Hubspot vs Pardot

Many aspiring B2B businesses wonder what are the main differences between Pardot and Hubspot. There are benefits and drawbacks to both marketing automation technology solutions.

Hubspot and Pardot are two of the most popular and leading marketing automation technology software solutions available today. Both tools are fairly user-friendly, (as opposed to Adobe's Marketo or Oracle's Eloqua), where most tools and features can be used by end-users declaratively, and without any comprehensive integrations required after implementation. However, Hubspot has typically been used by smaller companies; whereas Pardot is used more and more by Salesforce CRM customers.

“Hubspot has almost a 'freemium model. Hubspot is super-easy to get up and running very quickly, but the platform doesn't really scale as businesses mature”

Both Hubspot and Pardot have pro and cons in each platform. Businesses should strive to be agnostic to each platform's marketing (and somewhat skeptical of each firms Account Executives), but do due diligence and focus on the capabilities of tool as they support your businesses marketing needs, growth stage and technology stack development.

Pardot Marketing Automation

Pardot is typically seen as the industry's premier marketing automation platform. Pardot is owned by Salesforce, the leading Saas CRM. Pardot began as a standalone marketing automation platform (MAP), but was purchased by email marketing giant ExactTarget, shortly before Salesforce purchased the mass-marketing tool and rebranded it as Marketing Cloud Email Studio.

Marketing Cloud has many feature addons that offer additional automation capabilities, but Pardot is a one-stop-shop for marketing automation, allowing for website and digital asset tracking, segmentation, database management and of course, email marketing. Pardot is also fairly dependent on using Salesforce CRM. If your business is not a Salesforce CRM customer, Pardot might not be the best solution. However, Pardot is by far the closest aligned MAP tool to Salesforce, which can turbocharge marketing personalization and segmentation.

Pardot works best with Salesforce databases with marketing segment ranging from 1,000-2 million contacts. If you're only working with several hundred customers, Hubspot will likely be a cheaper alternative, and if you have over two million records, an enterprise solution like Marketing Cloud or Eloqua might be a better platform, though both will require significantly more implementation, development and operations resources.

Pardot is initially more expensive than Hubspot to get up and running. Packages begin at over $10,000/year (without discounts), for "Pardot Growth" edition and working with over 10,000 records will incur additional costs to purchase bandwidth. Additionally, while Salesforce will offer vendors to do "QuickStarts," these are typically low-cost vendors that deliver the bare minimum of setup. A successful Pardot implementation requires an experienced Salesforce Pardot Consultant, who can align a businesses marketing strategy with an existing CRM database.

The highest tier of "Pardot Advanced" can range up to $30-50K per year for larger enterprise businesses, but as Pardot is sold alongside Salesforce CRM, significant discounts are typically offered by Salesforce AEs for businesses willing to negotiate.

Hubspot CRM Platform

Hubspot is a great tool for startups and businesses just beginning a marketing automation journey. Hubspot is also a huge proponent of content generation, and has been instrumental in creating the term "Inbound Marketing," and any customer purchasing Hubspot will be offered a great series of training about content creation, including guides to help start building blog posts, social media posts, white papers, webinars and more.

Hubspot is independependantly owned, and has almost a "freemium" model of tools. Hubspot pricing begins at $540.00/yr. Used primarily by startups and SMBs (Small-to-Medium sized businesses), Hubspot is also extremely easy to onboard. If your business has a few hundred prospects, Hubspot is a very cheap platform to launch, and it offers a broad variety of automation capabilities, including the Nurture Campaigns, Email Marketing, Landing Pages + Forms, Lead Scoring, website integration, dynamic content and marketing analytics that Pardot provides.

However, Hubspot becomes prohibitively expensive as businesses scale. For 10,000 records (the minimum Pardot offers) the cost increases to around $5,000/yr for Hubspot's base "Starter" package. For Hubspot's "Enterprise" product, the marketing automation software becomes significantly more expensive than Pardot Advanced, coming in at $38,400 / year as of 2022.

Conclusion

Pardot and Hubspot are both premier marketing automation tools. Both platforms are quite user-friendly, have a ton of useful supporting training material (through Hubspot Academy and Trailhead), available certifications and a suite of different automation features to help engage and nurture prospective customers over time. Depending on the size, maturity and marketing goals of a company, either Pardot or Hubspot may be a cheaper.. or more effective solution.

“Pardot can have a more comprehensive up-front cost, but scales much more easily due to its pricing model and its close alignment with Salesforce CRM”

If you're choosing between Salesforce Pardot and Hubspot CRM, make sure you demo both platforms thoroughly, and assess potential costs for this year, but also along your businesses projected growth trajectory over the next couple years. If you want a more robust perspective, reach out to a top Salesforce Consultant with marketing automation experience. There are also numerous vendor comparisons available online, though it's often best to get feedback from someone who has used both platforms in different scenarios.