Marketo Engage vs. Salesforce Pardot: Which Marketing Automation Platform Is Right for You?

August 2021: This article has been updated with features and functionality made available after the original publish date of November 2020.

Since BDO Digital’s Demand Generation Group provides services around all of the major B2B marketing automation (MA) solutions (Marketo Engage, Salesforce Pardot, Oracle Eloqua, and HubSpot Marketing Hub), marketers often ask us for help evaluating which platform is the best fit for their business. The answer is that there isn’t a one-size-fits-all solution. The right platform is the one that can both support your business needs today and, more importantly, grow with you as your team and marketing strategy mature over time.

We wanted to provide marketers with a comprehensive look at how the various platforms stack up, so we dug in on two fronts: 1) I interviewed our Solutions Architects who are working within these platforms to support our clients; and 2) DemandGen CEO David Lewis — now Partner/Principal at BDO Digital — took the question directly to marketers on LinkedIn to gather real-world feedback on Marketo Engage vs. Salesforce Pardot and Marketo Engage vs. Oracle Eloqua.

In this post, we boil down the feedback we received on Marketo Engage vs. Salesforce Pardot into seven key differentiators to consider when determining which solution is a better fit for your organization.

In a hurry? Below is a quick snapshot for reference:

1. Scoring

Salesforce Pardot offers a dynamic lead scoring and grading methodology. This enables users to develop scoring criteria to measure value of marketing assets, and grading to build several ideal customer profiles. You can incorporate external activities like trade show demo requests and frequency or recency of interactions into your scoring model with Salesforce Pardot. The depth and dynamism of the Pardot-Salesforce integration enables marketers to develop scoring and grading programs that leverage both marketing data and sales data in ways that other MAPs are not able to, due to the native integration between Pardot and Salesforce.

Marketo Engage lead scoring capabilities are completely customizable. They can start simple with a one-dimensional behavior or demographic point value scoring model and develop into a more complex, multi-dimensional lead grading model. With Marketo Engage, you can score all buyer interactions, including external activities, as well as prioritize scoring based on frequency and recency of interactions. While it is not as easy to get started with lead scoring in Marketo Engage, less mature organizations can be confident that they will not outgrow the platform’s lead scoring capabilities as they move up the marketing maturity curve and more mature organizations will be able to operationalize the sophisticated lead scoring models they already have in place.

2. Lifecycle

While Salesforce Pardot allows marketers to quickly setup a lead lifecycle, the out-of-the-box lifecycle is rigid and provides a one-size-fits-all set of predefined funnel stages, definitions, and conversion rules with basic lifecycle reporting capabilities. This means that the lifecycle cannot be customized to align with the sales model a more mature organization may already have in place.

However, it’s important to remember that Pardot is not a standalone platform. It exists within Salesforce and offers more customization through that relationship. This approach makes it possible for marketers to supplement the out-of-the-box funnel using custom lead stages in Salesforce. Each stage can be mapped back into Pardot and used for segmentations, automations, and more. That information can then be used to build reports and dashboards in Salesforce that align with your company or organization’s sales model:

Lead lifecycle in Salesforce Pardot

Marketo Engage gives marketers the ability to tailor funnel stages and conversion rules to align with their organization’s sales model. Its integration capabilities with Salesforce enable Sales and Marketing to align on funnel stage definitions and lead ownership. More in-depth lifecycle reporting enables Marketing to set follow-up SLAs with Sales and report on stage movement and number of days spent at each stage:

Lead lifecycle in Marketo Engage

3. Segmentation

Due to Pardot’s native integration with Salesforce, Pardot provides deep segmentation capabilities. The integration enables users to leverage Salesforce data in addition to Pardot data to create broad or narrow segmentation lists. However, there are limitations. For example, Pardot is not able to provide segmentation on specific email actions, sends, or opens. This can be achieved using other Pardot tools such as tags to indicate that a specific email was sent, and Custom Redirects to track clicks associated to the email:

Segmentation in Salesforce Pardot

Marketo Engage also offers complex segmentation capabilities, not only on data shared across MA and CRM platforms, but also on engagement, such as email opens, web visits, forms submissions, event attendance, etc. You can segment prospects using a holistic view of buyer engagement across both campaigns and channels, and you can build out marketing strategy with follow-up campaigns and lead nurturing programs based on specific engagement:

Segmentation in Marketo Engage

4. Reporting

Reporting is available for Pardot in the Pardot Lightning App, on page layouts in Salesforce, and in Analytics Studio using B2BMA and B2BMA Plus. The reports in Pardot are standard table-based reports.

The reports in Salesforce are called Engagement History Dashboards. They are created using elements from Analytics Studio. These dashboards are dynamic and can be added to Leads, Contacts, Accounts, Opportunities, and Campaigns. Each dashboard element can be edited to home in on dates, assets, and campaign names.

B2BMA and B2BMA Plus are best-in-class analytics and reporting tools that seamlessly blend data from both Pardot and Salesforce. It comes out of the box with five pre-built dashboards. Those dashboards can be shared across the organization:

Reporting in Salesforce Pardot

Marketo Engage also delivers advanced reporting and dashboarding capabilities with Marketo Performance Insights. Marketers can see what is working at each stage in the revenue lifecycle, optimize based on these insights, and easily share results with the rest of the organization. Intuitive, visual dashboards quickly show which programs and campaigns are driving revenue:

Reporting in Marketo Engage

With Marketo Revenue Explorer, you can build custom reports and dashboards for different roles in the organization to home in on what is most important to them. Marketing Managers can track email performance engagement by day and time to optimize performance, while an executive-level dashboard can be customized to show Marketing’s influence on Revenue.

5. Productivity

In 2020, Salesforce Pardot rolled out a new and significantly improved email builder that includes drag-and-drop functionality. The new email builder is only available to those in Pardot Lightning, and its current iteration is limited to use in sending list emails (however, future releases will include the ability to build different types of email):

New Email Builder in Salesforce Pardot (Lightning Only)

For those not in Pardot Lightning, the current email builder is more rigid. Creating a new template from scratch requires custom HTML (and usually the services of an email developer). If you make changes to an existing Salesforce Pardot template, those changes will not be automatically applied to any emails you have already created based on that template:

Classic Email Builder in Salesforce Pardot

The “classic” Pardot email builder lacks certain functionality that has existed in Marketo and HubSpot for several years. The release of the new builder is welcome news as it shows that Salesforce is aware of the issue and is investing in improving the product to bring it in line with its competitors.

Marketo Engage provides an intuitive drag-and-drop interface for building campaign assets. Marketers can easily create different visuals and layouts by dragging and dropping different modules into an email or landing page and then updating the content, images, and hyperlinks — eliminating support from web developers. With Marketo Engage templates, tokens, and snippets (shared content), marketers can clone programs, create unique email and landing page layouts, and add personalization quickly and efficiently. These capabilities all help marketers be more productive:

Asset Builder in Marketo Engage

6. Account-Based Marketing

Salesforce Pardot is well-suited for organizations running complex Account-Based Marketing (ABM) campaigns. Because of the native integration with Salesforce, users can tap into a lot of account-level data for the purposes of segmentation and automation. Engagement Studio in Pardot enables users to build complex, multi-step drip campaigns that leverage various account-level details from Salesforce. Pardot has also recently rolled out enhanced Account-Based Marketing reporting functionality on the Account page layout in Salesforce:

ABM Reporting in Salesforce

There is also a second reporting tool called B2B Marketing Analytics. That tool, which lives in Analytics Studio in Salesforce, includes an ABM Dashboard template:

ABM Dashboard in Analytics Studio in Salesforce

Marketo Engage also helps more mature marketing organizations operationalize and activate their ABM strategies with built-in lead-to-account matching, account targeting, account scoring, multi-channel account nurturing, and handoff to Sales. With the Marketo Engage ABM module, you can create target account lists, monitor newly acquired leads for each account, trigger personalized messaging, and track each engagement in Marketo and through to your CRM:

ABM Module in Marketo Engage

7. Sales Enablement

Salesforce Pardot shares engagement data directly with Salesforce, including Creation Date, Last Activity, Engagement History, and Google Analytics tracking data (if any):

Engagement Data in Salesforce

This data is also available to sales users on the Salesforce page layouts in the form of dashboards:

Engagement Dashboard in Salesforce

Another sales enablement element of Pardot is Salesforce Engage. This tool lives in Salesforce Sales Cloud, but it is a Pardot product. Salesforce Engage leverages Pardot data to provide sales users with a real-time view of their lead/contact’s Pardot activity. Salesforce Engage bridges the gap between Marketing and Sales, enabling the marketing team to provide the sales team with the assets they need to execute their own campaigns. Once sales users have filtered their Prospects into desired groups, they can construct and run their own email campaigns for the target audience using Salesforce Engage Campaigns. Salesforce Engage also gives sales an easy-to-use interface to view how their sales prospects are interacting with marketing material:

Engagement Data in Salesforce Engage

Marketo Engage tracks engagement and identifies specific behavior through Interesting Moments. Visual indicators of fit and engagement give sellers immediate visibility into buyer behavior in the CRM, which they can easily act on by adding contacts to specific campaigns and sending emails directly from the CRM. Sales reps can also subscribe to real-time feeds notifying them when their leads or contacts are actively engaging with their content:

Engagement Data in Marketo Engage

Your path to digital transformation is unique

These seven key differentiators tend to be what sets Marketo Engage and Salesforce Pardot apart for most of our clients.

Salesforce Pardot offers depth and breadth of interconnectivity with Salesforce Sales Cloud. In many ways, Pardot is Salesforce. It is an application that lives within Salesforce Lightning. And starting February 15, 2021 it is no longer possible to log into Pardot without Salesforce login credentials. Pardot can’t be looked at as a standalone application because it is so intertwined with Salesforce Sales Cloud.

Marketo Engage is a more customizable standalone platform that can also support larger organizations and more sophisticated go-to-market strategies. Marketo Engage can grow with less mature organizations as they become more sophisticated and move up the marketing maturity curve. However, with flexibility comes complexity, and it can take more time and expertise to properly set up Marketo Engage.

Which platform is right for your organization will depend on the size of your organization, your current level of marketing maturity, and whether you have plans to scale and use more sophisticated features in the future. For long-time BDO Digital Demand Generation Group client Global Atlantic Financial Group, moving from Salesforce Pardot to Marketo Engage was the right choice as they moved up the marketing maturity curve. But that decision may not be appropriate for every organization. As David pointed out in his LinkedIn post, “It’s less about the company size and more about go-to-market approach and requirements.”

Get the most out of your current platform — or make the switch

The Demand Generation Group at BDO Digital has supported clients on the four major B2B MA platforms for years and we have a team of certified Marketo Engage, Salesforce Pardot, Oracle Eloqua, and HubSpot Marketing Hub specialists standing by to help.

Considering which MA platform is right for you? DemandGen offers an in-depth Marketing Automation Assessment and tools like our helpful guide, “5 Steps to Optimizing Your Marketing Automation Instance.” Once you find the right fit, you can turn to our team for deployment, migration, and consulting services as well as a variety of lead management framework optimization, training, and enablement service offerings to make sure you’re getting the most value from your investment.

Did we miss any features or capabilities you find especially beneficial in either platform? Help other marketers make an informed decision by commenting below!

After more than a dozen years in product management and product marketing, Anita Covelli shifted gears in 2009 and moved into the world of alliances and partnerships. She initially cut her teeth while building a partner program from the ground up at webinar and conferencing provider ReadyTalk. Then, she moved on to help scale and grow the AppCloud technology partner program at Oracle Marketing Cloud. In mid-2017, Anita joined DemandGen to activate and drive value from the great relationships the team has built over the years in the marketing technology community. Now, she heads up Alliances for the Demand Generation Group at BDO Digital.

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