Top 10 Pardot Alternatives & competitors

Planning to implement marketing automation and considering Pardot? We advice to look at resembling software to make a decision.

When customers choose marketing automation app, most often they are looking for functionality for email builder, marketing lead database, website builder, lead nurturing, A etc.

Comparing Pardot with competitors users pay attention to the automation builder, marketing lead database, help desk, conversations, survey builder, segmentation, number of triggers and actions and so on.

We’ve made a list of top 10 competitors that are very similar in cost and features to Pardot. The list is based on similarity, so if Pardot doesn’t suit you in any way, here you can easily choose the best variant for you.

ActiveCampaign

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ActiveCampaign is a platform that helps businesses automate customer experiences and build meaningful connections with their customers. Since 2003, ActiveCampaign has created tools that are both powerful and easy to use – because growing businesses don't always have the time to set up new tech. Today, 80,000+ businesses use ActiveCampaign for their email marketing, marketing automation, or CRM.

Act-on

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Act-On is a subscription-based software-as-a-service (SaaS) product for marketing automation. Its software products are for email marketing, landing pages, social media prospecting, CRM integration, lead management, webinar management, and analytics.

AutomateMyApp

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AutomateMyApp is a Task Automation Service that connects multiple applications together so that you can send data from one of your applications to another and sync your data across multiple applications.

Autopilot

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Autopilot is a cloud-based email marketing and marketing automation software platform that helps companies to connect their marketing systems, automate their marketing touchpoints, and convert more customers. Autopilot's built-in integrations to marketing, messaging, lead intelligence, and CRM tools allow marketers to message consistently using email, SMS, and physical mail.

Drip

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Drip is the world's first ECRM (an E-commerce CRM) designed for building personal and profitable relationships with your customers at scale. E-commerce marketers around the world are starting to see their customers in true color with Drip features like comprehensive tracking, hyper-segmentation, and robust email marketing automation. They're graduating from typical email platforms, bloated CRMs, or overhyped marketing automation tools, and making more money with Drip.

Marketo

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Marketo is SaaS based marketing automation software built to help organizations to automate and measure marketing engagement, tasks and workflows. Based in San Mateo, California the company sells marketing automation software to help B2B and B2C marketers to target qualified leads, produce lead-to-revenue opportunities and execute automated, personalized marketing campaigns across multiple digital channels.

Webmecanik

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Webmecanik is a marketing automation software that allows you to intelligently identify, segment and nurture unknown website visitors, leads and customers. Using an Open Source framework, it can be integrated with all major CRM's solutions on the market and more than 1.000 other systems through Zapier. This all-in-one solution enables you to create campaign scenarios and choose from many triggering criteria to send the right information to the right contact at the right time.

SharpSpring

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SharpSpring is one of the most flexible platforms on the market, offering behavior-based email marketing, native or 3rd party CRM integration, dynamic forms, landing page and blog builders, universal CMS compatibility, and integration with hundreds of applications.

EngageBay

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With a limit of 1,000 contacts and 1,000 emails/month, Enagebay CRM suggests its users the cheapest paid plans of the 3 providers. The basic plan will cost you $12 a month per user, and it includes 10,000 contacts and the same amount of emails.

MaaxMarket

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MaaxMarket was founded in September 2015 and the goal for the company is to create an artificial intelligence platform to automate marketing aimed at small and medium enterprise customers globally. Our principal offices are located in Boulder, CO with offshore development from our wholly-owned subsidiary office from Chennai, India.

How to choose Pardot substitute

Many marketing automation tools are similar to each other. Platforms with identical features can differ in cost by 2 times. The first feature you should look at is the availability of funnel builder. This is a basic feature of marketing automation apps and if it doesn’t include this feature, most likely this app isn’t formed yet. All funnel builders look almost the same. It's important not to look at the UX, but pay attention to the functionality.

In a month, you'll get used to the UI, but the lack of features will always spite you. Changing marketing automation apps is very expensive. If you have the usual email set up, it's not that difficult to switch to another tool. But if you've already configured integrations, workflow, and have complex funnels, it can take months to change the tool. That's why you should be attentive to choosing an alternative.

What to look for when analyzing the automation builder? It has 4 important features categories.

1. Triggers. For instance, "Form submit" is a trigger that launches a business process. The most often used triggers are: opening an email, clicking a link in an email, reaching a goal, adding or removing a tag, closing a deal, visiting a page, etc. In each platform for marketing automation this set is different. The more, the better.
2. Action. For example, "Send email". This is the most simple action you can have. The most often used actions are: add or remove a tag, send a text message, send a messenger message, set a salesperson task, update a transaction, notify someone by email, move a transaction to another stage, etc.
3. Delay. For instance, "Wait 2 days. Customer fill in the form on the website and get in the marketing automation app (Trigger), the software sends a Welcome email (Action). Then the app waits 3 days (delay) and sends a second email. This is the most simple automation. But there are other options. For example, "Wait until something happens". Or wait until November 30th, or wait until 9 PM in the subscriber’s time zone.
4. If/else. For instance, "If a client, has the tag "Bought product #1", send the email, if the subscriber doesn't have the tag "Purchased product #1", wait 2 days and send the email. The most often used if/else parameters are: was on the site page, bought certain items, opened certain emails, user field the contact card matches some requirements. This is information according to which you can segment the contact base.

Analyzing the automation builder, you need to look carefully at all four categories of functions. The more, the better. Often it appears that good-working marketing automation software with the biggest number of features look uncomfortable. New systems look nice, but they have few functions. You need to the tool you plan to implement very deeply. Otherwise, it will be very painful to change it in the future.

Once you've analyzed the automation builder, you understand whether there are integrations with the apps you need. Fortunately, Apiway can help you. Usually, tools like Pardot are the center of business IT infrastructure. It's kind of digital hub for all your subscriber. This kind of software is like an octopus, which is putting its tentacles into other system. App like Pardot need to integrate with most other ones. Or you’ll have to waste a lot of money and time developing custom integrations.

Also those who are looking for alternatives to Pardot use tools from other categories like email marketing software, chat on website software, CRM system, lead management software