What are the challenges/benefit of using gravity form instead of marketo forms?

[Sant_Singh_Rath]

Recently our stakeholder told us that now they want to use gravity forms in our wordpress pages and we have to do integration between gravity forms and marketo through zapier. I am afraid that they will work similar to marketo forms? Does anyone have any pro and cos of using these forms?
1. Does this sync works on the basis of filled out form trigger?
2. Is it gonna check the duplicate leads before pushing it to marketo?

3. Will we be able to build the report on the basis of form fill out?

Any help with this will be really appreciated.

Thanks,
Sant

[SanfordWhiteman · Accepted solution]

Using Zapier (and by extension the REST API) creates a ready-made Denial of Service vulnerability. It is not for use in a professional environment.

In addition, no, you will not see any Filled Out Form activities in Marketo. Leads can be deduped on Email Address... so at least there's that.

However, what you can (and should) do is use a visible Gravity Forms form in conjunction with the Forms JS (browser) API to submit a hidden Marketo form. This would be the best of both worlds and have acceptable scale. And your Filled Out Form activities would appear as usual.

[Sant_Singh_Rath]

Thanks Sanford Whiteman​. This information is really helpful.

[Elliott_Lowe1]

Records added to Marketo via the API (also via salesforce.com, New lead, etc.) are not automatically deduped using the email address. For that you will need to either have your API call check for an existing record with the same email address and update, rather than create a new record. If you don't do that, you will need to use a third-party app such as the RingLead DMS webhook to identify duplicate records when they are created and merge them with existing records.

[SanfordWhiteman]

Records added to Marketo via the API (also via salesforce.com, New lead, etc.) are not automatically deduped using the email address.

Sure they are, just use the right endpoint + parameters. Push Lead, ​for example, dedupes on email address when the lookupField is email. You don't need a separate API call, that would be an even worse DoS hole.

[yvonne_m_h]

Sanford, for this solution, would we still have to create each individual form in Marketo as well as Gravity Forms for there to be a 1:1 sync? 

[Jo_Pitts1]

@yvonne_m_h , technically no you don't, but if you want to trigger campaigns off specific forms being filled then yes you will need individual Marketo forms for each Gravity form.

I'm just very uncertain why you'd go down the gravity form path? 

FWIW There is now a Wordpress plug in that links Gravity Forms and Marketo.  Have a search for it.  There is a post on here (by me) about it. It works reasonably well.

Cheers

Jo