Pardot Reviews

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.

Segmenting beyond two variables is not easy, or well-supported.

The UI and navigating through the platform can be time-consuming.

Doesn't integrate too well with other data third-party apps.

Too many features are only available at higher levels.

Doesn't have as robust an email integration tool like HubSpot.

UI can be somewhat complex.

Requires careful attention to naming syntax when creating new campaigns etc.

Pardot is not easy to teach others and takes multiple hours to truly teach to someone in the organization so they can understand the platform as a whole.

My organization was trying to set up an automate campaign based on birthdays and send these emails out based on their birthday day going a month out, a week out and on the day of. This was very difficult to achieve and the customer service could not provide assistance. The answer came from the Pardot blog and other users working together. Birthday campaigns are used by many non profits and this should be fixed so it is easier to implement.

Creating lists in Pardot for you to send emails to can be difficult and takes time. There are many steps when trying to create certain lists of an audience.

The interface looks a little dated

File storage capacity is low and needs constant management

Pricey. I work for a nonprofit so it was a big decision to go with Pardot but it is one of the best in its class.

You must have the capacity/time/resources to actually use the functionalities and features. Otherwise, it could be a waste of money.

Lots of nuances are present - Pardot is great, but there's a TON of little things that it probably should do better being a product that's been around as long as it has. For example, You cannot create drip program emails without an unsubscribe link! That means that if you've automated the emails that go from your Sales team when someone fills out a form asking for a demo, it WILL have the ugly unsubscribe link and additional address tag that Pardot emails require.

You cannot have automation that will set the value of one field to be equal to another field or variable - only pre-defined values can be used. For example, you cannot have a date field set to equal today + 180 days (useful for Canadian Anti-Spam Law automation). You cannot set one field to equal the value of another field.

As nice as the email builder is, it's certainly no MailChimp. It would be nicer to have better compatibility with mail clients out of the box and a larger variety of templates. The email builder isn't drag-and-drop like other dedicated email systems, so you're usually stuck having to go into the code and cut+paste the section into the new area where you want it to go.

There's no option to automate personal emails sent from a team members Gsuite or Outlook 365 account!? Nowadays Marketing is playing a role that goes much farther down the sales cycle - if you are automating emails from your sales team, the email is still sent from Pardot's email server (which has mediocre deliverability compared to Gsuite or Office 365). A simple addition of the Zapier-like ability to trigger emails from a salesperson's actual email account would be a gigantic benefit.

No built-in calendar functionality like that offered by Hubspot. I love Pardot, but it does feel like they've been slipping in their product development as I haven't noticed any major addition to the platform that has made a difference to my workflows in probably two years.

Email builder. At an agency where we've used plenty of email tools, Pardot is the farthest behind. While their testing functions are robust, the builder itself is behind the times. The templates are often not mobile responsive and requires a decent amount of HTML hard coding. There's no modern block editor either.

List management is more cumbersome than other tools. It's difficult to manage a big group of contacts all at once. There's only ever a few options like removing/adding to list or tagging. There's not an easy way to mass update contacts.

Contact search and segmentation is not great. Other tools have advanced search filters that make it easy to narrow in on contacts and see how many fit a certain criteria. Pardot doesn't really have that. The only way to do such a thing is to make a dynamic list, but the list of lists can get cluttered real fast.

Visual builder for email and existing templates are clunky and hard to use without development knowledge

Integration with Salesforce still requires manual field mappings and creating properties separately in both systems so that sync will work properly

Workflows are linear, and it's difficult to use if/and statements based on custom property values

The implementation can be a little rough. Unlike other modern systems, like HubSpot, Pardot will require more attention, in both implementation and configuration. Your team will have to study and learn how to use it. It will take time to get it right. I highly recommend you do this process with an implementer.

SMS could be more thought out and engaging.

Email is not as sophisticated as in Marketing Cloud.

Users are not as easily up to speed as they are with Marketing Cloud.

The whole experience seems a bit piece meal.

Landing pages -there isn't a marketing automation platform that does this well. We use a 3rd party (and it is far from the worst).

Reporting... it's hit or miss here.

Better personalization - the "dynamic" part of it is great in theory, but like its main competitor seriously lacks.

Attribution - it only allows for a single type of attribution for campaigns... we have to use other platforms.

Not the best for ABM (but that is a Salesforce FAILURE, that overflows into Pardot).

Social media listening

Social media management

Social media monitoring

B2C marketing automation

Expensive tool.

Lack of automated reporting.

Requires a fair amount of user training to gain benefits of using the tool.

Some things are called one thing in pardot and another in Salesforce. This is due to the way Pardot was before Salesforce acquired it.

Price is high. Contracts can be long. There is a lot of volatility in marketing, teams change, people come and go. It can be difficult to want to keep a software like pardot for 5 years.

Email building tool is not the best.

Email nurture campaigns get really hairy really fast.

To this day cannot find a good use for folders.

They need more nuanced roles.

The form customization is a bit limited.

We found it didn't integrate as well with Salesforce as we wanted it to and was not great.

Building your email templates was not user-friendly or easy to customize. Content builder in Marketing Cloud is much better and user-friendly.

Great for top of the funnel and to only do lead nurturing- I wouldn't recommend it for marketing/communications to existing customers.

Lack of automated tracking redirects is frustrating

Things that should be easy to edit on an email or a landing page are sometimes very difficult for no rhyme or reason

While it's easy to organize, if your folders go down below the fold you have to scroll up to see everything.

Reporting - I have yet to see an automation tool with strong reporting, but Pardot's is really lacking here. The reports are not very customizable, you can't filter out for things like previously imported leads, and their landing page/form reports are EXTREMELY unreliable.

Support - Honestly, trying to get someone on the phone is not only difficult, it is expensive. They just merged their pardot and salesforce support teams and even deciphering their emails can be difficult.

UX/UI - Similar to SalesForce, it is not very intuitive, they use marketing definitions that don't make sense (campaign), it isn't the prettiest or easiest system for landing page or email creation. Their navigation is really really bad.

You have to pay extra if you want good customer support.

Sometimes the platform can be a little sluggish when trying to upload or download data lists.

Expensive. They are one of the more expensive platforms out there.

The general customer support (ticketing system) is horrible. I wait, on average, 10 days for any sort of response.

The email builder lacks basic functionality. We have to complete workarounds for nearly everything other than simple text blocks, including centering text and adding buttons. Even with our old email system (which was not robust at all), those functions were built in and easy to use. The template builder is clunky and hard to use. We are waiting patiently for a drag-and-drop email builder!

There are certain email completion actions that don't currently exist and should. For example, when a prospect clicks on a link in an email, we cannot notify the account's support rep. Salesforce could not provide a workaround for this.

Extremely pricey - not good for small companies

Solution only B2B focus

Not many integration options

Implementation takes a lot of time.

Data migration from the current system to Salesforce was not easy.

It would be nice if excluding prior opens was handled in a more obvious fashion (I still have not figured this out since taking over the primary responsibility of the tool from another employee several months ago).

I would like to see somewhat more sensitive search features, particularly by words.