There are many reasons to make a migration from Pardot to HubSpot. First, here's a brief description of the two marketing tools.
HubSpot Marketing Hub is a marketing automation software that allows users to create and deliver marketing with data from the CRM. This powerful platform is fully integrated with customer data and offers everything you need to create automated marketing campaigns.
Pardot is a marketing automation solution that was developed as a standalone platform in 2007 and later acquired by Salesforce.
Here are some of the top reasons why our customers who use Pardot decide to switch to HubSpot Marketing Hub:
1. Even though Pardot is owned by Salesforce, it doesn't integrate with Salesforce as well as HubSpot's bi-directional syncing. Many customers we work with have to export lists from Salesforce, and import them into HubSpot via a CSV file, every time they want to send an email. Imagine that life! It takes a long time, and makes your data messy.
2. With Pardot, automations must be triggered by a form. You can't send a marketing email, retargeted ad, or notification to the sales rep based on a website page view, lead score, or any other customer behavior other than filling out the form. In other words, you can't develop your leads that don't fill out a form!
3. There are no content marketing tools with Pardot. You can track content (website pages, forms, etc.), but you can't create content in Pardot.
4. There are no custom reports, you can only use out-of-the-box reports. Thus, all the specific KPIs that your customers care about are difficult to monitor with Pardot. If there is no report in Pardot already built for KPIs, it will not be possible to create them, as it is possible with HubSpot Marketing.
5. User fees are duplicated. The user will have to pay for licenses in both Salesforce and Pardot to use both, as it is not really one platform.
6. You must manually tag each part of a campaign in Pardot in order to report on it. Similarly, you have to manually tag each part of a campaign to be able to attribute it to a current source/campaign. And leads can only be associated with one campaign at a time! With HubSpot, the source report is out-of-the-box and saves you all this hassle and a lot of time.
7. Completed forms and manual adjustments are the only way to score leads (you can get more, but that requires adding Einstein).
8. Pardot's support is not very good and you have to pay for support. With HubSpot Marketing Pro, you get free phone support (in English or French) 24/7.
9. With Pardot, segmenting your contacts is very cumbersome. One could even say that it is poor. To send an email, contacts must be on a list. This forces you to create a million useless lists. It's also a step you have to take (create a list) before automation can take place, which slows down the nurturing process. Part of this is due to poor synchronization with Salesforce. You can only segment with a limited number of demographic/behavioral data points.
10. With Pardot, the email authoring tool is difficult to use. Also, the examples of how your email renders on mobile are often poor.
11. There is no template setup process (a free service offered by HubSpot to help you get value from HubSpot faster). It takes a long time to build a single landing page, blog, etc. This increases your time to value and prevents you from being as dynamic with content and deploying campaigns more slowly.
12. Chat bots should be built in Salesforce, where no marketing data resides.
13. In Salesforce, you have to pay to integrate your inbox with CRM. This is without reminding that HubSpot's CRM is free. Yes, it's true that you need at least the Sales Starter version to get several necessary features, but the cost is only $50 USD per month.
14. Pardot is much more difficult to use in general, they require a lot of training. The level of autonomy you need will be hard to achieve with Pardot. HubSpot's ease of use is definitely one of its greatest strengths. Of course, depending on your needs and context, it is likely that one of the two tools will suit you better. After all, it's not just the tool that counts, but what you do with it. There are many other reasons to use the HubSpot CRM platform and its 5 hubs. In fact, you can check out our article that mentions the 40 reasons to adopt this CRM platform