Is the Pardot Era Coming to an End? A New Wave of Migration Hits the B2B Marketing Automation Market

According to a new HubSpot study, 70% of marketers believe marketing has changed more over the past three years than it did over the previous 50. That implies marketing automation platforms — the systems that help companies manage customer communication, send email campaigns, and automatically nurture sales-ready leads — need to be evolving at the same pace. Pardot, a platform long established in the B2B (business-to-business) space, is failing to keep up with that demand, and as a result, a growing number of companies are looking for alternatives.

Salesforce's Pardot was rebranded as Marketing Cloud Account Engagement back in 2022, but users still refer to it by its original name. Tom Ryan, founder of MarCloud and a Pardot consultant since 2016, says many users are abandoning the platform out of concern that it will eventually be discontinued altogether. "There's no innovation happening on the platform," Ryan says. "The migration path is already clearly mapped out." In his view, the question isn't whether the platform will be sunset, but when.

Concerns about Pardot's future aren't the only reason companies are moving away from it, Ryan notes. Revenue attribution and reporting have become a persistent pain point for the platform — companies simply can't pinpoint how much revenue a given marketing effort actually generated, making it far harder to allocate marketing budgets wisely.

Analysts say this migration is part of a broader trend in B2B marketing: companies are now choosing marketing technology based not just on price, but on a platform's flexibility, integration capabilities, and long-term support. That shift, in turn, is likely to intensify competition across the marketing software market.