term.
- Max’s 2.75 million credits cover about 137,000 five-action interactions per term. Real production volume, still finite, and voice burns it 50% faster per action.
Those are illustrative numbers built on a per-interaction action count you have to measure in your own org. A knowledge-only deflection might be two actions. A booking flow that reads inventory, checks entitlements, updates a record and confirms could be six or more.
The point is not the exact figure. The included pool is denominated in a unit, actions, that most buyers do not instrument until after go-live. The surprise invoice has not gone away. It has been pre-loaded into your edition.
Two properties of the credit model sharpen the risk. The included pool is finite, and consumption keeps billing once you exhaust it, either through top-up packs at around $500 per 100,000 credits or through the meter in arrears, so under-sizing surfaces as unplanned spend mid-term rather than a hard stop. And on the pre-purchase structures, unused credits generally do not roll over, so over-provisioning is money gone. Under-size and you pay more later. Over-size and you forfeit the difference. The bundle does not resolve that tension. It hides it behind a single tier price.
The discipline that resolves it is the same one that mattered before the repackaging. Instrument consumption from day one. Turn on Digital Wallet’s per-action tracking and threshold alerts before launch, model your action-per-interaction count against a real pilot, and treat the included pool as a forecast to validate rather than a ceiling you will never reach. The levers that stretch the pool, from chunking knowledge so retrieval returns fewer results to using deterministic filters instead of extra reasoning actions, live in the Flex Credit optimisation playbook.
Who should move, and who should wait
The answer differs by where you start.
If you are an existing Agentforce 1 customer, moving to Max is close to automatic on paper: same price, 2.75 times the credits, plus the added Sales and Service inclusions. Verify that the products you are now entitled to, Spiff, Sales Planning, Maps, Slack Enterprise+, do not create shadow adoption pressure or migration work you did not plan for. More entitlement is only more value if you deploy it. Otherwise it is the same spend with a longer feature list.
If you are on legacy Enterprise and have not adopted Agentforce, Core is a price increase that buys you a bundle. Whether it is worth it turns on whether you will use the Agentforce, Slack and Tableau Next capabilities now included. If your roadmap has real agent use cases in the next year, the bundled credits give you a running start and the maths can work. If it does not, you are pre-paying for a platform shift you have not committed to, and the right move is to scope the ROI of a first agent before the renewal, not after.
If you are piloting and cost-sensitive, the free on-ramp still exists. Enterprise-and-above customers have been able to get a starter pool of Flex Credits at no cost through Salesforce Foundations. The allocation shifts and varies by region, so confirm the current number, but a proof of concept still should not cost licence money. Prove the use case and measure the action-per-interaction count on the free credits first. Then you know which tier’s pool your real volume needs.
Understanding the basics
What are the new Salesforce editions?
As of September 3, 2026, Salesforce sells three editions: Core at $195 per user per month, Advanced at $395, and Max at $550, billed annually. Each bundles Agentforce, Slack, Tableau Next, enterprise security and the Premier Success Plan, with 500,000, 1 million and 2.75 million Flex Credits included respectively.
Which edition replaces Enterprise, Unlimited and Agentforce 1?
Core replaces Enterprise, Advanced replaces Unlimited, and Max replaces the Agentforce 1 Edition. The legacy editions remain in Salesforce’s documentation, and Salesforce describes the change as a multi-year transition rather than a migration.
How far do the included Flex Credits go?
A standard agent action costs 20 credits and a voice action 30. If an interaction averages five actions, Core’s pool covers roughly 25,000 interactions per term, Advanced’s about 50,000, and Max’s about 137,000. Measure your own action count in a pilot before trusting those figures, because consumption keeps billing after the pool runs out and unused credits typically do not roll over.
Is Max worth it for existing Agentforce 1 customers?
On paper, yes. The per-user price is unchanged, the credit pool nearly triples, and Max adds unmetered Coworker access and the Sales and Service inclusions. The thing to check is whether the extra bundled products create deployment work you did not plan for.
The number the rate card cannot give you
The repackaging is a real improvement in how Salesforce is sold. It is not a change in what an agent costs to run. That number still comes from how many actions your agents execute, which is a design and governance problem, not a line on the rate card.
Buy the tier that fits the capabilities and the volume you can defend, get the Industries inclusions in writing, and keep the meter in view from the first day.
If you are sizing a tier against a real agent roadmap and want a defensible credit forecast before the renewal, talk to us, or start with the Agentforce ROI calculator.
