Pardot, now sold as Salesforce Account Engagement, is Salesforce’s B2B marketing automation tool, and in the marketing automation ratings it sits at the low end. The buyers who left it went in several directions, and no single destination dominates. What sorts them is who made the call: in about half the moves the organization decided, and Pardot went with the CRM or the merger; in the other half, the team itself initiated the move, for reasons including automation, compliance, scale and integration.
The alternatives, by what they are
Every destination buyers name, sorted by who made the call. The organization initiated four of the moves; the team initiated the other four.
Where buyers go
The two halves carry different explanations. In the four organization-initiated moves, the destination followed the new CRM or the acquirer’s existing marketing stack. When the team initiated the move, the reasons were specific to their requirements: automation and data, compliance, scale or integration.
Followed the CRM
A team whose company is moving its CRM to Microsoft: “we're moving fully to the Microsoft suite,” with marketing automation included. The same buyer is content with Pardot itself: “It's fine. It's good. It does the job.” Too few buyers rate Microsoft’s marketing product to publish a number.
A company that moved its CRM and Pardot to SAP together on a global corporate decision. The buyer credits SAP with better segmentation — “probably better than our previous system, Pardot, for putting together contact lists and target lists” — and still calls the switch overall a downgrade. Too few buyers rate SAP’s marketing product to publish a number.
No head-to-head published yet
After a merger
An acquirer folding an acquired company’s Pardot into its own Eloqua “as we merge tech stacks.” This buyer also has a product verdict: “Everything it does, Eloqua does better, faster, and more efficiently.”
The reverse case: Pardot “was an inherited system from an acquisition,” retired onto the acquirer’s HubSpot to simplify the stack. A later acquisition that also runs Pardot has this buyer weighing it again, on cost and on being a connected Salesforce product.
Stayed inside Salesforce
One team wanted to move “from one Salesforce product to another” for more automation and for Data Cloud, to unify its data. An insurer moved for compliance. The insurer’s buyer also finds the new platform harder to run: “Having used Eloqua and Pardot previously, I think those systems were a little more user-friendly.”
Built in-house, or left over integration
A very large business that built its own email system: “We have more customers than Pardot could handle in any instance.” Moving contacts in and out of the instance, the buyer says, led to service disruptions and falling deliverability.
No head-to-head published yet
A marketing consultancy that dropped Pardot over integration, citing “Limited functionality with integrations into bigger CRMs like Dynamics 365,” and evaluated nothing else before leaving.
No head-to-head published yet
Salesforce Marketing Cloud is the only destination named twice, and both of those moves stayed inside Salesforce. Every other destination appears once. So the pattern is in who initiated the move, not where buyers went — and a migration driven by a CRM change or merger does not by itself establish dissatisfaction with Pardot.
What lower-rating Pardot buyers complain about
That it is hard to learn and dated, and it is what separates them. Most buyers rating Pardot 6 or below describe it as hard to use, rigid or behind the times; almost none rating it 8 or better do. One says “It has a dated interface” and that “The learning curve is pretty steep”; another that “Everything has to be created from a deconstructed Lego”; a third rates it 6 because “the landing pages that they create today are outdated.”
Reporting, for some. One buyer rating it 6 finds its email performance data “very raw and not in a presentation-ready format.”
The Salesforce connection is not what separates them. Nearly every high rater credits it, and so do about half the low raters — though one of them calls it “a lock-in, as Pardot works mainly with Salesforce CRM.” Cost comes up in both bands at about the same rate.
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Get my read →When does staying on Pardot make sense?
The interviews do not settle staying as a rule, but two themes run through positive Pardot commentary.
The Salesforce connection. Buyers who rate it well describe sales and marketing working from one system. One names its main strength as “The ability to connect marketing to revenue because it's a Salesforce product”; another calls the integration between Salesforce and Pardot “an end-to-end solution.”
Ease, next to Marketing Cloud. The complaint that separates low raters is not universal. A buyer who gives Pardot a perfect score says “Pardot is very intuitive. Rarely are there issues,” and prefers it because it is “natively integrated with Salesforce, where Marketing Cloud is not.” Another rating it 8 describes “a really good platform behind it that is easy to use.”
Our read — ours, not a buyer’s — is that for an account staying on Salesforce CRM, Pardot versus Marketing Cloud is the most directly evidenced comparison in these departures, and the buyers above describe that trade from both sides. In the four organization-initiated departures, the marketing-platform destination followed the CRM change or the acquirer’s existing stack.
Common questions
Why do buyers leave Pardot?
In these interviews, about half the moves were decided by the organization rather than by Pardot: the company moved its CRM to Microsoft or SAP, or a merger consolidated two marketing stacks. The other half were the team's call — two moved to Salesforce Marketing Cloud, one for more automation and Data Cloud and one for a compliance requirement; one outgrew Pardot's contact capacity, and one left over weak integration with other CRMs. Separately, among buyers who rate Pardot, those scoring it 6 or below mostly describe it as hard to learn or dated.
What do buyers replace Pardot with?
Salesforce Marketing Cloud is the only destination named twice. The others each appear once: Microsoft Dynamics 365 and SAP when the company moved its CRM, Eloqua and HubSpot after mergers, and an in-house email system built for scale. Salesforce Marketing Cloud rates 6.8/10, HubSpot 7.5/10 and Eloqua 6.5/10 across the corpus, against Pardot's 6.3/10; Microsoft's and SAP's marketing products have too few ratings to publish a number.
Is Salesforce Marketing Cloud better than Pardot?
The interviews do not establish Marketing Cloud as universally better. Across the corpus it rates 6.8/10 against Pardot's 6.3/10. Two teams here moved from Pardot to Marketing Cloud: one wanted more automation and Data Cloud, while the other moved for a compliance requirement. The trade is not one-way: one buyer who made the move finds Pardot more user-friendly than Marketing Cloud, and a buyer who gives Pardot a perfect score prefers it because it is natively integrated with Salesforce where Marketing Cloud is not.
What do buyers like about Pardot?
Its connection to Salesforce. Nearly every buyer rating it 8 or better credits the integration — sales and marketing working from the same data, and marketing tied to revenue — and about half of its lower raters credit it too. Some high raters also find it straightforward to use, while most low raters describe it as hard to learn, rigid or dated.
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