Marketo Competitors: How do they stack up?
Marketo Competitors: there are a lot of companies that want to be compared to Adobe Marketo but in reality, there are only a handful of platforms that offer a comparable level of functionality.
The phrase "marketing automation" is overused: it gets thrown around by every tool that automates anything related to marketing. If you're looking for viable Marketo alternatives, the list is fairly short.
In this comparison, we limit our list to enterprise-ready marketing automation competitors with features sets comparable to that of Marketo. These features include:
- Lead Nurturing Workflows
- Email Drip Series
- Multi-Channel Capability
- Tools for building Emails, Forms, & Landing Pages
- Multi-Variate Lead Scoring
- Audience Segmentation
Let’s take a look at the Marketo competitors and how they stack up!
Marketo Competitors: How do they stack up?​
For the purpose of this blog post, we’re going to compare five main points between Marketo and its top competitors:
- Platform Functionality and Features
- Average Time to Go Live
- Pricing
- Quality of Support
- Average Time to See ROI
1. Marketo Competitors Platform Functionality and Features​
Let’s start with the meat of any Marketing Automation platform: the platform functionality and features.
Most “real” marketing automation platforms utilize a lot of different functionalities to allow marketers to drive ROI, generate leads, and convert visitors into customers by automating marketing programs, measuring marketing ROI, and communicating with specific groups and segments.
To figure out how Marketo Competitors really stack up when it comes to platform functionality and features, we wanted to go straight to the source: marketers just like you (and me!). So we recently paired up with G2, a trusted software review site with over 1.2 million authentic and timely reviews from real users, to license some data to get to the bottom, once and for all. The proof is in the pudding and that’s what we wanted to provide you with!
So here’s how Marketo Competitors perform when it comes to 3 large platform functionality and features requirements:
Segmentation​
Hubspot and Paminga both beat out Marketo for Segmentation capabilities, with Hubspot coming in at 84% user satisfaction with the feature and Paminga customers rating it at 91%. Salesforce Marketing Cloud Account Engagement (formerly known as Pardot, what a mouthful. We'll refer to it as "MCAE" going forward) and other competitors came in around 80%.
Lead Nurturing​
When it comes to Lead Nurturing, the data actually showed very close results. Hubspot and Marketo were both tied around 85% customer satisfaction regarding their lead nurturing features. Paminga came slightly ahead at 87% and MCAE fell slightly behind at 81%. Given that this is such a bread and butter piece of marketing automation, we’re not surprised that many competitors rank very similarly!
Lead Scoring​
Another section where most of the competitors scored very similarly was with Lead Scoring! At 82%, Marketo beat out Hubspot at 81% and MCAE at 79%. (Paminga came in at 90%).
2. Marketo Competitors Platform Average Time to Go Live​
Going live is an important aspect of Marketing Automation implementation: the quicker you go live, the faster that you get to really generate leads and see true ROI (more on that later).
When it comes to Time to Go Live for Market Competitors, we thought that giving you the in-depth details might be helpful!
Average Months to Go Live for Various Marketo Competitors
For those that don’t have their reading glasses on hand, Hubspot and MCAE users went live faster than Marketo users; Hubspot and MCAE both averaged a 2 month implementation period while Marketo users averaged 3 months.
Paminga actually came in as the head of this pack in all aspects; Paminga users went live in 1 month, which is 2x as fast as MCAE and Hubspot users, and 3x as fast as Marketo users.
3. Marketo Competitors Pricing​
Comparing pricing of Marketo competitors can be... tricky.
First off, Marketo's pricing is not published. They take the enterprise route where you must "contact sales" – not to get pricing of course! – but for them to qualify you as a prospect.
You're probably a long way from understanding costs at the end of that first call with Marketo.
Things are somewhat better with Salesforce and HubSpot, but only somewhat. These platforms both publish pricing pages, but they're also well known for pricing somehow remaining opaque. There are two primary reasons for this:
- Salesforce & HubSpot have broken their platforms into many pieces in order to maximize their revenues – via up and cross-sells
- If you have enterprise-level needs, you're likely to be asked to "contact sales" in order to get a price anyway
Paminga's pricing is much simpler. Paminga's pricing is published, and only two tiers apply when comparing to Marketo: Pro & Enterprise.
4. Marketo Competitors Quality of Support​
I could truly write a whole book about why quality of support is so important in the world of marketing automation.
For a lot of marketers, from the newest team member to the most experienced, learning a new marketing automation platform can be somewhat overwhelming. It’s why choosing a Customer Success (CS) team that will truly partner with you throughout your Onboarding process is so important; they should be giving you all the tools you need to be successful while using their software.
Then there’s the whole “what about after I’ve gone live?” question. Your CS Team should be there for you then, too! At Paminga, Pro and Enterprise customers have unlimited access to their Account Managers calendar to schedule training calls, and customers can expect to have any ticket they submit to the team to be resolved within an average of a single business day.
Quality of Support should not be overlooked! Having a great CS team helps save time, go live faster, and get you on the road to achieving your goals.
So how did Marketo Competitors do when it comes to Quality of Support? We’ll let the numbers speak for themselves.
- Paminga: A+ (97%)
- Hubspot: B+ (88%)
- Adobe Marketo Engage: C- (73%)
- Salesforce Marketing Cloud Account: C- (73%)
5. Marketo Competitors Average Time to See ROI​
Now in my humble opinion, average time to Return on Investment (ROI) is a huge deal — and one that a lot of marketers don’t necessarily take into account. If time to go live is the very beginning of your relationship with a software, time to ROI is the middle of the road; it’s a terrific indicator of how much a software is actually helping its customers market and increase revenue.
When it came to Marketo Competitors and the Average Time to See ROI, the data (remember, this is from marketers just like you) showed interesting trends.
Average Months to ROI for Various Marketo Competitors
If you’re considering Hubspot, MCAE, or Marketo, it’s likely that you’ll see ROI in around the same amount of time. Marketo users saw ROI in an average of 17 months, or just under a year and a half. If you’re looking for a Marketing Automation Platform that enables you to get ROI in 7 months, with 60% of customers reporting going live in 6 months or less, you might want to check out Paminga.
So that’s how Marketo and its competitors rank for 5 of the most important aspects of marketing automation platforms! We hope this post was helpful for you in understanding which Marketo competitors are really worth checking out!
