Comparing two of the biggest names in marketing automation means finding a lot more similarities than differences. Pardot, now Salesforce’s Marketing Cloud Account Engagement, and Marketo, now Adobe Marketo Engage, are both legacy platforms acquired by tech behemoths.
And with the right mix of premium services and add-ons, both offer the basics of marketing automation: email and multichannel marketing, campaign management, automation, lead nurturing, and analytics. This means a side-by-side Marketo vs. Pardot feature comparison won’t give you the full picture of each platform’s strengths and weaknesses.
So to understand whether one of these platforms is the right fit for your team (and budget), let’s hear from real users and industry experts who understand not only what these tools can do, but what it’s actually like to use them day-to-day.
The big picture: key advantages of Marketo vs. Pardot
Each platform comes with its own advantages — and trade-offs.
Marketo’s edge: power and scalability
Marketo takes the win over Pardot when it comes to power and scalability. Customers complain that Pardot is missing some advanced automation features, and requires a lot of manual work to clone programs or manage global regions.
“The Pardot feature set is not on par with Marketo. Many more nuanced capabilities, like Pardot’s automation rules, require extensive manual duplication and setup.” – Jeff H., Director, Marketing
Pardot’s strength: UI and Salesforce integration
Pardot’s advantage is its Salesforce ecosystem integration. When properly configured, marketing data syncs quickly with Salesforce opportunities and helps align sales and marketing teams. And compared to Marketo, most customers consider Pardot more intuitive.
“Coming from Marketo [to Pardot], it is night and day…Marketo STILL looks like it was developed with Windows 95, steep learning curve, and prone to errors.” – John C., Director
Two caveats here:
Pardot only integrates natively with Salesforce, while Marketo offers native integrations with both Salesforce and Microsoft Dynamics.
The Pardot-Salesforce integration isn’t flawless: some customers complain it still requires complex set-up and lacks key capabilities, like custom objects.
Look closely, and you will find a few differences in features that could impact your decision-making.
Reporting: Marketo offers advanced, customizable reporting, but building dashboards requires expertise. Pardot provides simpler out-of-the-box reporting, with advanced ROI analytics requiring Salesforce configuration.
Ready-made templates: Marketo includes ready-made templates; Pardot requires HTML knowledge and often consultant support.
Forms: Marketo’s Global Forms enable easier form scaling; Pardot requires individual form creation. Most experts agree Marketo’s form-fill follow-up actions are cumbersome to set up, but provide more flexibility — while Pardot’s are easier but more limited. (Sensing a theme here?)
Lead scoring: Pardot separates lead behaviors (Score) from demographics (Grade); Marketo combines both into one score.
Common challenges of Marketo and Pardot
Finally, let’s unpack a few more similarities: shared criticisms around user-friendliness and customer service.
Ease of use
While customers describe Pardot’s interface as more intuitive, both platforms present major usability challenges. Common tasks often require outside consultants or specialists, slowing down in-house teams.
“The [Marketo] user interface is massively outdated and the functionality is poor and complex. This leads to high internal personnel costs in the operation of Marketo and correspondingly low productivity!” – G2 verified user in mid-market IT
“Resourcing [Pardot] can be difficult and costly. There is a learning curve to new marketers learning how to navigate marketing automation. Pardot typically requires a full-time admin to administer.” – Jeff Kemp, Founder and Principal Consultant at Optimal Business Consulting
Evaluating marketing automation platforms? Marketo vs. Pardot is a classic match up.
Customer service
Post-acquisition, customers complain that support has gone downhill for both platforms. Users often face lengthy ticket queues, poor documentation, and catch-all support teams — if they’re even able to get in touch with a human. Premium support plans can help, but significantly increase costs.
“[Marketo] customer service can’t manage to fix any problems or even follow up with us on basic requests. Their service team has even actually created problems for us by implementing things incorrectly in the past and then took weeks to fix it.” – G2 verified user, Marketing and Advertising
“If something [in Pardot] is broken, we file a ticket and get an autoresponse a couple of days later. But if we need help figuring out how to solve something, we are left to navigate a totally broken help center and poke around outdated “community” posts. It’s a nightmare.” – Gartner reviewer, VP Marketing
The final verdict: Marketo vs. Pardot
The anticlimactic truth: there’s no one-size-fits-all winner here.
With the right budget and resourcing, both Marketo and Pardot can get the job of marketing automation done — and both leave a lot to be desired around customer support and usability.
But between the two, think about choosing:
Marketo if you have dedicated in-house Marketo experts (and budget to replace them if they leave), plenty of time to set up customizable programs and reporting, and lots of advanced use cases that will justify top-tier feature packages and add-ons.
Pardot if you are 100% locked into Salesforce, don’t need a lot of advanced automation, and have ample budget for outside consultants and premium support packages.
However — if you want to achieve your marketing automation goals without compromising on service or user experience, consider looking beyond legacy players that have been bought up by tech giants. Act-On is an advanced but easy-to-use platform focused exclusively on marketing automation.
To learn more, check out how Act-On stacks up against Marketo and Pardot.
