Pardot vs Marketing Cloud- Choose Wisely and Do Your Research
Updated May 20, 2019

Pardot vs Marketing Cloud- Choose Wisely and Do Your Research

Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 3 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Software Version

Enterprise

Overall Satisfaction with Pardot

I work at a small non-profit with a very specific niche audience and a small marketing team of 2 people. We selected Pardot for marketing automation over Marketing Cloud. Our use case was for building journeys for both new and existing B2B and B2C customers to deliver a consistent customer experience every time and automate some of the manual processes that often times weren't getting done on a timely basis due to capacity issues often experienced by smaller organizations. We also wanted something to help support lead generation and our developing sales team. We needed it to be user-friendly and to integrate well into our Salesforce CRM.

Pros

  • Lead scoring for large sales organizations would be very useful.

Cons

  • 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.
  • We spent several months and lots of money working with a outside integration partner, only to find out the journey we were trying to automate couldn't really be done and was better suited for Marketing Cloud. We ended up cancelling and switching to Marketing Cloud.
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.
Less than 10,000
Both
We found Pardot to be limiting and ended up switching to Marketing Cloud. With the exception of the lead scoring and lead grading, Marketing Cloud can do everything that Pardot can do and integrates better with Salesforce if you are using Salesforce as your CRM. From the email builder and options for testing to how the data is mapped over and used out of Salesforce, we found we had to do a lot of custom work-arounds to get the product to work for our use case. Pardot doesn't seem to get the same amount of resources and attention as Marketing Cloud and I question the commitment to keeping it around long-term.

Salesforce Marketing Cloud Feature Ratings

5.0
WYSIWYG email editor
4
Dynamic content
6
Ability to test dynamic content
1
Landing pages
7
A/B testing
Not Rated
Mobile optimization
6
Email deliverability reporting
6
List management
Not Rated
Triggered drip sequences
Not Rated
5.0
Lead nurturing automation
Not Rated
Lead scoring and grading
Not Rated
Data quality management
5
Automated sales alerts and tasks
Not Rated
Not Rated
Calendaring
Not Rated
Event/webinar marketing
Not Rated
1.0
Social sharing and campaigns
1
Not Rated
Dashboards
Not Rated
Standard reports
Not Rated
Custom reports
Not Rated
2.5
API
4
Role-based workflow & approvals
4
Customizability
1
Integration with Salesforce.com
1

Evaluating Pardot and Competitors

Yes - We upgraded from a basic version of Marketing Cloud Email Studio to gain the journey building and automation. We also wanted full integeration with our Salesforce CRM.
  • Price
  • Product Features
  • Product Usability
  • Third-party Reviews
We wanted it to be very user-friendly and easy to learn for our small marketing team. We didn't want something super complicated.
We were pushed to buy Pardot over Marketing Cloud by our account executive. There was not a proper demo or evaluation of all our different use cases and we ended up having to switch to Marketing Cloud to automate our first journey as Pardot couldn't do it. It seems Salesforce doesn't do a great job of spending the time you need in order to thoroughly evaluate the product. They want to invest a minimal amount of time in order to get the sale so do your own research and ask for reviews from other clients using both Pardot and Marketing Cloud.

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