Marketo vs Pardot vs Hubspot

[Liliana_Cheng1]

Hi Saulo Avelar​, can you elaborate on some of the pain points you've experienced with Eloqua?

[Anonymous]

Hi Liliana,

We used Eloqua for nurturing and scoring prospects as well as running customer programs to support Client Services and the Account Management teams.

Bottom Line is that Eloqua is probably the most expensive marketing automation tool on the market. In some ways, it worth it, but here are the pain points that would make me switch (not considering the cost of migration, of course):

• Some of our biggest problems with Eloqua come from still being on E9 (old version). This obviously only affects existing clients, but we were one of them.
• I never felt like Eloqua played well with other systems. Sure they have an integration with Salesforce, but it's not as good as some other options.
• Of course, costs
• [Not from me, but from the team] Since the Oracle acquisition, we felt that the overall quality of the customer-facing organization has declined substantially. It just seemed like it wasn't a priority for Oracle. And then all the people that I personally felt like made Eloqua great (and me a huge advocate for them) left or were pushed out.

I hope it helps.

Regards,

Saulo

[Anonymous]

Thanks so much Saulo. Funny enough as Marketo is actually cheaper than Hubspot for us. Pardot is very similar cost.

Your list of easy to use - are these in order of preference? I have a call with Act on tomorrow, so interesting to see how that is used.

[Anonymous]

I agree with Saulo's assessment.  Marketo and Eloqua have more robust functionality and are well suited to mid-size and Enterprise organizations.  These solutions scale very well to support global organizational needs.  Pardot is rapidly growing up (has historically been an SMB solutions) and it still is not quite on par with Marketo, but that gap is rapidly closing.  Pardot has a nicer and more intuitive interface for users new to marketing automation, but I prefer how Marketo handles the logic to create lists/smart lists, use of tokens, cloning and setting up nurture programs.  I also like how Marketo can easily write data to Salesforce (including campaigns) and leverage the Salesforce reports and dashboards. 
Hubspot, Act-On, Infusionsoft and others are best for SMB organization, and can handle basic marketing automation requirements.  In my experience, organizations often "outgrown" these SMB marketing automation systems because their organizations require tighter integration with their Salesforce data including custom objects and also want to support more complex marketing automation scenarios.  

[Anonymous]

I've used both Pardot and Hubspot the products.

• Hubspot is the best on top of the funnel features.
• Pardot has a very good lead nuturing tool called engagement studio that is easy to use
• Marketo I would say is all around the best for automations and doing more with your Marketing Automation tool.

[Betsy_Landon1]

Marketo for my current company is only a little more expensive than Pardot was at my previous company (same database limit). Our Marketo cost includes Web Personalization and Pardot does not have this. We recently migrated from Eloqua to Marketo, because it seems that Oracle is abandoning this product. I speculate that Oracle purchased Eloqua so they could buy their customer base and compete against Salesforce for CRM. The Eloqua UI and usability pales against Marketo and so do the features, in my opinion. We have been an Eloqua customer for years and our subscription was extremely inexpensive. Yet, we made the decision to migrate to Marketo. One of the deal breakers was Eloqua's inability to trigger an alert when a known visitor loads a "High Value" web page. Eloqua tech support confirmed with engineering that this feature used to work, is now broken and they don't plan to fix it. I feel like there isn't anything we can't do with Marketo and Eloqua was limiting us. Pardot is OK if you've never used MA before. However, it is roughly the same cost, in my experience, so why not choose the best of breed?

[Anonymous]

Thank you everyone for your feedback! This was exactly what I was after and brought forth even more insight into how powerful Marketo is. We have decided to stay with Marketo. It provides the most powerful functionality, loss of all data is a huge issue and others do not provide any other substantial functionality to warrant a change.

For our database, Marketo was actually the cheapest of Act On (AUD $-4k - +2k), Pardot and Hubspot being $8k more --> then there is onboarding, training and rebuilding costs.

Hubspot, Pardot and Act On all have different sections for each element, email, landing page, workflows etc. Whereas Marketo's programs enable cloning of similar programs, saving time and all elements of that program is in one place. Lead nurturing capability and customer journey is also a big plus for us.

Hubspot blog functionality is great! And if we were implementing from scratch, it may have been a contender.

I would be nervous implementing Pardot, with no added functionality benefit and SFDC sync poor.

Act On are still a bit immature, lacking functionality and didn't have an office or much presence in Australia. They did have some kind of account based marketing functionality.

I think once you have gone Marketo, it's hard to go back!

[Anonymous]

Hi Vanessa,

Can you elaboarte on the poor SFDC sync with Pardot? We have a very custom Salesforce instance and are currently using Marketo. We were acquired and our parent company is looking to get onto Marketing Cloud and/or Pardot (they currently use Exact Target). We have been challenged to compare Marketo and Pardot/Marketing Cloud in case we were to mirgrate over as well so the entire organization is onto one platform.

We heard that by using Salesforce Marketing Cloud you can integrate multiple Salesforce instances to one Marketing CLoud instance. Our parent company has 1 instance of Salesforce, and we have a second. That was a very appealing feature of Marketing Cloud that my boss liked. Has anyone had experience with that before?

Also for the others who commented with experience on Pardot can you elaborate on your experience syncing to SFDC as well, thank you! Grace Brebner​, Phillip Wild​, Daniel Murray​, Betsy Landon​, Heidi Ramich​

[Phillip_Wild]

Hi Amanda,

I haven't used Pardot myself so I'm probably not in the best position to comment. But overall, the idea of paying for both Pardot AND SFMC in order to get the full functionality of Marketo doesn't seem to make sense to me. Not sure how those costs could stack up. However, maybe you don't need all the B2C functionality of SFMC (eg. pushing audiences to Facebook) or the B2B functionality of Pardot (drips).

[gergana]

Since it has been 7 years since this post was created, I wanted to revive this post and know your opinion on the various marketing automation tools today, as all the tools have evolved in the meantime. Specifically, I am interested in a comparison between Pardot and Marketo. What are your thoughts on these? For those who have used both tools recently, what are the features you can't do without in Marketo and those in Pardot? Are there things that can't be done on Pardot or are much more complicated, where Marketo excels instead, and vice versa?