Pardot alternatives: What B2B marketers are choosing now
Resources and ideas to put modern marketers ahead of the curve Insights and strategies for managing contacts, pipelines, and customer relationships at scale Guidance on automations that personalize campaigns, nurture leads, and drive growth Tactics to align marketing and sales, close deals faster, and support modern selling teams Ideas and best practices for delivering seamless support and memorable customer experiences Tips for building high-performing websites and content that attract, convert, and educate Resources for measuring performance, reporting results, and turning data into action Practical perspectives on using AI to streamline work and scale smarter marketing efforts Strategies for selling online, managing payments, and optimizing the digital buying experience Original research, data-backed insights and industry analyses All of HubSpot's marketing, sales, and customer service software on one agentic platform. Marketing Hub Marketing automation software Free and premium plans Service Hub Customer service software Free and premium plans Content Hub Content marketing software Free and premium plans Revenue Hub CPQ, billing, and payments software Free and premium plans Agent Hub Your central home for building and managing AI agents across the platform Learn more AEO (Beta) Answer engine optimization tools that track and improve your brand's visibility in AI results Learn more Home Marketing Pardot alternatives: What B2B marketers are choosing now Pardot alternatives: What B2B marketers are choosing now Written by: Kayla Schilthuis-Ihrig HUBSPOT MARKETING SOFTWARE Get Started with HubSpot's Marketing Software for Free Seventy percent of marketers believe the marketing industry has changed more in the past three years than in the past 50. That means that marketing automation platforms need to change, too. Pardot is a longtime fixture of the B2B landscape, but the lack of development has left many businesses looking for alternatives. Why are businesses leaving? What Pardot alternatives are they choosing, and what do experts say about having a successful migration? This guide answers all these questions and more. Pardot (rebranded as Marketing Cloud Account Engagement in 2022) is a B2B marketing automation platform owned by Salesforce. According to Pardot expert Tom Ryan, founder of MarCloud, many Pardot users choose to leave because they fear it will be discontinued. Ryan has been a Pardot consultant since 2016 and feels the eventual discontinuation is obvious. “There’s no development on the platform,” he explains. “There’s a clear migration path.” To Ryan, it feels like “it’s just a case of ‘when’ not ‘if.‘” Beyond discontinuation fears, Ryan points to revenue attribution and reporting as persistent pain points. Revenue attribution is “[incredibly difficult] if you do not know how to do it. Users need to wrestle with the Pardot-Salesforce sync,” he said. Reporting presents similar challenges, as the platform offers little flexibility. “The reports are not customizable in Pardot and therefore, people cannot get the reports they need. Clear reporting in general is very difficult for people to achieve, without consultant-level knowledge.” In Ryan’s experience, the most common destination for customers leaving Pardot is HubSpot. “Pardot to HubSpot makes the most sense. There’s a lot of architectural similarities between Pardot and HubSpot via the connector. So there’s a familiarity there, and you get so much more.” Easy marketing tools that deliver fast time-to-value, unified in one place. Pardot alternatives should be evaluated on CRM integration. HubSpot and Zoho both offer full CRM capabilities, making them top candidates for businesses leaving Salesforce altogether. Salesforce Marketing Cloud Next runs natively on Salesforce’s own platform, so there’s no separate system to sync at all, eliminating the data silo issue that Pardot has. Marketo maintains a native two-way Salesforce sync for teams that want to keep their CRM there. ActiveCampaign offers the same native Salesforce sync, plus its own lightweight CRM for teams that want to consolidate instead. B2B teams should also weigh these criteria when reviewing Pardot alternatives. Businesses looking to leave Pardot need to evaluate other tools based on CRM sync, automation capabilities, integrations, and price. HubSpot Marketing Automation builds multi-step B2B nurture workflows that trigger based on behavior, lifecycle stage, or CRM data. The tool is designed for marketers who want their data under one roof with HubSpot’s Smart CRM, alleviating the pain points of Pardot’s siloed design and clunky features. Teams can replace Salesforce CRM with HubSpot CRM, or use the native two-way sync to keep contacts, companies, deals, and activity history aligned across both platforms. Reviews: Ease of use is the top strength cited by HubSpot Marketing Hub users, followed by email marketing, automation, and intuitive design. Users cite the learning curve and missing features as the cons. HubSpot Marketing Hub Pricing: Free plan for up to 2 users. Paid plans starting at $10/month/seat. What I like: HubSpot is famous for its user-friendly, modern interface and its all-in-one platform that syncs across marketing, sales, and CRM. It’s built for marketers, with all the marketing automation tools needed to test and scale. I love the drag-and-drop email and campaign builders that allow you to iterate and execute without waiting on developers. Easy marketing tools that deliver fast time-to-value, unified in one place. Salesforce Marketing Cloud Next is the tool that Salesforce itself pushes Pardot customers towards. Marketing Cloud Next is built natively on Data Cloud, rather than running as a separate, connected system as Pardot does. Marketing Cloud Next isn’t the right fit for every team, particularly for those replacing Pardot, who often want less Salesforce dependency. Marketing Cloud Next is a massive, expensive tool that suits teams that are already deeply ingrained in the Salesforce ecosystem and want to stay there. “Salesforce is directing [customers] to their new platform called Marketing Cloud Next... but essentially what this is doing is prompting a wider tech review,” Ryan shared. Rather than a straight migration, many customers use the moment to evaluate their full stack. “So it isn’t necessarily that people are blindly going towards Marketing Cloud Next. Quite a lot of customers are going. The most common direction is HubSpot.”
Source: HubSpot
This article has been carefully curated and reformatted for educational and informational purposes. Full credit goes to the original publisher.
📚 Visit more helpful articles on Joab Peters Blog
No comments