Marketing Cloud vs Account Engagement: which one is right for you?

Account Engagement, formerly Pardot, is built for B2B nurture and lead scoring against a sales pipeline. Marketing Cloud is built for high-volume, multi-channel consumer journeys. The deciding question is not company size — it is whether marketing hands leads to salespeople or markets directly to consumers.

Choose Account Engagement when

• You sell B2B with a considered buying cycle and a named sales team.
• Lead scoring and grading determine when marketing hands over to sales.
• Campaign influence and pipeline attribution matter more than send volume.
• Your marketing team is small and needs to run programmes without a specialist.

Choose Marketing Cloud when

• You market to consumers at volume across email, SMS, push and advertising.
• Journeys branch on behaviour and need real-time decisioning.
• You need a data model beyond the CRM — data extensions, not just leads and contacts.
• Personalisation depends on transactional or product data rather than CRM fields.

The data question underneath

The real difference is the data model. Account Engagement works with prospects tied to CRM records. Marketing Cloud works with data extensions that can hold anything, which is more powerful and more work. Choosing Marketing Cloud without the data architecture to feed it produces an expensive platform sending generic email.

This is why Ignyto starts with the data model rather than the tool. Where Data Cloud is needed to unify customer records first, we will say so — it is frequently the real first project.

Migrating from Account Engagement to Marketing Cloud

Ignyto has delivered full migrations, rebuilding templates, journeys, forms and scoring models rather than lifting them across. A lift-and-shift carries the limitations of the old platform into the new one, along with a decade of unused assets.

Common questions