For every modern marketer, embracing technology is a must. You can’t keep track of all your customers, their interactions with your brand, and where they are in their customer journey using outdated marketing techniques.
This is the purpose of marketing automation software – to help businesses keep track of important customer data and enhance productivity. How do you then make a choice out of the endless options available?
We will be comparing two popular marketing tools: Hubspot vs Pardot. Let’s see how they stack up against each other in terms of features, pricing, and ease of use.
An Overview of Hubspot and Pardot
Hubspot was designed with a focus on inbound lead generation through blogging and social media.
As the market demand changed, it evolved into an all-in-one, user-friendly customer relationship management (CRM) platform and content management system (CMS).
Pardot is a marketing automation solution that was initially developed as a sales and marketing platform back in 2007.
Salesforce bought Pardot parent company and is now offered as one of the three marketing solutions available on Salesforce. B2B companies can streamline their marketing and sales goals with Pardot and also boost their promotional results.
Hubspot vs Pardot features: User Interface and Experience
Even though HubSpot is a suite of tools, it maintains easy usability through a clean interface and a straightforward navigation framework. It is a great tool for new users of CRM software, as you don’t need any experience or technical skills to create or tweak your campaigns.
Pardot’s interface is just as neat as HubSpot’s, with a minimalistic design and well-organized options. However, Pardot’s editor is not as intuitive as HubSpot’s. While Pardot comes with customization options and basic edits are pretty straightforward on its interface, advanced customizations can be a problem for users who have no coding knowledge.
Pricing
HubSpot has a free package that offers beginners basic marketing and CRM functionalities like contact management, company insights, integrations with Gmail, Outlook, and Facebook Messenger, app marketplace integrations, basic reporting, dashboards, etc.
It also has paid subscriptions for users interested in enterprise-level functionality for their CRM activities: Starter, Professional, and Enterprise. The Starter plan costs $45 monthly and comes with all the free features the basic CRM package offers. It also offers email marketing, chatbot, landing pages, website traffic analytics, multi-language content creation, list segmentation, shared inbox, etc.
The Professional plan costs $450 monthly and allows users to enjoy AI-powered smart content and reporting, dynamic personalization, e-signatures, and phone support. Subscribers can also access the features available on the Starter plan.
The Enterprise plan comes with a higher price of $1,200 each month and allows users more flexibility over administrative controls through advanced permissions, sales analytics, playbooks, predictive lead scoring, conversation intelligence, increased support, etc. Also, users of all Hubspot CRM products enjoy a 10% discount on an upfront annual payment.
On the other hand, Pardot doesn’t come with a free option. However, it offers four paid plans like Hubspot. The Pardot Growth plan starts at $1,250 a month per 10,000 users. The Plus plan is priced at $2500, Pardot Advanced costs $4000, and the Premium plan attracts a fee of $15,000 each month and allows up to 75,000 contacts.
On its Enterprise plan, HubSpot is capable of hosting up to 80,000 contacts, whereas Pardot only goes as far as 75,000 contacts on its Premium plan.
Support
HubSpot provides extensive user support to its customers. Basic users can contact support through email, or leverage an in-app live chat to connect with customer support specialists with quick response times. Professional and Enterprise users also have access to live agent support via phone or chat. As a plus, support requests by email or chat are stored in your user account, so you can revisit the advice whenever needed.
HubSpot also has a community forum where users can get advice from other users and a comprehensive knowledge base containing helpful support articles for self-service.
On the other hand, all users on Pardot have access to the full range of support available on the platform – email. However, Pardot doesn’t offer phone support. As an alternative, Pardot utilizes a knowledge base like HubSpot and provides weekly virtual training on specific features of the platform.
Hubspot vs Pardot features: Lead Generation
HubSpot’s focus is on generating inbound leads. The platform achieves this through an integrated set of tools designed to create and deploy content for a seamless marketing experience. It guides users through their purchasing journeys. Some of the tools available on Hubspot include website hosting, a blogging platform, email marketing, and landing pages. It also has forms, chatbots, automation workflows, smart and/or personalized content, lead scoring, and A/B and adaptive testing.
Pardot also supports lead generation with similar tools (such as landing pages, email, workflows, A/B testing, etc.). However, Pardot doesn’t offer website hosting but instead hosts landing pages on a subdomain or other third-party domain.
Since these tools aren’t directly integrated with the rest of your company’s online presence, they significantly reduce the platform’s ease of use when compared to having all of your content on the same domain.
Overall, HubSpot’s lead management tools focus on generating and nurturing leads through a holistic content marketing system, whereas Pardot prioritizes automation over content marketing.
Reporting
HubSpot Marketing Hub offers better reporting than Pardot. It lets you see what needs attention from a broader, big-picture perspective with dashboards and content attribution reports. It also goes deeper with the campaign and tactic-specific reports for marketing emails, social media, and blogs.
Pardot’s reports can give you similar information, but the reports lack enough customization and analytics to make the data actionable.
HubSpot vs Pardot Features: Utility
Pardot focuses on customer journeys and sales, and it offers specialized sales and marketing lead tools for these purposes. It collaborates with Salesforce CMS and offers an intuitive and platform-specific email structure.
Companies and sales teams use it for consumer data management and analysis to understand where each customer purchasing journey.
On the other hand, the features available under HubSpot tailor their strategies mainly around inbound Marketing purposes.
It works with CMS integrations and offers dedicated SEO tools. It allows users to manage, create, and deliver digital ads across different social media and marketing platforms. Users can also create and publish content and manage them on HubSpot’s all-in-one platform.
While Pardot tools increase inbound marketing benefits, the platform only offers standard-level tools. HubSpot provides this more intricately, offering better tools for managing content and social media marketing campaigns as well.
HubSpot vs Pardot Features: Integration with CRM
Pardot offers more out-of-the-box automation by having triggers and connector sync preferences. However, its limitation is that it does not integrate with any CRM other than Salesforce.
HubSpot as a stand-alone platform offers users more integration options. You can choose to use HubSpot CRM and benefit from a fully integrated marketing, sales, and service platform. You can also choose to integrate with other CRMs, such as Microsoft Dynamics or Zoho, using HubSpot Operations Hub.
HubSpot vs Pardot Features: Social Media Management
Both HubSpot and Pardot offer social media posting and monitoring for your business.
However, HubSpot also offers Instagram scheduling and more advanced features.
You can only use Pardot to manage your basic social media presence.
HubSpot or Pardot: Which Should You Choose?
If your company uses Salesforce as its marketing software, then Pardot is a good choice because of its integration with Salesforce.
On the other hand, if you’re using advanced features on Salesforce, Hubspot is a better alternative to Pardot. It’s a better choice because of its integration capabilities as well as its advanced inbound marketing features.
HubSpot is also a good option for users new to CRM because it’s a simpler and easy-to-use solution that’s also less expensive.
It is also the superior choice for small to medium-sized businesses that want a full inbound marketing platform. It has special inbound marketing features like content management and website blogging; you can’t get these features on Pardot.
Pardot is built for B2B marketing, so if you’re a B2B organization looking for advanced marketing automation software capable of handling high-traffic campaigns, go for Pardot. It also helps if you have a generous budget with a competent user base.
READ MORE: Hubspot vs MailChimp Features: Choose a Marketing tool
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