Pardot no longer exists under that name. Salesforce renamed the platform to Marketing Cloud Account Engagement in 2022. The software is still there, but search for "Pardot" and you land on pages that stopped being accurate years ago. So here is a comparison as things actually stand: HubSpot against Marketing Cloud Account Engagement, list prices included, plus an honest answer to the question of when Salesforce is the better choice.
The short answer
Both do B2B marketing automation: email, forms, landing pages, lead scoring and nurturing. The difference is not the feature list. It is where your CRM lives.
HubSpot includes its own CRM, free, in the same system. Marketing and sales look at one record with no integration in between.
Account Engagement is a marketing layer on top of Salesforce. You need Sales Cloud underneath it as your CRM, and the two talk through a connector.
If you already run Salesforce and are not moving off it, Account Engagement is the logical choice. If you are starting fresh, or you have no Salesforce admin, HubSpot is live sooner and cheaper to run.
What does it cost?
Check which HubSpot pricing model applies to you before you compare anything. Since 1 October 2026, new customers in EMEA no longer buy separate hubs. They buy one edition covering the whole platform and pay per seat, in euros. Existing customers stay on the older per-hub model. Both are below. Expect discounts on multi-year contracts.
HubSpot for a new customer in EMEA, since 1 October 2026
Marketing, sales and service come in a single edition, and marketing contacts no longer exist as a separate line item. List prices per month, excluding VAT, from the Flexible Seats-and-Credits Pricing Supplement, checked on 22 October 2026.
| Edition | GTM Seat p/m | Ops Seat p/m | Records | Credits p/m |
|---|
| Starter | €20 | not available | 25,000 | 5,000 |
| Professional | €100 | €50 | 250,000 | 10,000 |
| Enterprise | €175 | €50 | 15,000,000 | 15,000 |
Marketing sits inside the GTM Seat, so the cheap marketing seat of the old model is gone. Marketing contacts count as records within the capacity above, alongside companies, deals and tickets. Email, workflow and AI usage runs on credits at €0.01 each, on top of the monthly allowance in the table.
HubSpot Marketing Hub, the old model
This still applies if you are already a customer. HubSpot renders its pricing page client-side and does not publish these figures in machine-readable form; they come from several matching third-party sources and were last checked on 11 October 2026. Euro prices differed from them.
| Edition | Price per month | Included |
|---|
| Free | $0 | CRM, forms, email with HubSpot branding |
| Starter | from $20 per seat | Branding removed, basic automation |
| Professional | $890 (3 seats, 2,000 marketing contacts) | Workflows, campaigns, attribution reporting, ABM. One-off $3,000 onboarding |
| Enterprise | $3,600 (10,000 marketing contacts) | Custom objects, multi-touch attribution, partitioning. One-off $7,000 onboarding |
Marketing Cloud Account Engagement
List prices per organisation per month, billed annually, checked on the Account Engagement pricing page on 22 October 2026.
| Edition | Price per month | Included |
|---|
| Growth+ | $1,250 (10,000 contacts) | Email, automation, lead nurturing, ROI reporting |
| Plus+ | $2,750 (10,000 contacts) | Plus advanced analytics and email reporting |
| Advanced+ | $4,400 (10,000 contacts) | Plus AI scoring, custom objects, sandbox |
| Premium+ | $15,000 (75,000 contacts) | Plus predictive scoring and premier support |
Two things stand out. The cheapest Account Engagement edition starts above HubSpot Professional, whichever model you price against. And Sales Cloud licences come on top of that, because Account Engagement does not work without a CRM underneath it. With HubSpot the CRM is in the price.
The contact comparison works out differently per model. Growth+ includes 10,000 contacts. On the old HubSpot model you got 2,000 with Professional, so your rate climbed as the database grew and the gap narrowed well below what the headline prices suggest. On the new model Professional counts 250,000 records across all objects, and contact volume is rarely where the decision lands any more.
Two things to watch when you put these side by side: the HubSpot figures above are in euros per seat per month and the Salesforce figures in dollars per month billed annually, and Account Engagement charges per organisation where HubSpot charges per seat. Convert, and model your own numbers against the model that applies to you, before concluding anything.
Where the real difference sits
One system or two
In HubSpot, marketing, sales and service sit on the same contact record. A marketing workflow can read a deal property without any data moving anywhere.
With Account Engagement, the connector syncs prospects to Salesforce leads and contacts. That works, but it is a synchronisation: it has a direction, a frequency, and a set of rules about which system wins a conflict. All manageable. It just costs management.
Who builds it
In practice this is the largest cost of all, and it appears on no pricing page.
Salesforce is built around configuration by an admin. That buys depth: territory management, complex assignment rules, scoring on your own objects. It also assumes that admin exists, in-house or hired.
HubSpot is built around a marketer doing it themselves. That is faster and cheaper, right up to the point where you hit the ceiling of what works without custom development.
So the question is not which platform can do more. It is which platform fits whoever will be at the controls in your organisation.
Content and website
HubSpot hosts your landing pages and blog on your own domain, inside the same system. Account Engagement serves landing pages on a separate domain by default; you can fix that with your own tracker domain, but you keep a separate content layer.
For organisations that treat content as a serious discovery channel, that is a real difference. For organisations whose website sits apart anyway, it is not.
When Account Engagement is the better choice
An honest comparison also names the cases where we do not pick the HubSpot side.
- Salesforce is the system of record and will stay that way. If your entire sales organisation runs on Sales Cloud with years of custom work in it, building marketing around that is cheaper than replacing the whole thing.
- You need deep Salesforce objects in your scoring. Scoring on custom objects that only exist in Salesforce is simplest to do in Salesforce.
- There is already an admin team. A Salesforce admin who knows your setup is valuable. Throwing that expertise away for another platform is rarely the cheapest route.
- Complex B2B with long cycles and many stakeholders. Account Engagement was built for exactly that from day one.
When HubSpot is the better choice
- You have no dedicated admin. Marketing wants to build campaigns without joining a queue.
- Marketing and sales need to look at the same record. No integration, no argument about which system is right.
- Content is a serious channel. Blog, landing pages and email on one domain, with attribution that runs through to the deal.
- Speed matters. Weeks to live instead of months.
Migrating from Account Engagement to HubSpot
It can be done, and we do it regularly. What comes across: contacts, lists, email history, form submissions and the fields you report on. What gets rebuilt: scoring models, automation rules and the landing pages.
One piece of advice we always give: do not copy your old setup across one to one. A migration is the only moment you can drop your legacy rules without an argument. Skip that chance and you move the mess along with the data.
You do not have to choose, by the way. HubSpot has a two-way Salesforce integration that can be running in an afternoon. Marketing in HubSpot and sales in Salesforce is a legitimate setup, not a compromise.
Frequently asked questions
Has Pardot really been renamed?
Yes. Salesforce renamed Pardot to Marketing Cloud Account Engagement in 2022. The old URL salesforce.com/products/marketing-cloud/pardot redirects to the B2B automation page. Internally and in the market, people still say Pardot.
Do I need Salesforce for Account Engagement?
Yes. Account Engagement is the marketing layer on Sales Cloud. Those licences come on top of the prices listed above.
Does HubSpot include a CRM?
Yes. HubSpot Smart CRM is free and included in every edition, Free included.
Which is cheaper?
That depends on which HubSpot model applies to you. On the new seats-and-credits model you pay per seat and contact volume barely moves the total until you pass 250,000 records, so the comparison is mostly about team size. On the old per-hub model HubSpot billed on marketing contacts, so a growing database pushed the two closer together. Run both against your own numbers.
Can I use both?
Yes. The HubSpot-Salesforce integration syncs in both directions and is a common setup at companies keeping Salesforce while running marketing elsewhere.
Other comparisons
Need help making the choice?
We are a HubSpot partner, so you know where our preference lies. That does not mean HubSpot is always the answer. In half an hour we will look at your current stack, your team size and who is going to run it, and tell you honestly which way to go.
Carel Schrier
