Adobe Campaign vs. Salesforce Marketing Cloud

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
Adobe Campaign
Score 8.1 out of 10
N/A
Adobe acquired Neolane in July 2013 and later re-named the product Adobe Campaign. Adobe Campaign provides both marketing automation and marketing resource management functionality such as spend & financial management, workflow, and asset management.N/A
Salesforce Marketing Cloud
Score 7.8 out of 10
N/A
Salesforce Marketing Cloud Account Engagement (formerly Pardot) is a marketing automation platform. Its key features include lead management, lead generation, social selling, and email marketing.
$1,250
per month
Pricing
Adobe CampaignSalesforce Marketing Cloud
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
Growth
$1,250
/month/up to 10,000 contacts billed annually
Plus
$2,500
/month/up to 10,000 contacts billed annually
Advanced
$4,000
/month/up to 10,000 contacts billed annually
Premium
$15,000
/month/up to 10,000 contacts billed annually
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Adobe CampaignSalesforce Marketing Cloud
Free Trial
NoNo
Free/Freemium Version
NoNo
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoYes
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
Additional DetailsSalesforce Engage, an additional offering for sales and marketing alignment, is priced at $50 per month per user.
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
Adobe CampaignSalesforce Marketing Cloud
Considered Both Products
Adobe Campaign
Chose Adobe Campaign
Haven't used Salesforce Marketing Cloud much.
Chose Adobe Campaign
Adobe Campaign Standard has a lot of segmentation options out of the box and a lot better analytics. Pardot is a lot more listbased, where with Adobe Campaign, you can do complete customized segmentation, such as all permissions in base A who are currently customers of this …
Chose Adobe Campaign
Because it's pricey, I've played around with cheaper alternatives when I didn't have access to it through work, such as Infusionsoft, ONTRAPORT & Pardot Marketing Automation. I found that all of them lacked the consistency and tools I needed to create strong results and as …
Chose Adobe Campaign
As we tried to centralise the marketing automation platform within the enterprise, Adobe Campaign can plug into several instances of Salesforce.com for lead management queues. All other marketing automation platforms can only plug into one instance of Salesforce.com.

Adobe …
Chose Adobe Campaign
  • Easy to install
  • Free trails
  • Lesser cost as compared to others
Chose Adobe Campaign
Adobe Campaign improves your email marketing with personalized and contextually relevant messages. We use the native email capabilities in Adobe Campaign alongside our other marketing channels. With more complete data, it delivers better email personalization and improves our …
Chose Adobe Campaign
Adobe Campaign offers unmatched customization but is definitely the least intuitive and user-friendly marketing automation tool I have ever used. We selected Adobe Campaign because we use other Adobe Marketing Cloud Products (Analytics and Target) but the integration with those …
Salesforce Marketing Cloud
Chose Salesforce Marketing Cloud
Pardot is pretty much on the same level. We chose Pardot because it integrates directly with Salesforce. We already use Contentful for landing pages, so we weren't too worried about using Pardot's builder. I really liked the simplicity of the visual email workflows. Coming …
Chose Salesforce Marketing Cloud
As stated earlier, Pardot is definitely the leader in marketing automation. In comparison to other competitors, it's the most expensive, but it provides the most efficient data for larger organizations. While it can be difficult to onboard, the customer service is excellent and …
Top Pros
Top Cons
Features
Adobe CampaignSalesforce Marketing Cloud
Email & Online Marketing
Comparison of Email & Online Marketing features of Product A and Product B
Adobe Campaign
8.7
92 Ratings
12% above category average
Salesforce Marketing Cloud
6.4
137 Ratings
19% below category average
WYSIWYG email editor9.186 Ratings3.391 Ratings
Dynamic content9.392 Ratings5.5119 Ratings
Ability to test dynamic content9.587 Ratings4.979 Ratings
Landing pages8.484 Ratings5.890 Ratings
A/B testing8.788 Ratings8.5120 Ratings
Mobile optimization9.386 Ratings3.279 Ratings
Email deliverability reporting8.190 Ratings8.098 Ratings
List management6.692 Ratings9.395 Ratings
Triggered drip sequences9.681 Ratings9.366 Ratings
Lead Management
Comparison of Lead Management features of Product A and Product B
Adobe Campaign
6.7
6 Ratings
15% below category average
Salesforce Marketing Cloud
8.6
93 Ratings
10% above category average
Lead nurturing7.16 Ratings9.285 Ratings
Lead scoring and grading7.35 Ratings8.586 Ratings
Data quality management6.36 Ratings7.686 Ratings
Automated sales alerts and tasks6.05 Ratings9.181 Ratings
Campaign Management
Comparison of Campaign Management features of Product A and Product B
Adobe Campaign
8.3
86 Ratings
9% above category average
Salesforce Marketing Cloud
6.9
85 Ratings
9% below category average
Calendaring9.386 Ratings6.976 Ratings
Event/webinar marketing7.46 Ratings7.073 Ratings
Social Media Marketing
Comparison of Social Media Marketing features of Product A and Product B
Adobe Campaign
7.9
4 Ratings
5% above category average
Salesforce Marketing Cloud
6.9
68 Ratings
9% below category average
Social sharing and campaigns8.04 Ratings6.264 Ratings
Social profile integration7.74 Ratings7.521 Ratings
Reporting & Analytics
Comparison of Reporting & Analytics features of Product A and Product B
Adobe Campaign
8.5
92 Ratings
12% above category average
Salesforce Marketing Cloud
7.0
94 Ratings
7% below category average
Dashboards8.191 Ratings7.789 Ratings
Standard reports8.891 Ratings6.793 Ratings
Custom reports8.787 Ratings6.570 Ratings
Platform & Infrastructure
Comparison of Platform & Infrastructure features of Product A and Product B
Adobe Campaign
8.2
88 Ratings
8% above category average
Salesforce Marketing Cloud
7.2
93 Ratings
5% below category average
API8.779 Ratings7.065 Ratings
Role-based workflow & approvals9.382 Ratings7.062 Ratings
Customizability9.185 Ratings6.182 Ratings
Integration with Salesforce.com7.863 Ratings9.283 Ratings
Integration with Microsoft Dynamics CRM7.950 Ratings8.33 Ratings
Integration with SugarCRM6.56 Ratings5.44 Ratings
Best Alternatives
Adobe CampaignSalesforce Marketing Cloud
Small Businesses
SALESmanago
SALESmanago
Score 9.6 out of 10
SALESmanago
SALESmanago
Score 9.6 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
SALESmanago
SALESmanago
Score 9.6 out of 10
SALESmanago
SALESmanago
Score 9.6 out of 10
Enterprises
PFL Direct Mail Platform
PFL Direct Mail Platform
Score 9.4 out of 10
PFL Direct Mail Platform
PFL Direct Mail Platform
Score 9.4 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
Adobe CampaignSalesforce Marketing Cloud
Likelihood to Recommend
8.8
(97 ratings)
8.1
(295 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
8.4
(5 ratings)
9.8
(111 ratings)
Usability
8.8
(41 ratings)
8.8
(34 ratings)
Availability
7.0
(1 ratings)
10.0
(11 ratings)
Performance
7.0
(1 ratings)
9.6
(9 ratings)
Support Rating
8.3
(40 ratings)
4.0
(35 ratings)
In-Person Training
8.0
(1 ratings)
5.0
(4 ratings)
Online Training
8.0
(1 ratings)
8.1
(7 ratings)
Implementation Rating
8.0
(1 ratings)
3.0
(17 ratings)
Contract Terms and Pricing Model
8.1
(2 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Ease of integration
-
(0 ratings)
7.0
(2 ratings)
Product Scalability
-
(0 ratings)
9.8
(3 ratings)
Vendor post-sale
-
(0 ratings)
8.0
(2 ratings)
Vendor pre-sale
-
(0 ratings)
10.0
(2 ratings)
User Testimonials
Adobe CampaignSalesforce Marketing Cloud
Likelihood to Recommend
Adobe
Multi-Channel Campaign Management: I have found Adobe Campaign to be excellent for managing campaigns across multiple channels, including email, mobile, social media, and web. Its centralized platform allows me to plan, execute, and track campaigns effectively, making it ideal for organizations with diverse marketing channels. For example, when I was running a campaign to promote a new product launch across email, SMS, and social media channels, Adobe Campaign provided me with the tools to orchestrate and track the campaign seamlessly. I could ensure consistent messaging and a cohesive customer experience across different channels.
Read full review
Salesforce
Salesforce Marketing Cloud Social Studio is a very good option for publishing administration, following digital marketing campaings performance and results, social listening an monitoring your brand image in social media and other digital media. It has good features for engagement, but falls a little short for customer service. I'm surre it would work much better integrated with Salesforce as a CRM, but we use another CRM platform and it was not possible to integrate.
Read full review
Pros
Adobe
  • It allows me to capture leads through various sources, such as website forms or landing pages.
  • It offers a centralized repository where I can securely store and manage customer data, encompassing contact information, preferences, transaction records, and additional relevant data.
  • It provides robust analytics and reporting capabilities.
Read full review
Salesforce
  • Pardot enables you to set up different environments via the Pardot Business Unit feature, this is helpful for when decentralization is still needed, but you want all business units working with the same tool.
  • Pardot enables you to quickly and easily create automation rules that can clean the database retro-actively.
  • Pardot has the ability to have multiple lead scoring models run at the same time.
Read full review
Cons
Adobe
  • Adobe Campaign does not have a high enough sales intelligence to let us know which landing page format would be the most optimal for the proper development of our mass marketing operations, which in the long run would also help with customer collection.
  • Does not directly track the number of people who enter our website, beyond sending them automated messages depending on whether they entered a certain section of the site. This problem is important, because it does not allow us to get complete tracking results in that area.
  • The platform does not do social media marketing extensively enough to let us create dynamic evaluations on the results of interactions that are obtained within social networks, which creates a huge margin of error in our analytical results messages, and so we have stopped applying social marketing.
Read full review
Salesforce
  • Email templates and drafts are really confusing. I trained various people to create their own templates, but they consistently got confused between publishing a template or just saving a draft, and where they needed to go back to find it.
  • Their help process is broken, at least for our particular use case. Because we have an enterprise license for Salesforce (even though we had a separate license for Pardot) whenever I needed help with something, I'd get stuck down a rabbit hole and couldn't submit a ticket.
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Likelihood to Renew
Adobe
Once you go for Neolane you are a bit stuck with it, so we will most likely stay with Neolane. Cost of investment and training are the main factors at work here. We havesimply have invested too much in the product to stop using it after 2 years. That said, my score of 8 does not imply that the product is worthy of getting an 8 but reflects our willingness to renew. Given that upgrading to a new version will cost again a substantial sum, we most likely will keep using the current version we are on which is 6X.
Read full review
Salesforce
As of right now we have not seen any other program that integrates as seamlessly into our Salesforce platform. We have barely scratched the surface of all the features and use cases. It would be irresponsible to make a move to another platform in the near future. We have not come up against any limitations that would prompt a need to switch
Read full review
Usability
Adobe
Thanks to this tool we are taking more internal control of the creation and deployment of campaigns with less dependency on an ESP. We can pre-program marketing publications, being able to concentrate on the target audience. It helps me manage email campaigns with real-time tracking.
Read full review
Salesforce
You won't find another solution that has as many features as Salesforce Marketing Cloud Interaction Studio. We all know Salesforce, we all know how big they are and it's not for nothing... Their tools do most of the things you want, need and even imagine. Using it is complicated, but the usability is infinite.
Read full review
Reliability and Availability
Adobe
Aside from frequent error prompts, the program is quite dependable
Read full review
Salesforce
Upgrades and timing of the upgrades were communicated well and planned during off hours for our work. If we did have a campaign scheduled during that time, it would kick-off after the system was back active. There were a few unplanned system down times, but it was a rare occurrence and those times were also short in duration.
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Performance
Adobe
No answers on this topic
Salesforce
Though the make up of MA apps is not built this way today, it would be nice to see them become more real-time. The integration between Salesforce and Pardot is not a true real-time integration. If I modify something in Salesforce, those changes are not automatically reflected in Pardot immediately. There is a delay of about 15 minutes before the systems sync. This delay, although not long, is less than ideal We would love the systems to be integrated real time such that changes are propagated from one system to the other immediately.
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Support Rating
Adobe
Although there is a lot of material available on the internet to answer questions, I still feel a lack of commitment and delay in the responses of the support, but as a whole, it leaves nothing to be desired. I believe that, in the great majority, companies sin in the desired support, but we cannot generalize. But this one, in particular, has a wide range of specialists and well-qualified management, but I believe that it is not so bad.
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Salesforce
They're fast and knowledgeable. You will always know what's the status of your request and they usually follow up with phone calls to ask you questions or provide updates. Sometimes it takes them a couple of days to investigate, especially if you have custom "situations" like my company usually does but at least they are very good at managing time expectations.
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In-Person Training
Adobe
No answers on this topic
Salesforce
The trainers at the Pardot user conference (Elevate and Connections) were very knowledgeable and presented the material well. Again, the content was targeted to more of a new user audience, and was not really relevant for folks who had been using the product for 2+ years.
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Online Training
Adobe
No answers on this topic
Salesforce
Pardot's online training touches on all topics briefly and vaguely without much indepth exploration into how a final outcome could look, such as Nurturing Campaigns, Email templates, landing page templates, etc... The only true way to uncover Pardot's full capabilities is to have Front End design and coding experience. Without this key skill set, I would not recommend Pardot to another business.
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Implementation Rating
Adobe
No answers on this topic
Salesforce
From an IT perspective, once you set up the Javascript beacon and start collecting data there is a waiting game. During this time you can start labeling your site actions which can be labor intensive for a single person, but you don't really have the final end-users on the platform yet. We did a lot of training so users were experienced, but it wasn't until they had their first tasks to accomplish that they started using the system and had questions. I'd recommend setting up some immediate goals for an end-user to start segmenting for the purpose of displaying message campaigns so you can jump start end-user action.
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Alternatives Considered
Adobe
As we tried to centralise the marketing automation platform within the enterprise, Adobe Campaign can plug into several instances of Salesforce.com for lead management queues. All other marketing automation platforms can only plug into one instance of Salesforce.com. Adobe Campaign was also able to handle the complexity and challenges of our enterprise data which are a result of years of legacy, mergers and acquisitions and data aggregation.
Read full review
Salesforce
We had some scenarios and limitations on Oracle Data Cloud. With help of Salesforce, we were able to overcome most of those limitations. This made the work more efficient and productive as integration and providing Ad data to other parties became much more sophisticated and easy. This is helping the business in saving a lot of time and effort.
Read full review
Contract Terms and Pricing Model
Adobe
Not everything was great at all times. It was handled accordingly, pricing was reasonable for what was purchased. It was the best value on the market at the time of purchase.
Read full review
Salesforce
No answers on this topic
Scalability
Adobe
No answers on this topic
Salesforce
We had approximately 20,000 recipients of most email campaigns, with some higher amounts and some smaller campaigns. The tools is easy to use and the recipient list size is really not a factor in the complexity or work to create and email campaign. Our campaigns could just have easily been sent to many more people, with virtually no additional work.
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Return on Investment
Adobe
  • Talking about profits can be subjective if you don't take into account the periodic variations between net and gross profit margins, but fortunately with Adobe Campaign, it is easy to notice these differences quickly.
  • Results have always seemed relative to us, as they vary greatly depending on how much is invested.
Read full review
Salesforce
  • The ability to create sophisticated rules to personalize messages has helped us to create sophisticated rules to personalize messages.
  • The ability to track customer journey performance at every stage helped us to track the performance of customer journeys and make improvements.
  • The ability to quickly build and deploy complex customer journeys without the need for coding allowed us to deploy customer journeys faster and with fewer resources.
Read full review
ScreenShots

Salesforce Marketing Cloud Screenshots

Screenshot of Pardot Analytics - Pardot's reporting and analytics allow you to perform true revenue impact analysis and closed-loop reporting.Screenshot of Pardot Email Analytics - See the reach and impact of your email marketing efforts in real-time with advanced reporting and analytics by device, email client, and more.Screenshot of Pardot Forms and Landing Pages - Pardot's form and landing page builders allow you to turn online traffic to leads with targeted offers and content marketing.Screenshot of Pardot Email Marketing - Define lead nurturing flows via an intuitive interface that enables easy definition of the simplest or most complex segmented and targeted campaigns.