Campaign Monitor vs. Pardot

1. Price

One of the most important considerations when choosing an ESP is the price, but if you’re in the market, you probably already know that. The trick is to find a plan that has all the features you need to power your email marketing while keeping costs low enough that you easily see a return on your investment.

It’s a difficult choice, but an important one.

Campaign Monitor

Campaign Monitor lets you choose from three plan options, and the price will ultimately depend on your number of subscribers. As your list grows, you might find that you go over your plan’s limit. At this point, Campaign Monitor will notify you and you’ll be able to upgrade your package or pay for the additional emails.

Campaign Monitor also offers an option for those who send email infrequently. With our pay as you go option, send emails for as little as $5 USD per campaign plus $0.01 per recipient. It’s an option that enables anyone to access the best Campaign Monitor features—including the insights dashboard so you can track and prove your success.

Campaign Monitor’s pricing is flexible enough to allow everyone from major enterprise players to solopreneurs the chance to have a beautiful, sophisticated email marketing program.

Another great aspect of Campaign Monitor’s pricing is that you won’t be locked out of more advanced packages or features just because you have a smaller list. Similarly, even the most basic package offers access to Campaign Monitor’s core abilities and the powerful insights dashboard.

Pardot

Pardot represents the more extreme end of the pricing spectrum, with the cheapest option costing $1,250 annually and only allowing for up to 10,000 contacts. And with this hefty price tag, you’ll still have to pay more to access some features such as dynamic content, campaign insights, and advanced email analytics.

If you want access to the full suite of Pardot’s B2B tools, you’ll have to pay for a more expensive plan option, such as their Advanced or Premium plans, which cost $4,000 to $15,000 per year respectively.

Even with these most expensive plans, you’ll still have to pay an additional price to access Salesforce Engage and other advanced features.

Takeaway

If price is your most important criteria, Campaign Monitor offers more cost-effective solutions and more flexible plans than Pardot. If you want access to all of Pardot’s more advanced features, you’ll have to pay for them.

2. Top-rated Salesforce integration

Integrations can make or break your email marketing strategy. The right integrations will enable you and your team to work smarter, pulling in the right data automatically so you can get back to doing what you do best. One of the most important integrations you’ll need—if not the most important—is your CRM. 

Email marketing is successful because it creates a one-to-one conversation with your audience. But you can’t create an email strategy based on that foundation without hyper-personalized content. And if you want personalization to power your success, you’ll need to integrate with your CRM, lest you spend hours manually pulling over accurate, detailed, and up-to-date information. 

Campaign Monitor

Did you know that Campaign Monitor has the top-rated Salesforce integration in the Salesforce AppExchange? With a five-star rating and rave reviews, customers love the support provided by Beaufort12, the integration’s developers. One of the key features that makes this integration so effective is the support provided by the Beaufort team of Salesforce pros. You’ll have access to Campaign Monitor support as well, while also receiving top-rated Salesforce support through Beaufort.

Customers also love that they never have to leave Salesforce to use Campaign Monitor. Instead, they can remain in one system the entire time, with an in-app window that lets you use Campaign Monitor while logged into your Salesforce account.

Pardot

Salesforce Pardot is owned and operated by Salesforce, as you’ve probably gathered. However, the Pardot app only has a 4.5-star review on the Salesforce AppExchange, with users commonly citing integration glitches as one of the reasons for the lower score.  

One of the other considerations when looking at the quality of any technology is how easy you’ll be able to hit the ground running and what resources companies provide to help you onboard seamlessly. On the Salesforce AppExchange, the Pardot integration only comes with a Pardot pricing page and a link to the Customer Hub on Pardot’s site. That’s far less resources than the Getting Started guide and the Installation and Setup guide that the Campaign Monitor integration offers, in addition to support and chat options.

Takeaway

If you want an integration you don’t have to worry about, with top-rated support, Campaign Monitor is a great fit with a 5-star review. If you don’t mind having to work around the occasional glitch, Pardot still has a 4.5-star review.

3. Ease of use 

You’ll spend a lot of time in your email marketing tool, but you want that time to be spent creating campaigns and tracking results, not trying to figure out how to implement a new feature or find your data. Plus, at some point, you might need members of your team to implement a campaign. When that happens, you want your team to be able to sit down and get to work without needing hours of training. 

Campaign Monitor

Campaign Monitor was built to create beautiful emails that get results. Campaign Monitor’s drag-and-drop editor is intuitive to use, even with little to no previous experience. But for anyone with more email knowledge and experience, they’ll find options to edit custom HTML code and create their own templates in Campaign Monitor as well, allowing for the most customization possible.

In fact, reviews across multiple sites identify ease of use as one of the main reasons why customers choose Campaign Monitor over other email service providers available.

Pardot

Reviews say that Pardot is more complicated to use, with one reviewer saying they ultimately had to google how to do things in the platform. In fact, reviewers often report having problems using the platform—from the initial setup to creating workflows or even maintaining—due to its unintuitive nature.

Another problem reviewers face is that, when they do have issues, they cannot easily reach support to help them find a solution and get back to work.

Takeaway

On average, users rate Campaign Monitor as easier to use than Pardot. Users also rate Campaign Monitor as having better quality of support and ease of set up, which are crucial aspects to making sure your team has the power to succeed in your ESP.

4. Beyond B2B

Another important consideration is what you need your email marketing tool to accomplish. The number one purpose of an email service provider is obviously to provide email services, but some platforms do more than that. Many offer landing page builders, SMS capabilities, and many more features. 

Most ESPs that provide more features will also have higher prices, so it’s important for your team to understand what features you actually need and will use to generate revenue. 

Campaign Monitor

As mentioned earlier, Campaign Monitor was built to simplify the process of designing and sending effective email campaigns. Because of this focus, Campaign Monitor focuses on email marketing. If your company needs to create landing pages or send texts, you’ll need to integrate with other software to accomplish that. 

Luckily there are hundreds of integrations that can make pairing your technology with Campaign Monitor simple and straightforward. While Campaign Monitor does not have built-in features like lead management, it does have a flexible interface that can create emails that work for B2B or B2C companies.

Pardot

Pardot positions itself as a B2B solution, including features such as lead management and lead nurturing to support B2B efforts. Pardot allows marketers to align with their sales team through real-time alerts and Salesforce Engage. However, to access top-level initiatives such as Salesforce Engage, you’ll have to pay an additional price.

Takeaway

If you are looking for B2B marketing automation functionality, Pardot has more capabilities than Campaign Monitor. However, if you’re looking for email marketing that works beyond B2B, Campaign Monitor will be a better fit.If your organization is looking for top-notch B2B functionality without the complex setup and high price tag, we’d suggest taking a look at our sister company, Delivra.