Pardot vs HubSpot

HubSpot’s Marketing Automation, CRM Sales, & Service suites have all been built by HubSpot. The result is a unified and consistent user experience where customer data, reporting, and individual tools are all similar and work in concert with each other. Using HubSpot is intuitive, even the advanced features. This means a faster time to value for your employees, and faster time to market for your business. 

Pardot was acquired by Salesforce to build out their portfolio of products. The Salesforce platform of products has grown primarily through acquisitions such as Pardot, which necessitates manual connections and maintenance to create a unified user experience and adds to technical complexity.

HubSpot Marketing Hub has an integrated set of tools designed to nurture prospects along the complete buyers’ journey, such as website hosting, ads, landing pages, blogging, email, ABM, social, workflows, automation and attribution reporting. These tools are easy to use right out of the box. And they all speak to each other seamlessly.

Pardot also supports lead generation with a host of tools that have become the standard for marketing platforms (e.g., landing pages, email, workflow, A/B testing, etc.) However, Pardot has remained more focused on email automation, and so users may find they need to connect more tools as they scale.

Landing pages are typically hosted on a subdomain or other third party domain separate from your main website. Tracking across domains is possible, but cumbersome and, in an age when user experience is everything for both marketers and those they’re trying to reach, it’s less ideal. This is also not ideal for your website’s SEO, compared to having all of your content on the same domain.

"We switched over from Salesforce & Pardot a few months ago. So far, one of the main benefits we're seeing is having sales and marketing streamlined in one platform. We're able to better report on our marketing efforts and enjoy the ease-of-use of HubSpot." - G2 Mid-Market User (51-1000 emp.) April 2019

Marketing Hub is the only marketing automation platform that offers top of funnel marketing automation tools, built inside of a world class CRM. This unique combination is the only true way to deliver CRM-Powered Marketing and break through the noise in today’s noisy competitive environment. 

With Marketing Hub you’ll attract the right customer and grow your audience faster, break through the noise with personalized messages delivered through the right channel, quickly turn attention into customers, and delight customers with a frictionless buying experience. 

Pardot doesn’t have a built-in CRM. You’ll need to purchase Salesforce or an alternative CRM separately, and set up an integration. This experience is cumbersome and disconnected.

Make sure your marketing team gets the credit they deserve. With HubSpot, revenue and contact attribution reporting help your team track their influence at every stage of the sales process, from demand generation to closed deals. Attribution reporting makes it easier to make smarter, data-backed decisions when allocating your budget by letting you identify which channels are performing the best, and which ones might need some fine-tuning. 

In terms of out-of-the-box functionality, Pardot cannot compare to HubSpot's reporting and analytics. Salesforce offers several paid add-on which can be purchased to provide additional functionality. Even with these paid add-on, though, reporting requires internal user management to operationally maintain.

Salesforce and HubSpot have fundamentally different philosophies when it comes to customer support and service. 

HubSpot is invested in your success from day one. Our world-class support and customer success teams are available to all customers– with phone and email support at no extra charge for Pro and Enterprise customers– and you won’t pay more for it as you grow. HubSpot Academy, consistently ranked as one of the top online learning platforms in the world (source), is also available right at your fingertips. 

Pardot charges 20% of your net contract price for 24/7 premier support, while additional feature access costs 30% of your net contract price. With percentage pricing, as you spend more on additional seats and add-on features, you’ll have to pay more for the same support. When choosing a Pardot support plan, you’ll want to carefully forecast how much your team will need.

HubSpot and Pardot both offer powerful software for fast-scaling businesses. As a business evolves, it’s important for both your CRM and Marketing Automation software to be able to grow and change with your business needs. With this in mind, having the flexibility and control to customize your CRM is critical.

HubSpot prioritizes ease-of-use and prescriptive recommendations to make it easier for businesses to get started. HubSpot’s usability means that you have the flexibility to change and adapt your HubSpot instance over time, layering in more customization and complexity as your business scales.

Pardot offers endless customization for the most complex organizations. However, these advanced features may require more admin and developer support, which can make it difficult for businesses to change and adapt their Pardot instance over time.

HubSpot is uniquely dedicated to ease-of-use and simplicity for admins, reps, and managers. This way, you spend less time (and money) getting your sales system to work how you want it to. Customers have the freedom to organize and administer their tools in the way that works best for their business.

Salesforce Pardot implementation and maintenance requires experienced and well-trained administrators. Most Salesforce customers need to bring in a consulting agency or hire one or more full-time admins (with an average salary of $77,503 according to Glassdoor), or have current employees take on additional administrative tasks in order to make the system work.