When enterprise teams evaluate marketing automation solutions, it often comes down to the Marketo vs Eloqua showdown. These two legacy platforms have a combined 40+ years on the market, but a lot has changed since their founding — not always for the better.
Once independent innovators, both platforms are now small pieces in the vast portfolios of tech giants Adobe and Oracle. And according to longtime customers, it shows: users report steep declines in service quality and user experience while costs continue to rise.
Don’t let legacy platforms rest on their laurels. Choosing the right marketing automation platform (MAP) makes a huge impact on your team’s performance — so let’s go beyond the usual feature comparisons and consider what real users and marketing automation experts have to say.
Advantages of Marketo vs Eloqua
Both platforms position themselves as enterprise powerhouses, but each has its distinct strengths and weaknesses. Marketo’s primary advantages over Eloqua are relative: it’s cheaper, and its learning curve isn’t quite as steep.
Eloqua is widely considered the most expensive MAP on the market and requires massive enterprise resources (like marketing ops, IT support, implementation specialists, and outside consultants) to implement over several months, plus weeks of training to learn campaign basics.
“Eloqua is not intuitive and rather hard to learn. It is a tool that needs to be known and managed by dedicated IT specialists.” – Irina M., Marketing Manager
Compared to Eloqua, Marketo is more affordable and easier to implement — but as we’ll discuss in a minute, that’s not saying much.
Advantages of Eloqua vs Marketo
While Eloqua’s complexity makes it harder to use, that’s also where it outperforms Marketo — supporting enterprise needs for multinational, multichannel, and multi-brand organizations.
“If you want to set up complex nurture workflows, Eloqua has the edge there. Its Campaign Canvas makes this process far easier than daisy-chaining together smart campaigns in Marketo. [Marketo’s] built-in nurture engagement programs are very basic and can only execute emails on a linear basis.” – G2 verified user
Since Eloqua comes with a hefty price tag, it’s probably not worth the investment for organizations that don’t require this level of complexity to achieve their marketing goals.
Features & Fine Print
Both platforms come with a lot of functionality, provided you pay for all the requisite top-tier packages and add-ons. But take these differences into consideration:
- Campaign building: Most users say Marketo’s Smart Campaigns are more straightforward but less flexible than Eloqua’s Campaign Canvas. Eloqua visualizes complex, multi-directional decision-based campaigns in one location, while Marketo requires breaking workflows into multiple smaller campaigns.
- Form capabilities: Marketo offers more flexibility with forms, allowing users to create and sort picklists directly without creating new objects. Eloqua requires creating separate picklists for each dropdown variation.
- Data management: Especially for Oracle users, Eloqua provides more robust data handling with unlimited API calls, while Marketo users face API limits and data synchronization challenges. However, Marketo offers more custom fields on lead records (Eloqua caps at 250).
Common Flaws
What do these platforms have in common? Customer complaints around total cost, support, and user experience.
1. Cost transparency
Both platforms come with significant costs beyond their already-expensive base subscriptions. Marketo’s pricing increases with database size and add-on features, while Eloqua limits core functionality and contact volumes at its lower pricing tiers. And both platforms’ complexity typically requires outside consultants and certified experts, driving up total cost of ownership.
“Marketo has a lot of pain points. The email and landing page editors are nearly useless and we have to employ outside tools to build templates which is an added expense… to get the full value we have hired consultants because Marketo support is not helpful – another added expense.” – Gabriella W.
“[Eloqua] training that’s worthwhile is very expensive. The platform itself is also quite costly for what you get compared to other similar platforms.” – G2 verified user, financial services
2. Strategic customer support
With each platform, customers complain that support — especially beyond entry-level troubleshooting — has noticeably declined post-acquisition. Adobe’s catch-all support teams lack marketing automation expertise, while Oracle’s revised portal-based system doesn’t win many fans.
“There have been times when I’d need to go back and forth with the [Marketo] agent in order to explain something again and again until they understand.” – Pavel I.
“The [Eloqua] customer success team has shown a significant decline over the last few years. We are a large account and with the constant re-org that occurs, we’ve lost the “white gloves” we have had for the last 12 years and have seen engagement only to “buy this, or that, or upgrade to this” but consistent unresponsiveness to our daily needs.” – Gartner reviewer, Sr. Manager of Marketing Automation
3. User experience
Since their acquisitions, both platforms show signs of neglect. Users report inconsistent interfaces, dated features, and a lack of response to longstanding feature requests. While Marketo may be marginally easier to use than Eloqua, both tools make even daily tasks unnecessarily complex.
“The [Eloqua] UI is inconsistent across the platform. It’s pretty obvious that there are some tools that haven’t been updated in a long time.” – Tyler Haire, marketing automation consultant
“Uploading and tracking files and images, email building, webinar events — everything lacks the intuitive user experience that many of Marketo’s competitors have.” – G2 verified user, information technology and services
Marketo vs Eloqua: The Final Verdict
Neither Marketo nor Eloqua deliver a user-friendly marketing automation solution, and both require significant investment in resource, training, and support.
But given these two legacy options, think about:
- Eloqua if you’re a large enterprise with complex multi-brand or multinational campaign needs, have dedicated IT resources, and can justify the highest price tag in marketing automation.
- Marketo if you need enterprise-grade capabilities but don’t require Eloqua’s level of complexity, and still have budget for specialists and add-on features to work around limitations.
The truth is, these legacy platforms no longer represent the latest and greatest in marketing automation. Rather than settling for dated interfaces and declining support, consider working with a partner who doesn’t treat marketing automation as a side project. Act-On delivers sophisticated, enterprise-ready marketing automation with the innovation, ease of use, and dedicated support your team deserves. Learn more about how Act-On stacks up against Marketo and Eloqua.