Exceeding the allocated number of marketing contacts in your plan

All marketing automation platform pricing packages include a fixed number of marketing contacts. Depending on limits and how quickly a company is growing, along with how often you add prospects via import or data sync, this limit can easily be surpassed.

Pardot

Pardot has a grace period

If you exceed the allocated number of prospects in Pardot, you will not be immediately charged. You’ll see a warning banner within your Pardot dashboard. If you don’t remedy the situation, you will likely be contacted by your Salesforce rep.

Onboarding or implementation fee required with purchase

Some marketing automation systems require clients to pay an additional fee to have their product installed and implemented, while others do not.

Pardot

No implementation fee

No implementation fee is required. Many companies hire a Pardot Consultant to implement and set up their instance. (Note: Rather than trying to set things up by yourself, we recommend hiring us to implement and onboard you to Pardot with one of our Implementation Packages.)

Robust email and landing page builder

A powerful email and landing page builder is at the crux of all marketing automation software. But, not all email builders are created equal. Far from it, in fact.

Pardot

Antiquated interface, limited formatting options, even with Lightning

With Pardot the email builder is just plain frustrating. You’ll want to consider using a third-party email builder, such as Stripo, for building your emails. For landing pages, using a CMS such as WordPress with a good drag-and-drop page builder will yield better results, and page views can still be tracked by the Pardot tracking code.

We prefer using an external email builder to build email templates using a convenient drag-and-drop builder and then copying over the HTML to the Pardot Classic email builder, and so do many of our clients. See this popular article: Best email template builders for email production.

Marketing contacts and how you’re billed

All marketing automation platform pricing packages include a fixed number of marketing contacts, but how a MAS (Marketing Automation System) defines a ‘marketable’ contact varies from platform to platform.

Pardot

Marketing contact only counted if it is a mailable prospect

Pardot only charges for prospects that are mailable. Prospects that are unmailable, whether they’ve hard bounced, opted out or unsubscribed, or simply marked Do Not Email, do not count towards your billable marketing contacts. This makes it pretty easy to quickly identify how many mailable and thus chargeable prospects you have.

Monthly limits on email sends

Some marketing automation systems cap the number of emails that can be sent each month. It’s important to explore these limitations during the platform selection process to find the system that best meets your email volume requirements.

Pardot

Sky’s the limit! Send away.

The absence of any restrictions on monthly email sends is one of Pardot’s most appealing features. Want to send a daily email to your entire mailable database? You can, but of course for many reasons we strongly suggest you don’t do that. But if you send a high volume of emails then Pardot may be the system for you. If transactional emails are important to your business then Pardot may or may not be a good choice.

Cost

Cost for mid-market and enterprise marketing automation platforms can ratchet up fairly quickly depending on your needs. There is no winner here, except for maybe HubSpot and Salesforce themselves as global companies in the billions of revenue.

Pardot

With Pardot you also need a Salesforce license for each user for “Lightning” functionality

Pardot/Salesforce can also be expensive since you need to pay 1) for each platform (your Pardot AND Salesforce plan, unless you only want to use the Pardot ‘app’ in which case you can use free identity licenses), 2) for how many users you need (Salesforce seats), there is no onboarding fee but you’ll probably need to pay 3) for an experienced consultant or agency to set things up, 4) for how many contacts you have, but NOT for how many emails you can send per month. Pardot plans start at $1250/month, plus Salesforce Professional at $75 per seat. Annual plans via contract only.

Pausing HubSpot workflows or Pardot Engagement Studio

Automations put the A in MAS. What happens to contacts when automations are paused varies significantly between HubSpot and Pardot, so it’s important to understand the implications of pausing then restarting a journey.

Pardot

Pause means prospects do not advance in the journey, on restart prospects pick up where they left off

Pausing automations or Engagement Programs (a.k.a. journeys) causes prospects to stop at the step they are at, and when restarting a journeys prospects pick up exactly where they left off. Makes sense to us! And also facilitates making quick updates without losing anything, i.e. pause the journey, add or change some steps (i.e. add or update a ‘didn’t click CTA’ path) or even add new membership lists, restart the journey,..no harm done.

Lifecycle stages for contacts and accounts/companies

Cost for mid-market and enterprise marketing automation platforms can ratchet up fairly quickly depending on your needs. There is no winner here, except for maybe HubSpot and Salesforce themselves as global companies in the billions of revenue.

Pardot

Lead stages for leads only, not contacts or accounts

Lead stages work only across leads, so there are no pre-built facilities for managing contacts with regard to lifecycle. With our clients, we layer in cradle-to-grave lifecycle management by implementing a Lifecycle Stage field along with additional lists and automations to manage lifecycle stages across both leads and contacts. Proper lifecycle management provisions for targeted marketing and sales throughout the Buyer’s Journey based on Lifecycle Stage using Pardot and Salesforce.

Automation waits or delays

Waiting for a contact to take an action is a common step in automations. How this is handled between HubSpot and Pardot is quite different.

Pardot

Engagement Program steps can wait a specific number of days or a specific number of days until an action happens

With Pardot Engagement Studio, a journey step will wait either a set number of days or a set number of days to ‘listen’ for an action to occur, i.e. link click. If a prospect takes action after the set number of days has passed, the journey won’t trigger the action. Pardot’s methodology has more limitations and makes it much more difficult to set up the timing you are hoping to achieve since you have to guess at how many days to wait. If you wait too short a time you could miss the event trigger entirely, if you wait too long you could throw off the timing of the following steps. Another problem with waiting a set number of days is you’d need to wait until that number of days completed before you could get a report on the final results. Pro Tip: a work-around could be to use a dynamic list in the conditional step that matches the event trigger, which would remove the need to set any ‘number of days’ wait parameters.

Using tags in automations

Tags are particularly useful for temporarily flagging a prospect via a tag within journeys to trigger additional steps.

Pardot

Tag prospects in an Engagement Program, or use tags conditionally within automations and lists

Tags are super useful and can be used as another taxonomy, in many cases, rather than lists or fields. Tags are particularly useful for temporary purposes like flagging a prospect within a journey, then conditionally checking for that tag later, i.e. ‘tag contains’ or ‘tag does not contain’, then removing the tag at a step further down in the journey. Using a custom field for this is only practical when you need to store a value more permanently. A big benefit of tags over fields is that creating tags doesn’t require an Admin role like creating a custom field does. Also being able to create tags for more temporary everyday tracking needs helps to keep fields and lists less cluttered.

Copying field values via automations

Using an automation to copy a contact field value to another property in the same record or another record can be very useful. For example, copying a contact’s mobile phone value to the same contact’s ‘best way to contact’ field, or copying a Contact’s ‘last contacted date’ to their related Account.

Pardot

No support for copying field values to any other record

Functionality of this type will require a Salesforce Flow, which is not ideal, since that usually involves a Salesforce Admin and likely more coordination with the team.

Managing options in multi-select fields

Managing value option selections within multi-select fields is a critical part of data management and marketing automation.

Pardot

Can easily clear/remove or append just one or more options from a Pardot multi-select checkbox field

Pardot supports clearing/removing from or appending just one or more options on multi-select fields via Engagement Programs and automations.

ClickUp integration

ClickUp is a very popular project management tool. Having deep integration with ClickUp allows you to update tasks in ClickUp that can trigger actions in your CRM or marketing automation platform, or visa versa.

Pardot

No integration with ClickUp

If you want any type of integration with ClickUp and Pardot you would need to use a third party tool like Zapier.

Indicating which contacts are ‘do not email’

Marketing automation systems can use different fields to indicate which contacts should not be emailed. If you use Salesforce as your CRM, syncing these fields could prove problematic. Check out our quick tip for more help on this issue.

Pardot

Uses ‘Do Not Email’ field

Pardot and Salesforce use the ‘Do Not Email’ field. No further work required for indicating which contacts you don’t wish to receive marketing emails (but be sure you set Field Sync Behavior to use the most recently updated platform).

Campaign structures

HubSpot and Salesforce have two very different paradigms pertaining to campaigns; each has its own benefits. So no particular winner here. If you have HubSpot integrated with Salesforce then you can use HubSpot campaigns and Salesforce campaigns together to get the best of both worlds depending on your reporting needs.

Pardot

Campaigns are based on campaign object using parent/child hierarchy with campaigns potentially tied to multiple assets

Salesforce campaign structure seems to give a more flexible way to capture data related to campaigns as an object with custom member status, default fields, and custom fields. You can associate prospects multiple times to a campaign based on their interaction or lack thereof, and you can report on any level of the campaign hierarchy, rather than as a collection of assets.

Standard fields

Standard fields come set up at installation and allow you to capture more information on your contacts without additional work.

Pardot

Fewer standard fields

Pardot requires much more set up to capture the types of useful information you are going to want, both in terms of custom fields and processes to capture the data. HubSpot has many more fields as standard fields, meaning less setup needed.

Attribution models

Marketing and revenue attribution are very important and yet an imperfect system no matter what system you use. Some orgs may want to use both HubSpot and Salesforce for attribution reporting depending on their needs. The main difference here seems to be built-in (HubSpot) vs. required setup and possible additional cost and complexity (Pardot/Salesforce).

Pardot

Pardot has five attribution models

In addition to Pardot having four less attribution models than HubSpot, comparable attribution reporting in Pardot (compared to HubSpot) requires good set up and use of Salesforce Campaigns, consistent use of Contact Roles on Opportunities (without which marketing influence on revenue can’t be known), and B2B Marketing Analytics (B2BMA) for any of the extended attribution models beyond the standard three First Touch, Last Touch, and Even Distribution. B2BMA is a Tableau component and an add-on expense to some plans. B2BMA also requires additional set up.

Works with Salesforce Sales Cloud CRM

Can the marketing automation platform work with and sync bi-directionally with Salesforce? If you only use HubSpot you can use HubSpot CRM Hub or Salesforce Sales Cloud CRM; if you use Pardot you need to use Salesforce Sales Cloud CRM.

Pardot

Pardot must be used with Salesforce Sales Cloud CRM, but that does make for a tighter integration

Pardot must be used with Salesforce Sales Cloud CRM. Pardot is designed to integrate with and work with Salesforce, therefore Salesforce is required. Which means you need to have a user license for every Pardot user (or at least an Identity License). But that does also mean that because Pardot is meant to work with and in fact is owned and developed by Salesforce, that you get a tighter integration between Pardot and Salesforce.

Unlimited lists, or limited number of lists

These marketing automation platforms cost a lot, especially once you add up all of the costs based on your configuration and needs. So the fewer limits for the features that you’ll really need, included within the plan that you can justify subscribing to, the better.

Pardot

Pardot puts no limit to the number of lists

We much prefer Pardot’s approach to unlimited lists. You can go list crazy without worrying about it. You can always delete unwanted lists later.

Build complex conditional list or automation criteria

Often times you need complex criteria to achieve the desired membership and segmentation outcomes, i.e., using (this OR that) AND this. If you can’t build complex conditional active/dynamic list or automation criteria then you’ll end up building several lists to achieve what should you be able to achieve using a single list, or at most 2 lists. This will make managing lists unnecessarily much more complicated.

Pardot

Criteria within and between groups can use AND or OR

Defining criteria for dynamic lists or automations in Pardot is very powerful, and a lot like building an SQL query (only much easier). You can build complex logic and comprehensive lists/automations with Pardot’s list/automation criteria statement builder. In Pardot you can build complex conditional lists or automations to build a complex query of almost anything you might need (i.e., using (this OR that) AND this) AND (this OR that) AND this)). We think Pardot’s list options are one of its best and more powerful features of Pardot.

View list performance metrics

Segmentation lists are foundational to marketing and marketing automation, and having as many types of list metrics available is a very desirable feature.

Pardot

Very basic list metrics supported

With Pardot you only have very basic list information available, like Total Member count, Total Mailable count, list Created Date, list Updated Date, and list Created By. Total Member count and Total Mailable count are clickable to see which prospects are members.

Deleted records automatically unenrolled from or continue in workflows

The preferred action for prospects who are deleted then restored, and who are members of any workflows, would be for those prospects to continue in any workflows where they are still a match. This is a preferred solution rather than removing prospects from workflows, then needing to handle them in some way to get them back into any workflows if they are restored.

Pardot

Pardot puts no limit to the number of lists

We prefer Pardot’s approach for the scenario where prospects are paused from workflows if they are deleted, and prospects will continue in the workflow from where they left off if they are restored.

Workflows can take action on associated records

Having workflows update associated records, such as updating a contact’s associated company, is a powerful option not available in many marketing automation platforms unless relying on setting up a Salesforce Flow if you are syncing with Salesforce.

Pardot

Requires Salesforce Flow to take action on associated records

Pardot automations and Engagement Programs can only update prospect records. Company/Account, Opportunity, and Custom Object records from Salesforce that are related to a Pardot prospect are read only. If you want to update any records/objects related to a Pardot prospect you would need to create a Salesforce Flow.

Cookie and tracking consent

Having a system for managing cookie and tracking consent for privacy compliance has become more and more important. Some platforms provide built-in options for this, while others require external extensions. Both Pardot and HubSpot have a built-in system for managing cookie and tracking consent, but they do require a bit of set up.

HubSpot and Pardot can accommodate single page applications which require a bit of updating to the tracking code JavaScript.

Pardot

Pardot provisions for set up of consent banners for different domains at the account level

The overall look and feel of the Pardot consent banner is rather rudimentary, and Pardot does not offer multiple language options for the banner.

Campaigns

Campaigns are vital for reporting and understanding marketing attribution, to know what is working and what is not.

Pardot

Campaigns available with all packages and integrated with Salesforce Campaigns

Campaigns are best managed using Salesforce campaigns via Salesforce/Pardot connected campaigns. B2BMA (B2B Marketing Analytics), an addon for some plans, allows for interactive data visualization by harnessing the technology of Tableau.

Using automations to create new records

Creating a new contact, company or opportunity via a workflow or Engagement Program would help to automate processes and cut down on manual data entry.

Pardot

Pardot automations cannot create new records

Pardot Engagement Studio or other automations do not support records to be created. In fact, Accounts and Opportunities related to prospects are read-only in Pardot. New prospect creation in Pardot is handled via form submissions, import, or Salesforce sync. For any other types of record creation (or automated deletion) Pardot relies on Salesforce or Salesforce Flows.

2023-05-09 Summer 2023 update: Record creation will soon be supported by Pardot via automations, so changing this from Red to Green.

Email and text field validations

All marketing automation platform pricing packages include a fixed number of marketing contacts, so it’s important to keep within your allocation. Depending on limits and how quickly a company is growing, along with how many prospects are added over time through imports and data syncs, this limit can easily be surpassed, and often faster than expected. Email address validation allows you to control data input so you aren’t adding bad prospect data or sending out emails to worthless email addresses. This can go a long way to help with data integrity and to keep your total mailable prospect count in check.

Pardot

No data validation

Salesforce Flows could be used to help transform data after the data exists, or there are apps available for Salesforce that can help with data conformity and integrity, but Pardot does not currently support any type of input validation feature.