Pardot alternatives: What B2B marketers are choosing now

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Seventy percent of marketers believe the marketing industry has changed more in the past three years than in the past 50. That means that marketing automation platforms need to change, too. Pardot is a longtime fixture of the B2B landscape, but the lack of development has left many businesses looking for alternatives.

Why are businesses leaving? What Pardot alternatives are they choosing, and what do experts say about having a successful migration? This guide answers all these questions and more.

Why Marketers Are Seeking Pardot Alternatives Now

Pardot (rebranded as Marketing Cloud Account Engagement in 2022) is a B2B marketing automation platform owned by Salesforce. According to Pardot expert Tom Ryan, founder of MarCloud, many Pardot users choose to leave because they fear it will be discontinued.

Ryan has been a Pardot consultant since 2016 and feels the eventual discontinuation is obvious. “There’s no development on the platform,” he explains. “There’s a clear migration path.” To Ryan, it feels like “it’s just a case of ‘when’ not ‘if.‘”

Beyond discontinuation fears, Ryan points to revenue attribution and reporting as persistent pain points. Revenue attribution is “[incredibly difficult] if you do not know how to do it. Users need to wrestle with the Pardot-Salesforce sync,” he said. Reporting presents similar challenges, as the platform offers little flexibility. “The reports are not customizable in Pardot and therefore, people cannot get the reports they need. Clear reporting in general is very difficult for people to achieve, without consultant-level knowledge.”

In Ryan’s experience, the most common destination for customers leaving Pardot is HubSpot. “Pardot to HubSpot makes the most sense. There’s a lot of architectural similarities between Pardot and HubSpot via the connector. So there’s a familiarity there, and you get so much more.”

How to Evaluate Pardot Alternatives for B2B Teams

Pardot alternatives should be evaluated on CRM integration. HubSpot and Zoho both offer full CRM capabilities, making them top candidates for businesses leaving Salesforce altogether. Salesforce Marketing Cloud Next runs natively on Salesforce’s own platform, so there’s no separate system to sync at all, eliminating the data silo issue that Pardot has. Marketo maintains a native two-way Salesforce sync for teams that want to keep their CRM there. ActiveCampaign offers the same native Salesforce sync, plus its own lightweight CRM for teams that want to consolidate instead.

B2B teams should also weigh these criteria when reviewing Pardot alternatives.

ABM and lead scoring: Does the platform support both individual lead scoring and coordinated outreach across a group?

Sales alignment: Is the data easy for sales to access?
Integrations: Does the new platform integrate with your existing marketing tech stack: email marketing, analytics, reporting tools, etc.?
Time-to-value: Can a marketer build and launch without a developer or certified consultant, or does every task require outside help?