Pardot Software Pricing & Features

Pros
Intuitive UI, great functionality for the price, native integration with Salesforce, dynamic content add-on. Automation rules that can help keep the system clean and prospects updated.

Cons
Limitations within automation rules for mutli-variable updates. For example - Loading a tradeshow list with campaign member statuses in SFDC. I would like to upload in one automation rule to say if X campaign status, update to this campaign in SFDC for X status, within the same rule I would like to add all of the other statuses with specific completion actions instead of having to run 1 rule for each status. Dynamic content should be able to trigger via a URL parameter and not just a known prospect field.

Rating breakdown

Likelihood to recommend: 8/10

Pros
Pardot lets us punch above our weight as a small marketing team. It was there when we were a marketing team of 1 and is able to grow with us as we become a marketing team of 14. Specifically, Pardot's B2B focus and different channel integration makes it very easy for us to synchronize marketing campaigns and orchestrate content and engagement across channels. From email to landing pages to social media to forms that we can inject into our web properties, Pardot makes it extremely easy for us to scale quickly and look incredible! Finally, the fact that Pardot is natively integrated with Salesforce Sales Cloud means that I don't have to worry about clunky integrations, pages or 10-step reporting. The data is right there and ready to give us insight across sales and marketing. Our sales teams are using Pardot Engage from right inside Sales Cloud to run their own, marketing - enabled, micro campaigns. This fosters alignment between our teams and helps them achieve smarter and faster results.

Cons
There is so much more that Pardot could be doing with reports given all the data that passes through the system. I'd really like to see more reports such as client engagement reports that combine account engagement scores with revenue data that Pardot pulls from Sales Cloud. I'd love to see enhanced social listening and sentiment integrated in Pardot and a more robust social queueing capability. But these are improvements that could be made rather than negatives about the existing product. We use the reports and social queueing extensively and these are ways it could be improved. Finally, help and support can be challenging to navigate. If you're someone who takes the initiative and can dig in, you'll be fine. If you want hand-holding through the process, you'll likely need external consulting.

Rating breakdown

Likelihood to recommend: 10/10

Pros
We have fully implemented Pardot into our sales and marketing teams. We use everything from landing pages, forms, custom redirects, email templates, email automation, and their gmail plugin. It does¿t meet our sales and marketing requirements.

Cons
In less than one year we have opened 42 support tickets with Pardot. Many with no resolution. After determining that the product simply doesn't work we are transitioning to their competitors. Pardot is still forcing us to pay licensing fees even though their product failed to function. Do not use. Stand Out Issues: - The Gmail plugin simply doesn't work. Activity is not consistently logged in SalesForce. We have reported the technical issue many times to their support. - They cap uploaded assets (Ex: images) at 100 MB storage. This is ridiculous. When we hit the cap they wanted to charge us 4K to increase storage. - Poor reporting on emails: * Missing data on 1:1 emails. Direct emails sent via the Gmail plug-in. * CTR doesn¿t show for under 1% in engagement studio > Requires us to click down into each email template to pull report and export details to do a side by side comparison * There are no reports generated for engagement studio (only drip programs - old feature now retired) - Can't track replies on emails > can¿t gauge performance - Recurring issues with Engage in Gmail and Engage Alerts (holds up the sales team from their day-to-day tasks) - Poor UX in Engage via gmail for sales team (cannot organize 1:1 templates by folder) - Limited on engage logic, can only use prospect fields. We can't use opportunity or account data in automation.

Rating breakdown

Likelihood to recommend: 0/10

Pros
From its Exact Target roots, the email marketing capabilities are what I like the best about Pardot. I have full HTML control and can easily create my own templates, A/B test, use variable tags, view reports, and more. The use of Litmus email previews is awesome too. I've been using the new SF Lighting UI for a while now and I like it a lot better. There were a few bugs at the beginning, but I thin they are all cleaned up now. The folder organization is probably a feature that doesn't get talked about much, but it helps a lot. We were told to try to use them and much as possible during the initial Pardot setup, and I'm so glad we did because you'll notice content and files start piling up immediately and having a solid folder structure makes life a lot easier. I've used a few other Marketing Automation tools before and Pardot is my favorite. It's simple, but robust enough to handle advanced needs.

Cons
The automation and "Drip" functionality is pretty simple and doesn't offer any real advanced options. For example, you can't create drip automation based on if a prospect clicks a certain link in an email, but I think there are working on that. There are a few other little things, but nothing major. One item that Pardot could improve upon is Basic Chat Support. They only offer basic support through their Olark chat, and more than half the time I check, it shows them offline which means they are full. It can get a little annoying at times if you need something urgent. However, their case management is very good and if you have a case get escalated to a higher team, the support is very good. I've had the team spend a lot of time working on some advanced form functionality for me that helped a lot. Their knowledge base is strong too, so that usually a good place to start.

Rating breakdown

Likelihood to recommend: 9/10

Pros
Once you understand the areas of Pardot and how affective they are throughout the areas of your marketing efforts and establish a synergy it's a great tool that's used frequently to solve and offload processes from other, potentially costly systems.

Cons
My con is a con that anyone would have, it's a different UI, capabilities are different in some contexts, and it really just takes a matter of time to feel it out and get comfortable with. If time is that bad of a con, than we'd all have a bad wrap. I do with their integrations were a bit long but with most things going to Salesforce and Pardot having a bond with it, we can solve things through that channel.

Rating breakdown

Likelihood to recommend: 10/10