Is Marketo Abandonware?

[Jeff_Morgan1]

I have to make a decision about whether to migrate away from Marketo to Hubspot in the next week or two.

I've invested a lot into Marketo over the last 9 years. I have been a VAR for Marketo, and as such implemented and supported it with countless companies. I've always believed that it was the best option out there. I've put my neck on the line many times by recommending Marketo over its competitors. I know it like the back of my hand.

However, in my current role as Head of Marketing for a seed funded start-up, there has been a lot of pressure from investors to migrate to Hubspot, which is perceived to be easier to learn/support and less expensive (at least in the first few years while you qualify for their funded start-up discount).

This has pushed me to take a look in the mirror to ask if I'm holding on to a dying pony.

The product really hasn't had any meaningful improvements in a long time. Some popular feature requests have been ignored for over a decade.

The system is really quirky and is certainly much harder to learn than Hubspot. Beyond that there are features of the product that we try to use that just don't seem to be supported at all (Chrome Gmail Extension, Marketing Calendar, Event iOS App, to name a few).

And to top it all off, when we report bugs to Marketo Support, it can take days for a response, and usually answered by an offshore, non-English speaker, who is much less knowledgable about the product than I am. 

So I'm coming to my fellow Marketo professionals to ask, is it time to shoot the pony? Or is the grass on the other side of the fence just as dead as Marketo?

[Phillip_Wild]

Hi @Jeff_Morgan1 ,

Overall there are always going to be different situations that require different solutions. 

Marketo does a lot of things very well: tokens, engagement programs, the sync with SFDC - this is what I often point to. However, it is expensive, and at a certain size of company, it's entirely possible something like HubSpot would make more sense. It's less powerful overall but easier to use, and if you don't have dedicated marketing automation/operations resources then it's much simpler to jump into, build an email, and then go and do something else. 

In addition, having a CRM and MA tool integrated natively (as per HubSpot) will certainly be beneficial for simplicity. However, there's a point when you need a more powerful CRM and MA solution, and that is when HubSpot is generally not the tool for you. It doesn't really have much success in the enterprise space. And with Adobe now owning Marketo, there are integrations such as Adobe Real-Time CDP which will significantly add to functionality for enterprise customers. It will be interesting to see how it plays out as Marketo migrates from being a "best of breed" provider to being more fully integrated into (and perhaps dependent on) the rest of the Adobe stack.

Hope this helps: my thoughts only 🙂

[Jeff_Morgan1]

Thanks for your thoughts Phillip. Your take is aligned with my experience. It is hard to decide if sticking with the solution we'll eventually need is the best course, or if we should switch and then be faced with switching again in a couple of years.
 

It would be an easier decision if Marketo seemed like they cared about advancing and supporting their product.

[Jay_Jiang]

With Adobe at the helm, Marketo looks to replace Adobe Campaign and will be positioned as more of an enterprise offering. There is a lot of work already done or underway to integrate Marketo with AEM and Adobe Analytics and potentially Adobe Real-Time CDP - all of which a start up would never be able to afford. 

Marketing automation itself has broadened from email marketing, landing pages and forms to managing data and processes and what Marketo still does well is exactly this - the ability to create automation rules and pre-process data before it hits your CRM. So, yes, while learning Hubspot will be quicker and even the UX to send an email out is quicker, it's probably not your endgame for a thriving revenue operations function. 

As such for ourselves, we started out with Pipedrive and eventually migrated to Marketo and SFDC with our fresh round of funding.

[alsorobd]

I can see no one's contributed to this topic for a few years so let me share my experience. With almost 20 years in Marketing, as I've moved up the ladder I've been a heavy users of a number of different systems. Salesforce, Pardot, HubSpot, Active Campaign, Autopilot and for the past 2 years Marketo.

Of all these products, Marketo feels the oldest and deadest of all the marketing tools I've used. I now have a team responsible for Ops and Automation and spend about 50% of my time helping them solve Marketo related issues, many of which we have more knowledge of than Adobe's support agents. 

Marketo is old, the user interface has had no development for years and it feels like an early 2000's product. Even Salesforce now feels easier to use than Marketo and that's saying something. The product seems to have been built to deliberately cause mess and chaos, since correcting setup errors or performing cleanups are made pretty much impossible by terrible UX and UI.

And then there's the bugs... I open support tickets on a weekly basis due to simple, product breaking bugs. Want to change company names of people in Marketo by uploading a static list? You can't, you're unexpectedly blocked, and no this isn't because we've blocked field updates from list uploads, it's a bug that's been out in the wild since 2015.  https://nation.marketo.com/t5/product-discussions/explicitcompanyupdatenotallowed/td-p/125564

Want to update company names manually? Not possible. Company Objects are blocked from editing. Want to move something from one workspace to another? Drag and drop doesn't work. Instead, you need to create a folder, add the thing you want to move like a program or campaign, then move the entire folder, remove the item you've moved from the folder, now it's in the correct workspace, delete the folder. Why can't Adobe fix the UI? They tried with "new experience" and added a little toggle switch which allowed a user to change the layout of a couple of pages within the interface. No new features, just a layout change, and then this was rolled back. Come on Adobe, you're the people that made Photoshop and Premiere, surely there's someone there who can bring Marketo into the 21st century?

Many basic features people have requested as far back as 2016 have been completely ignored. It feels like Adobe has a skeleton crew running Marketo, with just enough people to keep the cash cow alive for their Enterprise customers like my organisation. Features like being able to sort columns of custom fields in tables have been ignored for decades. Imagine you have a custom field like "account revenue" and want to sort people in a smart list from largest to smallest? You can't sort custom fields. You need to export the whole list as a .csv file and sort that instead. Want to delete something? Good luck. Mass selection and editing of objects like Programs or Emails, as you'd expect in a product in 2023, is simply not possible. Was that email used by a campaign 2 years ago?  Well, if it was, unless you delete the related campaign that email is going to sit in your Marketo instance for eternity. Need to remove a Segment because you've hit your limit or misconfigured it? Tough. That segment is used by thousands of assets and the ONLY way to remove it is to first manually track down all those assets and delete them one-by-one.

Anyone considering a Marketing Automation platform for their organisation would do well to steer clear of Marketo in its current state in 2023. It's expensive, difficult to use, full of bugs and requires an army of people to support, it's not been updated in decades and the support provided simply adds band aids to a completely outdated system. As OP suggested, Marketo is abandonware and terrible value for money for new users. As a heavy user for the last 2 years I'm left wondering if my organisation has made a huge mistake with Marketo and am seriously considering the business impact and cost to migrate to something like Hubspot.

[Jo_Pitts1]

@alsorobd ,

This post interests me for a couple of reasons:

1. Quite a lot of what you say is correct.  However, Marketo is actively supported and is still having features added.  The UI is getting updated slowly but surely (and I can think of at least one tool in the Marketing Automation space that makes Marketo's UI look superb).
2. I've looked at your previous posts.  They are posted with a pretty frustrated tone, but that frustration seems to come from lack of understanding (e.g. Your Question: why can't you sort by custom fields?  My Answer: Because they aren't indexed and the performance impacts would be horrific, and no; you can't index every custom field - that also has performance implications).

I'd love to know the nature of the weekly bugs you are reporting.  Maybe the community could help, or at least add pressure to Adobe to resolve some of them.

We're all here to help.  The more you engage with the community, the more help we can be.

Cheers

Jo

[alsorobd]

Thanks for the response. In answer to your questions allow me to elaborate:

"I'd love to know the nature of the weekly bugs you are reporting. "

Here's one specifically. We have a bunch of records with incorrect company names. My team wants to correct this by uploading a list to correct these existing people. Each time we receive the error "ExplicitCompanyUpdateNotAllowed". Adobe support advised that this is because our CRM is connected, which kind of makes sense if that were our primary data source and the relationships between contacts and accounts are managed by sales. However, we don't currently have our CRM connected and have no way of correcting this error.

And another. We use segmentation to control multi-language content in emails. We need to update the snippets controlled by these segments, however, these snippets are used in so many emails we've been informed by Adobe it's no longer possible to update them. The only way we could do this is to employ someone for the next 3 months to manually track down assets across 30 workspaces and delete them one by one, until no more assets exist that use the snippet we want to edit. Great solution. Why can't we just run a filtered search, track down the offending assets, unapproved them and then delete them? Asset management, clean up and organisation is a HUGE pain. 

"but that frustration seems to come from lack of understanding"

Indexing custom fields is something available in a VAST number of other tools we use for managing customer data. Our Project Management tool contains literally hundreds of custom fields, and hundreds of thousands of tasks. Sorting lists by custom field is a breeze. Horrific performance impacts resulting from indexing custom fields speaks more to Marketo's ancient data structure, than it does to your assumption this is an insurmountable problem.

Rob

[SanfordWhiteman]

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Indexing custom fields is something available in a VAST number of other tools we use for managing customer data. Our Project Management tool contains literally hundreds of custom fields, and hundreds of thousands of tasks. Sorting lists by custom field is a breeze. Horrific performance impacts resulting from indexing custom fields speaks more to Marketo's ancient data structure, than it does to your assumption this is an insurmountable problem.

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Well, allowing you to sort isn't the same as indexing.

At the RDBMS level, you can order by any column, regardless of whether it's indexed! But the performance of a sort on an unindexed column directly relates to the size of the table (plus the actual distribution of values and the sorting algorithm). It's probable that in a small instance that isn't under load, an unindexed sort (i.e. table scan) would be reasonably performant with few side effects, but Marketo protects against the case where you have 10s of millions of rows. That's perhaps overaggressive but not unreasonable, as anyone who's built SQL-based platforms can attest.

[Jo_Pitts1]

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@alsorobd wrote:

Thanks for the response. In answer to your questions allow me to elaborate:

"I'd love to know the nature of the weekly bugs you are reporting. "

Here's one specifically. We have a bunch of records with incorrect company names. My team wants to correct this by uploading a list to correct these existing people. Each time we receive the error "ExplicitCompanyUpdateNotAllowed". Adobe support advised that this is because our CRM is connected, which kind of makes sense if that were our primary data source and the relationships between contacts and accounts are managed by sales. However, we don't currently have our CRM connected and have no way of correcting this error.

So, just pondering here.  Were these records ever synced to CRM?  If so, the fact you've disconnected the CRM from Marketo won't have changed the fact that the records aren't still marked as being synced to the CRM.  Perhaps if you ask Adobe to clear the synchronisation data on the records you might get somewhere?

And another. We use segmentation to control multi-language content in emails. We need to update the snippets controlled by these segments, however, these snippets are used in so many emails we've been informed by Adobe it's no longer possible to update them. The only way we could do this is to employ someone for the next 3 months to manually track down assets across 30 workspaces and delete them one by one, until no more assets exist that use the snippet we want to edit. Great solution. Why can't we just run a filtered search, track down the offending assets, unapproved them and then delete them? Asset management, clean up and organisation is a HUGE pain. 

---

The fact that you can't edit a snippet because of the number of times it is used seems odd, and I'm not sure I believe Adobe when they give that as an excuse.  Have the explained to you why that would matter?

In regards being able to find all the assets used by the snippet, doesn't 'Used by' give you what you need?

Indexing custom fields is something available in a VAST number of other tools we use for managing customer data. Our Project Management tool contains literally hundreds of custom fields, and hundreds of thousands of tasks. Sorting lists by custom field is a breeze. Horrific performance impacts resulting from indexing custom fields speaks more to Marketo's ancient data structure, than it does to your assumption this is an insurmountable problem.

You'll note I've been very careful not to make assumptions here.  Hundreds of thousands of records isn't many at all.  Millions of records becomes problematic and many Marketo instances have millions of records.  No one is saying it is an insurmountable problem but, to @SanfordWhiteman's point, it is one that is easily explained.  I'm curious as to examples where you need to sort on custom fields with such frequency that it becomes a major bug bear for you.

What other bugs are you dealing with?

Regards

Jo

[Jay_Jiang]

The only times I've ever logged support tickets would be for things that only support can do from the backend like clearing tree caches, setting up custom sync rules, requesting to be added to the premium IP range (cats out of the bag).

With all due respect, if your team is asking support for help for issues you've given as examples, you should consider investing in upskilling your team or hiring a Marketo solution architect.

Marketo is an opinionated platform, there are certain ways you should be configuring/using Marketo if you have Marketo natively synced with SFDC, and for any outliers, that's where your Marketo solution architect comes in.