Marketo v Dynamics 365 Marketing

[Barry_Dupont1]

Hello everyone, looking for some help and opinions here please.

We are switching our CRM from a custom built one (integrated very well with Marketo) to Dynamics 365 CRM. That's fine, it makes sense for us, and I have been looking at the integration with Marketo.

Then, the Microsoft partner started pushing Dynamics 365 Marketing to replace Marketo, and my manager wants me to look into this.

If we were talking Pardot v Marketo I could talk about the differences all day, but I've never used Dynamics 365 Marketing. A quick glance at the documentation & 30 mins on their free trial and I was quite impressed - mostly because we use Microsoft Office already at our company so it felt familiar. But the basic functionality seems to be there as well, and seems to have come on a long way since I last glanced at it a couple of years ago.

But I'm aware of the sheer amount of functionality that Marketo has, its integrations, the API, the community and that if you have access to people with the right skills you can do pretty anything you want. I suspect that Dynamics Marketing does the basics very well, but doesn't allow you to do more than that.

A few things to give you context

• We're an SMB based in the UK, about 10 people in Marketing/Digital who would use the platform.
• We use Magento for ecommerce and Creative Cloud for design so need to consider the Adobe roadmap/integrations with these products. (assuming they get past changing icons and implement some really useful functionality 🙂 )
• On the other hand everyone in the company has Office 365 accounts, we use Outlook, and are going to use Dynamics CRM
• We don't have a hugely customised Marketo instance apart from the CRM integration. Most of what we do can be achieved by non-dev's, and we work with 3rd party Marketo agencies occasionally when we need extra help.

At the moment I'm still strongly in favour of keeping Marketo. Its familiar, I know it can do all we'll ever need, and there's this community who can answer anything. But to build a case to keep it (Dynamics 365 Marketing is 50% cheaper after initial set-up) I need more specific information. If we were to change, what are all the things that would make us say "If only we had known, we would never have changed from Marketo"

Thanks in advance!

[Britney_Young1]

Hi Barry, 

Might be too late on the answer here, but figured I'd give my two cents since I had to do a similar evaluation between the two platforms about 2 years ago. You're right in that it does do most of the basics. At the time when I evaluated some of the key areas I saw that were lacking had to do with forms and lemail/anding page editor. The forms didn't really allow for any branching logic and the email/landing page editor was no where near what Marketo offered. Additionally the ability to create complex workflows for automation seemed lacking as well. My recommendation was to keep Marketo based on Dynamics 365 inability to replace existing workflows we were already doing with Marketo.