Leaving Pardot? How to choose your next marketing automation platform

Pardot has been part of the B2B furniture for a long time. Now a lot of teams are asking whether it should stay. A recent HubSpot article on Pardot alternatives captures that mood, drawing on interviews with a long-time Pardot consultant. Unsurprisingly, it points towards HubSpot. Our view is more neutral: the right choice depends on where your customer data lives and what your team can realistically run.

What's happening

Pardot was rebranded as Marketing Cloud Account Engagement in 2022. Tom Ryan, founder of consultancy MarCloud, told HubSpot he believes the platform will eventually be discontinued, citing a lack of development. That is his opinion rather than a Salesforce announcement, but it reflects real anxiety among users.

Ryan also points to two everyday frustrations: revenue attribution that depends on wrestling with the Pardot–Salesforce sync, and reports that are hard to customise without specialist help. He says Salesforce is steering customers towards Marketing Cloud Next, but many are using the moment to review their wider stack.

The article lists alternatives including HubSpot, Salesforce Marketing Cloud Next, Adobe Marketo Engage, ActiveCampaign and Zoho, and suggests evaluating on CRM integration, lead scoring and ABM support, sales alignment, integrations and time-to-value.

The migration advice is the most practical part. Lead scoring and ABM journeys can't be ported directly and must be rebuilt. Campaign objects differ between platforms, so attribution models need translating. Ryan's typical migration runs two to three months.

What it means for B2B and Microsoft partner marketers

HubSpot's list leaves out an option many of our clients should consider: Dynamics 365 Customer Insights – Journeys. If your sales team already runs on Dynamics 365, or you are a Microsoft partner selling it, keeping marketing automation on the same Dataverse record removes the sync problem entirely. It is also the most credible story for a partner to tell customers.

If your sales team is committed to Salesforce, the decision is different. Keeping Salesforce for sales and moving marketing to a platform with a strong native sync, such as ActiveCampaign, HubSpot or Marketo, is a legitimate path. Moving everything is a much bigger project than a marketing team should take on alone.

The bigger lesson is that a platform change is rarely the real fix. Teams frustrated with attribution in Pardot often carry the same unclear lifecycle stages, inconsistent campaign naming and unowned data into the new platform. Use the migration to fix those.

How to put it to work

1. Start with the CRM question. Decide where the master customer record will live for the next five years. The marketing platform should follow that decision.
2. List what you actually use. Audit active forms, journeys, scoring rules, integrations and reports. Most teams find a large share is unused.
3. Sort into three buckets, as Ryan suggests: needed, nice to have, and only if time allows.
4. Redesign scoring and ABM. Rebuild lead scoring with what you have learned, and map where every prospect sits in active journeys so they continue without restarting.
5. Decide where attribution lives, in the CRM, the marketing platform or both, before you migrate any campaigns.
6. Budget realistically. Include implementation, contact tier growth and training, not just the licence.
7. Run in parallel for a short period, then cut over in phases.

For partners, the platform choice also shapes how you run channel partner marketing and co-marketing with distributors and ISVs.

How UBE Marketing can help

UBE Marketing is a B2B marketing agency founded by Alvin Paronda, who spent years marketing in the Microsoft partner ecosystem with Dynamics 365 and Power Platform. We help B2B technology companies choose and implement marketing automation, whether that is Dynamics 365 Customer Insights, HubSpot or ActiveCampaign, and rebuild nurture and scoring properly along the way. Explore our Microsoft partner marketing services or contact us for an independent view.