Commence CRM vs Keap (2026)

TL;DR

• Commence CRM runs $12 for Essentials, $19 for Sales, and $32 for Enterprise per user annually, with Marketing, Customer Service, and Project Management as separate per-user add-ons at $12, $12, and $10.
• Keap is a single plan at $299 a month billed annually, covering two users, with extra seats at $39 and pricing that climbs with your contact count. Implementation is required and quoted case by case.
• Commence looks far cheaper and often is — until you load the modules, at which point a full seat hits $66.
• Keap's marginal cost per person is the lowest thing about it. Ten users land near $611 a month, roughly $61 each, for a platform that also handles email, SMS, scheduling, and payments.

Different products wearing the same category label

Commence is a business system. Its shape says so: accounts, contacts, activity tracking, opportunity pipelines, quoting and pricebook, role-based permissions, an org chart, ticketing, Gantt charts. Manufacturers, distributors, and professional services firms that track both a pipeline and ongoing delivery work are the buyers it fits, and the reason to choose it is breadth from one vendor rather than any single standout capability.

Keap is a marketing automation engine that happens to include a CRM. Formerly Infusionsoft, it is built around a visual automation canvas with 52-plus templates, tag-based segmentation, and behavioral triggers on opens, clicks, and purchases. Bolt on order forms, shopping carts, appointment booking, and native invoicing and you have the machinery for an owner-operated business running a full lifecycle: lead magnet, nurture sequence, booking, invoice, follow-up.

If nobody on your team will build automations, most of what you pay Keap for goes unused. That is the single most useful test.

The price comparison flips on headcount

At small headcount Commence wins on cost by a wide margin. Three users on Sales CRM is $57 a month against Keap's $299 for two. Even a fully loaded Commence Enterprise seat with all three modules at $66 beats Keap's per-person rate until you cross about five people.

Then Keap's structure starts working. Its base absorbs the first two licences and additional seats cost $39. Five users is $416 a month, ten users $611. A ten-person Commence team on Sales plus Marketing pays $310 — still cheaper, but not by the order of magnitude the $12 headline implies, and Commence is not giving you SMS, appointment booking, payment processing, or an automation builder for that.

Two structural details matter more than the tier tables. Commence bills modules per user across the whole account, not per user who opens them — so if two people in a ten-person company handle support tickets, you still pay $120 a month for the Customer Service module. And Keap prices by contact volume, so a 40,000-record list inherited from an old email tool inflates your quote on day one whether or not you ever mail it. Prune before you get quoted.

Where each one is genuinely weak

Commence's $12 entry tier has no opportunity tracking at all — no pipeline, no forecasting, no deal stages. It is a competent contact manager, and any sales team starts at $19. Its interface is dated next to modern tools, its integration catalog is narrow, and everything published is annual billing with no advertised monthly option and a three-user minimum.

Keap's problems are cost and learning curve. There is no free plan, only a trial capped at 25 email sends with payments disabled, meaning you cannot properly evaluate two of the three things people buy it for. Implementation is mandatory, no longer carries a published fixed fee, and should be assumed to be a four-figure one-off. The automation builder rewards real study and punishes teams that expect it to work out of the box.

Consolidation, two ways

Both products argue you should stop paying for separate tools, and both are partly right.

Commence's consolidation is horizontal across business functions — sales, marketing, service, projects — each priced separately so you buy only what you want. The Project Management module at $10 is the best value on its list.

Keap's consolidation is vertical down one customer journey. One subscription replaces a CRM, an email platform, a scheduler, and an invoicing tool. For a coach, clinic, agency, or franchise operator whose revenue depends on that exact sequence running automatically, $299 stops looking expensive around the second month.

Who should pick what

• B2B teams of five to fifty tracking pipelines and delivery work → Commence, on Sales or Enterprise.
• Owner-operated service businesses running nurture sequences and online booking → Keap.
• Anyone selling products with carts and order forms → Keap; Commence has no e-commerce layer.
• Budget-constrained teams that only need pipeline and reporting → Commence Sales at $19.
• Teams of ten-plus needing email, SMS, and payments alongside CRM → Keap, where the $39 marginal seat is hard to beat.
• Businesses with a huge dormant contact list → Commence, since Keap will charge you for records that generate nothing.

Bottom line

Commence is the honest value pick for B2B companies that want a lot of functional surface for a small budget, provided you go in knowing that $12 buys an address book and a configured seat costs $66. Keap is expensive, requires paid implementation, and takes real time to learn — but if your business genuinely runs on automated follow-up, nothing in Commence's lineup replaces what its canvas does. Decide whether you are buying software to record work or software to perform it.