Overview

Marketo and Pardot (now Salesforce Marketing Cloud Account Engagement) are the two dominant enterprise B2B marketing automation platforms. This comparison comes down to a fundamental question: do you prioritize automation depth (Marketo) or CRM integration (Pardot)? For our take on Marketo, see our Marketo comparison.

The CRM Question

Your CRM strategy largely determines this choice. If you're 100% committed to Salesforce and want native integration without sync complexity, Pardot is the natural choice. If you want the most capable B2B automation engine and might use non-Salesforce CRMs, Marketo offers more flexibility.

Automation Depth: Marketo's Advantage

Marketo's program builder is more sophisticated than Pardot's Engagement Studio. More branching logic, better nested programs, more flexible scoring models, and stronger multi-touch attribution. For complex B2B nurture programs with dozens of paths, Marketo gives marketing ops teams more control.

Salesforce Native: Pardot's Advantage

Pardot lives inside Salesforce. Shared contacts, native Einstein AI, Salesforce reports and dashboards, one admin console. There's no sync to manage, no data conflicts to resolve, no third-party connector to maintain. For Salesforce-centric organizations, this simplicity has real value.

The Sequenzy Alternative

For SaaS founders who don't need enterprise CRM integration, Sequenzy offers transactional email and marketing campaigns with native Stripe integration at $49/month — a fraction of either enterprise platform.