Pardot Reviews

We moved from Act-On to Pardot almost a year ago. The way Pardot integrates with Salesforce and is able to report on the communications really drew us to change. We enjoyed the customization of the emails and the easier set up of the emails. Both products are similar but as stated, the reporting and processes were positive to my organization.

The upside of Act-On is the ability to make lists and learn the system on your own. Pardot requires much more training on the front end.

We originally looked at both Marketo and Pardot for our marketing automation. They were considered to be almost identical products. The main reason for selecting Pardot was that we were already using salesforce and it made sense not to add too many different systems from different suppliers.

I found Marketo to have stronger, more granular functionality around automation. However, Pardot is MUCH easier to use, and thus more manageable for one or two people. You don't need to have a developer on your team to be able to put out some great looking content. Pardot is also cheaper than Marketo.

Compared to Autopilot, I found Pardot to be much more reliable and to have a broader variety of proper Marketing automation functionality. Autopilot had some really innovative features that Pardot does not have like being able to trigger custom greeting cards being printed and sent to a lead. Pardot's emails had a slightly lower rate of deliverability (like 0.5% less), but the automation and workflows in Pardot were significantly better. I found the data sync with Salesforce in Autopilot was not at all what I wanted, works much better in Pardot.

As a user of Infusionsoft and SharpSpring, I wouldn't say that Pardot is the best. Infusionsoft is better overall. Pardot is used by one client of ours. Pardot's lack of good email builder is what puts it lower on the totem pole. It is a bit stronger with reporting and connections.

Pardot was less expensive than HubSpot or Marketo. Compared to Act-On, it was similar in price but had more features and the integration with Salesforce was better and natively supported. Compared to SharpSpring, it doesn't have the same strong features, but the integration with Salesforce, again, was stronger. Overall, Pardot isn't the best choice out of these, but it comes down to which platform your existing team is most familiar with and how much support the platform will give your team without billing extra.

I think overall Pardot is a more complete product. It is definitely easier to implement, learn and use. Infusionsoft's learning curve is quite tough. So I really saw how we assimilated Pardot easier and faster than Infusionsoft. The fact that is deeply integrated with Salesforce is a huge differentiator for a B2B model where you need a sales team to finish the job.

Maybe Pardot's biggest disadvantage against competitors is pricing. Pardot is more expensive, at least than Infusionsoft. Way more than double. Can't remember the exact number but I'm sure Pardot is a few times more expensive than Infusionsoft.

Pardot is a player in that it is one of the older products on the forefront of email marketing. This is good and bad in that it has been established but bad in that it isn't as robust as some of the other products on the market. Adobe can be good but is new to the market and thus there are some reservations you have to take when looking to implement it.

Pardot is a VERY flexible tool. Most have thought of it as a very adolescent tool, but it holds its own against Marketo in the VAST majority of areas. You DON'T need a near full-time developer to keep it working (unlike Marketo). Act-on was limited in what it could do, HubSpot was overly simple and limiting compared to Pardot's flexibility...

If there is a direct competitor, it is Marketo.

As Salesforce users, Pardot's integration was native and, of course, much more aligned to the Salesforce. We have been able to improve our reporting and rely on our data more since the two are in the same tech platform. With the new Pardot Lightning App, we've been able to do this even more. However, HubSpot's social features do outweight Pardot's.

We use Mailchimp for email campaigns that are not sales-specific, i.e., press releases. While Mailchimp is good for tracking opens, click-throughs, embedding photos, embedding videos, etc., Pardot works best when integrated both with Google Analytics as well as Salesforce. It has more robust reporting against the customer/prospect journey beyond email alone.

Pardot is a good tool for medium-sized and smaller sized companies. Working with larger companies I have seen more lean towards Marketo. I have also worked with e-commerce brands that have no use for a marketing automation tool that connects to Salesforce. Starting at a company with the cash and the right resources, Pardot is a great way to go.

Marketo is too complex. What takes 1 step in Pardot takes 6 in Marketo.

Acton has a crappy interface and isn't intuitive

Pardot is a weaker version of Marketing Cloud. I would only recommend it if you really need the lead scoring and nurturing. That is probably the only leg up it has over Marketing Cloud. We stopped using Pardot and switched over to Marketing Cloud.

The decision for our organization to switch to Pardot was a global decision and was not very popular. Countries in our company who were using Marketo were very happy and we seem to have limited ourselves by going with Pardot. Overall, Pardot works fine, but Marketo has much more capability and does everything better than Pardot.

If you use salesforce for your sales team, Pardot is the best option because it integrates the best. It allows you to notify sales team members more easily and reports in SalesForce are easier to create. HubSpot offers a better all-around marketing solution, but doesn't integrate as well, which can cause confusion for the sales team trying to follow up on inbounds.

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 from Marketo, it was nice to use software with a visual editor.

While Pardot's integration with Salesforce, segmentation functionality, and automation rules are much more robust than any of its competitors, the email builder lacks even compared to free versions of marketing automation software. For us, the integration and being able to customize communications based on clean data was the most important factor is choosing Pardot. Until Pardot improves its email builder, we can always build email templates outside of Pardot and import the HTML.

Pardot is very similar to HubSpot in that it is easy to use and customize. They are also comparable in price. The main decision maker in this regard will be what you're using for a CRM. Pardot is much more intuitive than Microsoft products and, with unlimited users, makes it easy for the entire team to see what's happening on the sales and marketing side of the business.

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 always available to help with any issues.

I haven't used other products.

We originally used Marketo but switched when Salesforce bought Pardot. We expected the Salesforce/Pardot integration to be better than Marketo but that was not the case for many years. However, now I think the integration is as good as Marketo and having both products (Salesforce and Pardot) under the same brand gives us more confidence that the Pardot/SF link will continue to improve and offer new features.

Pardot has a clean UI and UX and was very simple to use for the scope of our marketing team. Based on the size of our organization and team, Pardot had enough functionality for what we needed to do. However, if our company were to scale we would probably move to a more robust marketing automation tool like Eloqua or Marketo.

Pardot works well with Salesforce and can handle our organization globally.

I've used both Infusionsoft and Marketo in previous roles to aid in marketing automation. Infusionsoft is much more small business and is great for that market. Marketo, although appropriate for a variety of company sizes, is less user friendly and requires more developed skillsets for managers of the system. There is no same ease of creating landing pages and emails, for example, as there is with Pardot, where inexperienced/non-designers and non-coders on your marketing team can make beautiful pages and emails that are mobile-friendly and dynamic.

Pardot is a much more robust product than Act-On. We had used Act-On back when we were just getting into the marketing automation use and Act-On was a very young company just starting out, so the fit was good for both sides. As we started requiring more and more, it seemed that Pardot was a much better fit due to the sophistication of its various capabilities as well as the roadmap for improvements. And it fit within our budget!