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IBM Watson Campaign Automation vs Salesforce Marketing Cloud comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Categories and Ranking

IBM Watson Campaign Automation
Ranking in Marketing Automation
20th
Average Rating
7.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.3
Number of Reviews
1
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Salesforce Marketing Cloud
Ranking in Marketing Automation
1st
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
6.9
Number of Reviews
63
Ranking in other categories
Social CRM (3rd), Marketing Management (1st), Social Media Management Solutions (2nd)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of June 2026, in the Marketing Automation category, the mindshare of IBM Watson Campaign Automation is 1.6%, up from 1.2% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Salesforce Marketing Cloud is 11.6%, down from 22.8% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Marketing Automation Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Salesforce Marketing Cloud11.6%
IBM Watson Campaign Automation1.6%
Other86.8%
Marketing Automation
 

Featured Reviews

it_user701487 - PeerSpot reviewer
Marketing Administrator and Member Web Support at a financial services firm with 201-500 employees
Valuable features include creating and using defined templates. I would like to see reporting capabilities and graphing reports.
We are currently planning to switch at the end of this year to a different ESP. One reason was that, with IBM's takeover of SilverPop, we did discover that customer care and our relationship/sales manager were no longer responsive or as caring as they had been in the past seven or eight years. The feeling is very different. We had never felt ignored because we are not super-users, but now, we do feel that way.
GauravSingh2 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Consultant at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees
Targeted email journeys have boosted campaign insight and now need better data access and support
I feel that Salesforce Marketing Cloud can be improved in how the data views are accessed; it would be better to have something more physical. With data extensions, you can view them directly, but for data views, it is very difficult as you can only send it out or load it into data extensions. Improvements can also be made in the connections to different external tools such as Azure or AWS. Customer support can be improved in Salesforce Marketing Cloud, as sometimes it is not clear what the issue is or how to approach solving it, and it also takes time to resolve issues.

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"I love their tech support; they have not been needed frequently, but when needed, they are quick and very knowledgeable."
"The most valuable features of Salesforce are the automation and the ability to create dashboards which provide a wider picture of what is going on."
"We have found the solution stable, the performance is good, there are no bugs or glitches, and it doesn't crash or freeze."
"The Journey and CloudPages and automation are all great."
"It is very easy to use from a marketing standpoint."
"The automation is great. It saves us a lot of time and it makes us move faster."
"The Journey Builder, which has been around for a while and follows the steps that customers use, is the greatest tool that Salesforce has."
"We are satisfied with the Salesforce Marketing Cloud products, which is why we have extended and acquired the Data Cloud as integration."
"Offers many great features and is intuitive."
 

Cons

"One reason was that, with IBM's takeover of SilverPop, we did discover that customer care and our relationship/sales manager were no longer responsive or as caring as they had been in the past seven or eight years."
"Salesforce Marketing Cloud should be linked to an email ID, so the features after 15 days can update on the opportunity. You should not have to update them manually to the next step."
"The encryption and decryption have room for improvement."
"Query Studio in Salesforce Marketing Cloud needs to be improved because not all queries are supported and we cannot debug the AM Script or SSJS code, which makes code debugging manual."
"Technical Support: That's where it gets bad, in my opinion. I have had to deal with the support several times."
"Salesforce Marketing Cloud should provide some debugging facilities for every user."
"The customization of Salesforce, a generic CRM software, has room for improvement."
"Salesforce Marketing Cloud could improve by having more graphical options because a lot of tables are now only numbers and percentages and data. I prefer graphs, lines, and pie charts. I know there are ways to receive this from Salesforce Marketing Cloud. It doesn't play a huge role in my daily work to invest the time to figure it out. I feel that it would be time wasted. They could make the graphical options easier to find and use in the future."
"Clarity around new features could be improved when they are released."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

Information not available
"The licensing cost for the solution is on a yearly basis."
"Salesforce is an expensive solution."
"The solution's pricing is very high and should be more flexible for smaller companies."
"It's not cheap, which is why I recommend that you use Marketing Cloud to create automated journeys. If you plan to use Marketing Cloud just to send emails, use another tool."
"I don't know if my company pays for Salesforce Marketing Cloud monthly or yearly. It's a SaaS, so it's a recurring cost, but I have no information on its price."
"This is a low cost solution suited to larger organizations."
"It is a license per user."
"The price is expensive."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
No data available
Financial Services Firm
18%
Construction Company
9%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Comms Service Provider
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
No data available
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business20
Midsize Enterprise15
Large Enterprise34
 

Questions from the Community

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What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Salesforce Marketing Cloud?
I did not work on any pricing or implementation aspects but learned on my own when dealing with Revenue Cloud products.
What needs improvement with Salesforce Marketing Cloud?
Regarding areas for improvement, the realization of value from Salesforce Einstein's predictive AI features is a notable challenge. Although the implementation partner highlighted these capabilitie...
What is your primary use case for Salesforce Marketing Cloud?
As a consultant, I partner with organizations to optimize their use of Salesforce Marketing Cloud (SFMC). My engagement often begins pre-implementation, where I lead the requirements gathering proc...
 

Also Known As

IBM Marketing Cloud, IBM SilverPop
ExactTarget
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

The King Arthur Flour, Stonyfield, InsideOut Development, Moosejaw, Big Scary Cranium, Paper Style
American Express, Financial Conduct Authority, KPN, Merck KGaA, Peterborough City Council, The Chapar, ADP, Financial Times, Stanley Black & Decker, SureFlap, Western Union, Philips
Find out what your peers are saying about Salesforce, HubSpot, Adobe and others in Marketing Automation. Updated: June 2026.
899,258 professionals have used our research since 2012.