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Marketo pros and cons

Vendor: Adobe

4.2 out of 5

25 reviews
96% willing to recommend

Pros & Cons summary

Marketo offers valuable features like Smart Campaigns and efficient email tracking. It's praised for ease of use, flexibility, and superior lead generation. Compliance with GDPR and CAN-SPAM rules ensures consent-based marketing. Users can create appealing emails easily, but data manipulation and JavaScript form customization need improvement. There's potential for enhanced integration with email testing, scalable solutions, flexible APIs, and better visualization in reporting for large audiences.

Buyer's Guide

Get pricing advice, tips, use cases and valuable features from real users of this product.

Prominent pros & cons

PROS

Smart Campaigns are highlighted as a valuable feature for tracking and managing user interactions effectively.

The extensive features for email campaigns, including sending and tracking, are considered Marketo's main strength.

The system's flexibility and ease of use, including customizable templates and robust lead management, are highly regarded.

Marketo provides strong support for GDPR compliance, ensuring that users respect privacy and consent regulations.

Features like progressive profiling, lead scoring, and seamless lead generation and segmentation enhance user engagement and reporting capabilities.

CONS

Marketo should allow more flexibility for data manipulation and JavaScript integration, especially for form customization.

The APIs of Marketo need to be more flexible, as some functionalities are missing and not available through existing APIs.

Challenges exist with processing delays in data syncing, particularly when sending data from Marketo to other applications like CRMs.

Marketo's segmentation is limited to 20 segments, which might not be sufficient for companies requiring more detailed segmentations.

Pricing could be more competitive as Marketo is not the cheapest option, potentially making it a less appealing choice compared to other platforms like HubSpot.

Marketo Pros review quotes

MA

Muhammad Ardhin

Works

Feb 3, 2020

The most valuable feature of this solution is Smart Campaigns.

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MO

Marketo Consultant at Webtech software servies

Nov 25, 2020

It is a very user-friendly solution. I'm mainly working on Design Studio, which is useful for companies in tracking repeat users. The progressive proofing is also useful. It is not available in other solutions.

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AD

Founder at Kav Interactive

Nov 30, 2020

The most valuable features are the Marketo emails, both sending and tracking.

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Free Report: Marketo Reviews and More

Learn what your peers think about Marketo. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: December 2025.

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reviewer1493613

Digital Transformation specialist at a tech services company with 201-500 employees

Jan 31, 2021

The smart campaign looks quite interesting and useful.

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SM

Head of Digital Marketing Operations at a marketing services firm with 501-1,000 employees

Oct 16, 2021

The main feature of Marketo is sending out emails, so that would be the most valuable feature.

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reviewer1140438

Global Product Marketing & Operations Lead at a hospitality company with 201-500 employees

Feb 22, 2022

The most valuable feature is the scoring.

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reviewer1932015

MAP ETL Developer at a tech services company with 10,001+ employees

Aug 4, 2022

The product has been stable.

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NH

Nikashkhan Haneefa

Report Analyst at GigaNET

Nov 23, 2023

I like that the solution is flexible.

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Associate Manager at Tech Mahindra Limited

Apr 11, 2024

The main highlights of Marketo are its support structure, the documentation available, and the features mainly related to forms, landing pages, and leads. Although other platforms like Oracle Eloqua have similar features, Marketo's support structure, lead generation, and segmentation features are easier than those of different platforms.

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Executive - Marketing Automation at a tech services company with 1,001-5,000 employees

Apr 23, 2024

One of the most important things about Marketo is its focus on GDPR compliance. It helps you follow GDPR and CAN-SPAM rules. For example, with Marketo, I won't accidentally target audiences without their consent. Firstly, the Marketo Insights system will highlight new customer segments that I should engage with.

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Show 6 more reviews (out of 16)

Marketo Cons review quotes

MA

Muhammad Ardhin

Works

Feb 3, 2020

Marketo should give more power to the users for data manipulation.

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MO

Marketo Consultant at Webtech software servies

Nov 25, 2020

I had an issue while integrating JavaScript with forms. When you embed JavaScript, you can either embed it in a landing page or some other self-contained management system like WordPress. Currently, it provides you access to CSS, where you can customize your form design, but there is no option for JavaScript modification for a particular form. This area needs to be improved where you can integrate JavaScript, and it has the JavaScript functions for that particular form. There are a lot of other areas of improvement. In the design area, they can give us more testing options instead of relying on email testing alone. It would be great if they can provide responsive testing where email clients can be tested within Marketo. It would be also helpful if they can implement some in-built options for users or forms for blocking a generic email ID such as Yahoo or Gmail. Similarly, it would be helpful to have JavaScript features and forms as well as the option to add Google analytics and a header and footer for the landing pages.

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AD

Founder at Kav Interactive

Nov 30, 2020

Its APIs need to be more flexible because there are some things that are not available in the API.

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Free Report: Marketo Reviews and More

Learn what your peers think about Marketo. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: December 2025.

879,768 professionals have used our research since 2012.

reviewer1493613

Digital Transformation specialist at a tech services company with 201-500 employees

Jan 31, 2021

Adobe, the parent company, needs to improve on getting more information published to allow users to educate themselves on how to use the solution.

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SM

Head of Digital Marketing Operations at a marketing services firm with 501-1,000 employees

Oct 16, 2021

It could be more scalable.

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reviewer1140438

Global Product Marketing & Operations Lead at a hospitality company with 201-500 employees

Feb 22, 2022

Revenue management, attribution, and ABM can all be improved.

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reviewer1932015

MAP ETL Developer at a tech services company with 10,001+ employees

Aug 4, 2022

For the moment, we migrated some of our processes to Marketo and implemented them there. We had some difficulties related to this.

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NH

Nikashkhan Haneefa

Report Analyst at GigaNET

Nov 23, 2023

The user experience needs improvement, particularly in terms of ease of use and navigation between projects.

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Associate Manager at Tech Mahindra Limited

Apr 11, 2024

One limitation is the user limit. For bigger organizations with large audience sizes exceeding, let's say, 500k, the solution may not be as efficient as larger enterprise platforms like Salesforce or Oracle Eloqua. However, Marketo is one of the best platforms for mid-scale and small-scale organisations.

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Executive - Marketing Automation at a tech services company with 1,001-5,000 employees

Apr 23, 2024

Marketo's reporting and dashboarding features could be better. Compared to other tools, the visualization options with charts and graphs seem somewhat limited.

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Show 6 more reviews (out of 16)

Product Categories

Product Categories

Marketing Automation

Marketing Management

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Product Categories

Product Categories

Marketing Automation

Marketing Management

Popular Comparisons

Popular Comparisons

Teradata vs Marketo

Microsoft Dynamics CRM vs Marketo

Salesforce Marketing Cloud vs Marketo

HubSpot Marketing Hub vs Marketo

Oracle Eloqua vs Marketo

Zeta Marketing Platform vs Marketo

SAP Marketing Cloud vs Marketo

Netcore Customer Engagement Platform vs Marketo

Pardot vs Marketo

Aprimo vs Marketo

Adobe Campaign vs Marketo

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See all alternatives

Related questions

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