Pardot vs Customer.io

I give Pardot a review of four out of five stars, and for more reviews, see below. Before my organization started using Pardot, we were on eTapestry's built-in mass email communication software system. It wasn't working for us because it was a technology of the past. It was very clunky. We had a very limited amount of mailable prospects we had, and it was very manual, and the resolution for videos, images wasn't the best. The first biggest selling point for Pardot was its native integration with Salesforce. So now whenever we have a contact in Salesforce, it's automatically synced to Pardot, which makes it a lot easier for my team to use and navigate. And the second reason why we chose Pardot is because of its really intelligent tools, such as Engagement Studio where we can automate a lot of our tasks and be a much more efficient organization. Pardot definitely is not the easiest tool to use. We have to hire consultants to help us build it and integrate it with Salesforce. It took us about a full year before we became confident with using Pardot, and every day my organization is still learning more things that the tool can do for us. If you're a small team and want to be super efficient, Pardot is a great tool for you because it takes a lot of the manual work out, especially with drip campaigns and a lot of its automation tools.

- Sabal A.

I would give Pardot a three out of five stars. And for more reviews, you can click below. Prior to using Pardot, we were using HubSpot Marketing Hub. It was a great marketing tool. I have really no quarrels with that. But the integration with Salesforce Sales Cloud was a little lackluster and hard to control, especially when it came to custom field syncing. We chose Pardot primarily based on the integration with Salesforce. It had a lot of overlapping capabilities with other marketing automation platforms, but we were most excited to leverage the connection between our Sales Cloud contacts and our Pardot prospects. Pardot was a little difficult up front, but it didn't last very long. So the implementation for properly set up work would probably be about two months. We used kind of an implementation partner, which I would recommend, through Salesforce actually, their jumpstart program. And that helped because we had a dedicated and knowledgeable person that would give us feedback and check-ins once a week. So that made it a little bit easier. But I would say the first two months are a little bit of a challenge and then the org works well. I think if you're considering using Pardot and going to use Pardot, of course there needs to be some integration with another Salesforce channel. That's really where you get the best leverage and Pardot separates itself from other marketing automation softwares like HubSpot or Mailchimp or something like that. I think it's also important to have a dedicated personnel to manage Pardot. It's commonly the same person that manages a Salesforce instance. So you can double up like that, but it's not something that's going to self-manage you really need a dedicated administrator for when configuration requests come up.

- Kelly Michael S.

Pardot has made it easy to understand how our marketing is working, know who is a hot lead versus a disengaged one, and to create content that is easy to share and delivers good ROI. It’s built in many safeguards to keep you from getting in trouble with spam rules and avoid sending emails multiple times.

- Kate B.

What I really like is that we use our own database as the single source of truth, and not the email platform database which is never up to date. With Customer.io we use real-time data from our own platform (B2B SaaS) which helps me as a marketer to always communicate with customer segments in the best possible way. Customer.io provide lots of options to filter based on segments and rules which comes in very handy when you want to create cool workflows. Overall, extremely happy with the platform.

- Max V.

Great tool. Not made for beginners but if you are willing to spend time on masterising, I highly recommend. I have been using it in several companies for the past 5 years.

- Nessim M.

I don't find this product very easy to use but it's one of the best so far I've used in the email automation space.

- Shilpa S.