Marketing automation tools are used by roughly 9 out of 10 marketers today. For good reason, too – businesses going down this route have increased qualified leads by a whopping 451%. The benefits are two-fold – it helps your business target more customers, and do it more efficiently. According to Nucleus, marketing automation improves your business’ productivity by 20%.

As of January 2022, HubSpot was the market leader, with 31.61% of the total marketing automation market. Salesforce’s Pardot, on the other hand, has some big clients like PayPal, Amazon, and Forbes, with a total market share of 4.02%. These numbers do paint the initial picture that HubSpot is a clear winner, but both of them were ranked in the top 10 marketing automation tools by G2 up until a couple of years ago. So, which one should you choose in a decision of HubSpot vs. Pardot? Let’s compare and find out.

The Basics: Understanding Both Platforms

Acquired by Salesforce in 2013, Pardot specializes in lead generation through inbound marketing and email marketing. It offers some basic marketing automation features, like A/B testing, creating workflows, etc. Although it has many features, most of them can seldom be fully utilized – more on this later.

HubSpot’s marketing automation software, on the other hand, is a suite of comprehensive tools and services that are often considered best-in-class. From social media management to CMS Hub, CRM, content, and email marketing tools, HubSpot has it all seamlessly working in sync to help your business grow. 

Key Differences

HubSpot vs. Pardot: Lead Generation

HubSpot offers a lot in terms of inbound marketing capabilities and support throughout the lifecycle of a customer. Some of the key features are a blogging platform, email marketing, automated workflows, user-customized content, and hosting.

Every tool is easy to use and manage and does not need any advanced technical knowledge. The biggest advantage is that all of these work like one big family, seamlessly integrated and interconnected to draw insights from each other and present a cohesive summary on your dashboard.

Pardot has similar features but without any integration. Pardot does not provide web hosting, so all these features are stand-alone tools connected to your website. This can create issues because now your landing pages are no longer hosted on the same domain as your website. Tracking data across multiple software platforms can be quite a hassle.

HubSpot vs. Pardot: Testing

A/B Testing is quite critical to the success of marketing campaigns. Both platforms offer this feature, but with different capabilities. With HubSpot, you can test your call-to-action triggers, events, emails, landing pages, subject lines, and all that you need. HubSpot also offers AI-based, adaptive testing. You can thus automate your A/B tests.

With Pardot, you can only perform A/B testing on your emails and landing pages. Since landing pages and your website are not hosted on the same domain, tracking the data and making decisions based on them is quite complex. Pardot also has no feature similar to the adaptive testing that HubSpot offers.

HubSpot vs. Pardot: Paid Ads and Marketing

Hubspot is the clear winner here. You are essentially comparing a full-blown paid ads management tool with features like CRM and ad platforms integration, and ad retargeting, to Google AdWords. That’s because Pardot offers no ad management features, but does allow you to integrate with Google AdWords.

HubSpot vs. Pardot: Integrations

Simple numbers here: HubSpot vs. Pardot – 1000+ vs. 32. While HubSpot has over a thousand integrations and they’re still adding more, Pardot has only the most basic ones required. Some of Pardot’s integration offerings include CRM, Eventbrite, and Google AdWords. HubSpot offers everything that Pardot does and over 30 times more.

Pricing

HubSpot has three plans – the starter, professional, and enterprise tier plans. These cost $40, $800, and $3,200 per month.

Additionally, HubSpot allows you to mix and match features into bundles, negotiate the number of contacts initially, and offer very reasonable plans if you choose to invest in all four hubs.

Pardot has three Plans – growth, plus, and advanced, priced at $1,200, $2,500, and $4,000 per month.

Final Verdict 

Tracking data across multiple tools, choosing from 32 plugins, and paying additionally for your CRM – are some of the pain points marketers have to contend with upon choosing Pardot. On the other hand, HubSpot is comprehensive in every way, offering a connected experience with superlative features, a free CRM, and over a thousand integrations. If you need help deciding if HubSpot is right for your technology business, we're happy to help. 

Download the Buyer's Evaluation Guide: Marketing Automation Software for Scaling Teams

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