How much would you spend on marketing automation software?
1. Pardot pricing: Basic plan costs $1,250 2. HubSpot pricing: Marketing Hub starts at $45 3. EngageBay pricing: Marketing platform as low as $12.99 4. SharpSpring pricing: Costs $499
These are monthly prices and without a doubt, Pardot by Salesforce is one of the most expensive options in the industry. Is it worth it? Are there better alternatives? Does the price justify its features?
This review post explains what you stand to gain with Pardot and also helps you decide if it’s the right platform that fits your budget and marketing goals.
Table of Contents
Pardot Overview
Pardot is a B2B marketing automation software by Salesforce that enables marketing and sales teams to automate lead generation, email marketing, multi-channel marketing, and email campaigns.
In July 2013, Salesforce acquired Pardot from ExactTarget and in April 2020, it changed the name to Marketing Cloud Account Engagement.
Salesforce Pardot is an expensive tool and may not be a great fit for small-scale businesses with a low budget; however, it can be suitable for B2B enterprises and medium-sized businesses.
With Salesforce being the central hub, Pardot acts as an add-on to the platform and uses the data from its CRM to understand how your prospects interact with your website, social media platforms, and other digital marketing assets.
If you’re a Salesforce customer, you may likely have a better experience. Nonetheless, you can still sync your Pardot account with your preferred CRM tool while maximizing its benefits.
Pardot Features
With an expensive tool like Pardot, you would naturally expect all marketing automation features at your disposal. But Pardot doesn’t offer everything, and like several other platforms, it may lack certain features.
However, that doesn’t make it any less. These features make Pardot unique and help you generate meaningful prospects through targeted campaigns, build a solid sales pipeline by generating more leads, and close deals by sending personalized emails.
Here are a few features of Salesforce Pardot.
1. Marketing analytics and attribution
Pardot’s analytics helps you understand the effectiveness of your marketing efforts by providing metrics to analyze your conversions, interactions, and content marketing strategy.
By building custom dashboards, you can understand how your prospects move through the various stages in the buyer’s journey and the touch points that lead to conversions.
2. Landing pages and forms
Pardot’s landing page builder comes with different template styles as a go-to solution for a quick setup. You can also build your template to suit your style and brand.
Likewise, the form builder offers several fields for visitors to input information, helping you customize conversion needs for a variety of leads.
3. Lead management
With Pardot lead management tools, you can convert your leads into loyal customers. Lead nurturing, scoring, and grading help you assess the quality and behavior of your leads, and help you know the right content to promote at any phase in the journey.
With segmentation and proper data management, you can assign leads to different levels in the personas you’ve set. By integrating it with your customer relationship management (CRM) suite, you can track their overall activity.
4. Email marketing
Pardot’s email automation feature helps you design and generate personalized emails for your lead generation and nurturing campaigns. Extra features like A/B testing and onboarding email sequences will help you detect the best email marketing strategy for attracting new leads.
Features for tracking deliverability, open, bounce, and click-through rates show how your customers interact and engage with your products. Moreover, you can preview your emails and, as well, create custom lists to help you segment your audience.
5. Personalization
Pardot uses the data from your CRM and lead scoring to generate personalized, AI-driven, and optimized messages. It tracks and gathers tons of information from various sources to deliver targeted messages and auto-replies to boost your customer experience as they move down the funnel.
Read also: 10 Competitors That Give Zendesk A Run For Its Money
Pardot Pricing
Pardot pricing starts at $1,250 per month (Growth plan) and can go all the way up to $15,000 per month (Premium plan). This makes it among the costliest marketing automation software on the market, suited more for large enterprises than small companies.
Broadly, Salesforce Pardot has four major pricing plans:
- Salesforce Pardot Growth — $1,250 per month
- Salesforce Pardot Plus — $2,500 per month
- Salesforce Pardot Advanced — $4,000 per month
- Salesforce Pardot Premium — $15,000 per month
There are no free plans, and each plan supports up to 10,000 contacts. The premium plan, however, supports 75,000 contacts. All plans are billed annually, so here’s what you would pay for each plan:
- Salesforce Pardot Growth — $15,000 per year
- Salesforce Pardot Plus — $30,000 per year
- Salesforce Pardot Advanced — $48,000 per year
- Salesforce Pardot Premium — $180,000 per year
All tiers have support and success plans to help you understand how the platform works and, as well, fix issues.
These include a two-day response time, a customer support community, interactive webinars, events, and guided journeys. Increased support like expert coaching sessions, 24/7 support, and many more may attract additional fees.
Here’s an overview of what you stand to get from all four plans.
1. Salesforce Pardot Growth plan
This is the lowest plan, starting at $1,250 per month ($15,000 per year) for 10,000 contacts. It has some basic features such as,
- Unlimited Email Marketing
- Multivariate Landing Page Testing
- Tracked Social Posts
- Email A/B Testing
- Merge Fields
- Engagement Programs
- Lead Nurturing
- Prospect Tracking
- Lead Deduplication
- Lead Scoring and Grading
- ROI Reporting
- Email Rendering, and Preview Analysis
- Custom Fields
- User Forum
- Live Best Practice Calls and Office Hours
- User Management
- bit.ly Pro Connector
- Eventbrite Integration
- Native CRM Integration
- Olark Chat Integration
- Webinar Integration
- Account Engagement Setup Assistant
- Fully Customizable URLs
Some other features of the growth plan have certain limitations. They include:
- Forms — 50
- Landing Pages — 50
- Automation Rules — 50
- Competitor Monitoring — 10
- SEO Keyword Monitoring — 100
- Engagement History Dashboards — 5
- File Hosting — 100 MB
- API Access — Calls per day — 25,000
- SSL Vanity Domains Per Account — 3
Other features of this plan come with additional fees. They include:
- Advanced Dynamic Content — $400 per month
- Advanced Email Analytics — $400 per month
- Premier Plus — $*
* – custom pricing
2. Salesforce Pardot Plus plan
Following the Growth plan is the Plus plan, which is priced at $2,500 per month ($30,000 per year) for 10,000 contacts. In addition to its features, it also has all Growth plan features. They are:
- Unlimited Email Marketing
- Unlimited Forms
- Unlimited Landing Pages
- Multivariate Landing Page Testing
- Tracked Social Posts
- Email A/B Testing
- Merge Fields
- Engagement Programs
- Lead Nurturing
- Advanced Dynamic Content
- Prospect Tracking
- Lead Deduplication
- Lead Scoring and Grading
- Multiple Scoring Categories
- ROI Reporting
- Advanced Email Analytics, Email Rendering, and Preview Analysis
- Multitouch Attribution Models
- Custom Fields
- User Forum
- Live Best Practice Calls and Office Hours
- User Management
- bit.ly Pro Connector
- EventBrite Integration
- Native CRM Integration
- Olark Chat Integration
- Webinar Integration
- Google AdWords Integration
- Account Engagement Setup Assistant
- Fully Customizable URLs
Some Plus plan features also have limits, including:
- Automation Rules — 100
- External Activity Active Extensions — 10
- External Activity API — 50,000
- Competitor Monitoring — 25
- SEO Keyword Monitoring — 250
- Engagement History Dashboards — 10
- File Hosting — 500 MB
- API Access — Calls per day — 50,000
- Licenses B2B Marketing Analytics — 5
- SSL Vanity Domains Per Account — 10
Other features may come with additional fees:
- Dedicated IP Address — $500 per month
- Custom User Roles and Permissions — $500 per month
- B2B Marketing Analytics Plus — $*
- Developer Sandbox for Account Engagement — $*
- Premier Plus — $*
* – custom pricing
3. Salesforce Pardot Advanced plan
This is the third plan, priced at $4,000 per month ($48,000 per year) for 10,000 contacts. It includes all Growth and Plus plan features.
- Unlimited Email Marketing
- Unlimited Forms
- Unlimited Landing Pages
- Multivariate Landing Page Testing
- Tracked Social Posts
- Email A/B Testing
- Merge Fields
- Engagement Programs
- Lead Nurturing
- Advanced Dynamic Content
- Prospect Tracking
- Lead Deduplication
- Lead Scoring and Grading
- Multiple Scoring Categories
- ROI Reporting
- Advanced Email Analytics, Email Rendering, and Preview Analysis
- Multi-Touch Attribution Models
- Account Identification
- Lead Score
- Behaviour Scoring
- Send Time Optimization
- Campaign Insights
- Custom Fields
- Custom Object Integration
- User Forum
- Live Best Practice Calls and Office Hours
- User Management
- Custom User Roles and Permissions
- bit.ly Pro Connector
- EventBrite Integration
- Native CRM Integration
- Olark Chat Integration
- Webinar Integration
- Google AdWords Integration
- Account Engagement Setup Assistant
- Fully Customizable URLs
- Dedicated IP Address
The advanced plan has other features but with extended limits:
- Automation Rules — 150
- External Activity Active Extensions — 20
- External Activity API — 100,000
- Competitor Monitoring — 100
- SEO Keyword Monitoring — 1,000
- Engagement History Dashboards — 20
- 10 GB File Hosting — 10 GB
- API Access — Calls per day — 100,000
- SSL Vanity Domains Per Account — 20
- LIcenses B2B Marketing Analytics — 5
- Business Units — 2
- Developer Sandbox for Account Engagement — 2
Additional features may come with increased fees:
- B2B Marketing Analytics Plus — $*
- Premier Plus — $*
* – custom pricing
4. Salesforce Pardot Premium plan
This is an enterprise plan, priced at $15,000 per month ($180,000 per year) for 75,000 contacts. It includes all features from Growth, Plus, and Advanced plans. They are:
- Unlimited Email Marketing
- Unlimited Forms
- Unlimited Landing Pages
- Multivariate Landing Page Testing
- Tracked Social Posts
- Email A/B Testing
- Merge Fields
- Engagement Programs
- Lead Nurturing
- Advanced Dynamic Content
- Prospect Tracking
- Lead Deduplication
- Lead Scoring and Grading
- Multiple Scoring Categories
- ROI Reporting
- Advanced Email Analytics, Email Rendering, and Preview Analysis
- Multi-Touch Attribution Models
- Account Identification
- Lead Score
- Behavior Scoring
- Send Time Optimization
- Campaign Insights
- Manage your data.
- Custom Fields
- Custom Object Integration
- User Forum
- Live Best Practice Calls and Office Hours
- User Management
- Custom User Roles and Permissions
- bit.ly Pro Connector
- EventBrite Integration
- Native CRM Integration
- Olark Chat Integration
- Webinar Integration
- Google AdWords Integration
- Account Engagement Setup Assistant
- Fully Customizable URLs
- Dedicated IP Address
- Premier Plus
Other capped features include:
- Automation Rules — 150
- External Activity Active Extensions — 30
- External Activity API — 100,000
- Competitor Monitoring — 100
- SEO Keyword Monitoring — 1,000
- Engagement History Dashboards — 20
- File Hosting —10 GB
- API Access — Calls per day — 100,000
- SSL Vanity Domains Per Account — 20
- B2B Marketing Analytics licenses — 5
- B2B Marketing Analytics Plus licenses — 5
- Business Units — 5
- Developer Sandbox for Account Engagement — 5
Salesforce Pardot Add-ons
In addition to the 4 major plans, Pardot allows 3 major add-ons to help facilitate your lead campaign and nurturing process. Like the other plans, they are also billed annually.
1. B2B Marketing Analytics Plus
This feature gives you AI-driven insights into your marketing data.
Cost: $3,000 per month ($36,000 per month)
2. Salesforce Engage
This can help your sales team communicate often and effectively with clients.
Cost: $50 per month ($600 per year)
3. Additional Contacts
Once you’ve exhausted your contacts, you can purchase additional 10,000 contacts to extend the limit.
Cost: $100 per month ($1,200 per year)
Salesforce Pardot Pros and Cons
Let’s take a look an honest look at Salesforce Pardot Pros and Cons.
Pros
Pardot comes with a few perks that help you generate personalized leads at scale and nurture them to become loyal customers.
- Great options for enhanced data visualization
- Excellent lead management tools
- Easy contact filtering and segmentation
- Good CRM integrations with Salesforce and other CRMs
- Improved automation features for personalizing your customers’ journey
- Great customer support
Cons
With all the excellent features and capabilities, Pardot still has its drawbacks.
- No free plan
- It’s way too expensive, compared to other platforms
- It doesn’t have too many integrations
- A/B testing is only available to pro users
- It has limited content management and marketing options
- Limited tools for team organization and coordination
Check a few G2 reviews from Pardot users:
Read also: The Top 8 EngageBay Alternatives of 2022 [Features, Pricing, Reviews]
3 Affordable Pardot Alternatives With Better ROI
Although Pardot by Salesforce comes with great automation capabilities, it is expensive and may not be a great fit for marketers on a low budget. Fortunately, other marketing automation platforms can offer similar results at affordable plans.
Top 3 affordable Pardot alternatives: 1. HubSpot 2. EngageBay 3. SharpSpring
1. HubSpot
HubSpot marketing platform helps you attract the right audience, convert them into loyal customers, and scale up your inbound marketing campaigns.
Its all-in-one CRM helps you keep all your data in one place to avoid juggling multiple points and, as well, helps you connect with your customers using personalized and targeted messages.
Features
HubSpot marketing hub is packed with numerous excellent features that make it stand out from the crowd. Just like Pardot, its capabilities automate your marketing efforts to help you scale up faster. Here are the major features:
- Dynamic content
- Ad tracking and management
- Social media management
- Form and landing page builder
- Live chat
- Email marketing
- Marketing Analytics
Pricing
HubSpot beats Pardot with its affordable pricing plans. Also, it has a free plan packed with great features to help you test the platform — something Pardot lacks.
If you plan to upgrade your account, you can check out the most suitable plan for your business needs.
- HubSpot Free — $0 per month
- HubSpot Starter — $45 per month
- HubSpot Professional — $800 per month
- HubSpot Enterprise — $3,600 per month
Read also: HubSpot Pricing and Comparison with Affordable Alternatives
2. EngageBay
EngageBay is an all-in-one marketing and sales automation platform that helps you understand how your customers interact and engage with your digital assets, and how to convert them to loyal customers.
Its affordable pricing plans make it a perfect fit for small and medium-sized businesses, without any reduction in its capabilities.
Features
Although Pardot is packed with numerous features, EngageBay also comes with great perks that can enhance your marketing strategies, even on a low budget.
Check out a few features that make EngageBay a great fit for you
- Email marketing
- Forms and landing page builder
- Live chat
- Segmentation
- Social media management
- Team management
- Web analytics
- A/B landing pages
- Custom reporting
Pricing
EngageBay is one of the most affordable marketing automation software with flexible plans, making it a suitable option for both large and small marketing teams.
Unlike Pardot, it has a free plan that allows you to understand how the platform works before making further upgrades.
- EngageBay Free — $0 per month
- EngageBay Basic — $12.99 per month*
- EngageBay Growth — $34.99 per month*
- EngageBay Pro — $69.99 per month*
*The prices are monthly. EngageBay offers a 10% discount for annual contracts and 20% discount for biennial contracts.
Read also: Is Salesforce a CRM? A Simple, In-Depth Guide
3. SharpSpring
SharpSpring’s marketing automation platform helps you carry out automated campaigns that respond to user behavior and, as well, start conversations that lead to conversions using personalized messages.
Using the data in your CRM, you can assign leads to the different buyer personas you’ve set to help you automate your segmentation and send targeted messages.
It’s an amazing alternative to Pardot because of its numerous integrations and affordable pricing plans.
Features
The excellent automation features in SharpSpring make it a preferable option. Although Pardot by Salesforce may possess similar features it comes at an extra cost.
These features include
- Email marketing
- Dynamic content
- Forms and landing page builder
- Visual workflow builder
- A/B testing
- Buyer personas
- Social media management
- Custom analytics and dashboard
Pricing
Pardot by Salesforce is one of the most expensive marketing automation platforms; however, SharpSpring presents itself as an affordable alternative as it gives you excellent features at a reduced price. Although there are no free plans, it’s still worth the trial.
- 1,000 contacts — $449 per month
- 10,000 contacts — $999 per month
- 20,000 contacts — $1,449 per month
SharpSpring also has customized prices for agencies and enterprises.
Read also: 6 Affordable SharpSpring Alternatives (Features, Pricing)
Wrapping Up: What’s the Most Suitable Marketing Automation Platform?
There’s no one-size-fits-all approach to this, as there are different strokes for different folks. While Pardot may be a great fit for larger organizations, other platforms counter some of its features at a reduced price.
Nonetheless, your choice largely depends on your budget and business goals, and as usual, all platforms still have their great perks and limitations.
SharpSpring is a great fit for agencies, and it’s packed with loads of amazing features: however, it doesn’t have a free plan and may be quite expensive for smaller businesses.
HubSpot, being the go-to platform for inbound marketing, provides excellent automation features, alongside its CRM to help you scale up your marketing efforts. It’s a great fit for larger organizations as it may be a little bit pricey as you scale up.
EngageBay, being an all-in-one sales and marketing automation software, is the perfect fit for smaller businesses looking to maximize their marketing efforts. Its affordable and flexible plans come with great automation features.
In terms of pricing and number of contacts, here’s the ultimate comparison:
| Salesforce Pardot Premium | HubSpot Starter | EngageBay Pro | Sharpspring |
| 75,000 contacts | 75,000 contacts | 30,000 contacts | 20,000 contacts |
| $15,000/month | $3,040/month | $99.99/mo | $1,449/mo |
Sign up for a free plan (yes, without a trial deadline) or request a demo to test the platform and maximize its excellent perks. As you upgrade to higher plans, you open up more features to enhance your marketing efforts.
