Is Marketo the right fit for your business?

Marketo was sold as the power behind high performing demand generation engines — a compelling promise for a lot of teams at the time. But what was sold as a scalable solution has, for many, proven more harmful than helpful. 

As expectations around speed, scale, and simplicity have evolved, so has the gap between what teams need and what the platform delivers.  

These challenges aren’t new — they’re just becoming harder to ignore. And if you’re asking these kinds of questions, you’re not alone:

• Are we spending more time maintaining the system than creating value? 
  
• Is Marketo aligned with our greater marketing tech stack and go-to-market strategy? 
• If we were designing our GTM stack today, would we pick Marketo again?

For some teams, Marketo will remain a fit. But for those where it isn’t, there’s a path forward. 

This guide explores the most common challenges we’ve seen teams face with Marketo, how modern platforms like HubSpot compare, and why some companies are choosing to change course.

P A I N   P O I N T S

Why Marketo has teams reconsidering its value

It's complex — and doesn't get easier

Marketo’s legacy architecture hasn’t kept pace with the needs of modern marketing teams. While it offers power and customization, its complexity increases over time as organizations scale, and more programs are added.  

This is compounded by the fact that each Marketo account is organized based on the preferences of the individual admin managing it at any given point in time.  

New team members must ramp into unfamiliar folder structures and custom logic, making the platform harder to onboard, scale, or evolve as teams change and expand.

“There hasn’t been a major UI update to Marketo in over nine years. When a platform’s interface doesn’t evolve, neither does the user experience. Over time, what should feel intuitive starts to feel like a system you’re constantly working around.” - Chris Algiere, Senior Director, Delivery 

Where complexities hit hardest:

• Automation: Without a centralized platform structure, automations often run from multiple programs built by different users over time. It’s hard to track what’s firing, when, or why. And if you didn’t build the logic, updating or shutting things down can be frustrating and time-consuming.
• Program Management: Marketo doesn’t provide a native organizational structure, so program setup and maintenance are left entirely to individual teams. As a result, consistency depends on who’s managing it. This makes it harder to scale, harder to repeat successful programs, and harder for new team members to get up to speed.
• Asset Creation: Due to limited drag-and-drop and styling limitations, HTML/CSS coding is often required for emails and landing pages to give marketers the end results they’re looking for. 
  

UI complexity increases ramp time by 12–18 months for new hires, requiring around 80-120 hours of training for basic competency. (MarTech Alliance) 

Admin dependency = fragile operations

Instead of scaling operational knowledge and competency across teams, Marketo expertise often lives with one person. And when that person leaves, it’s not just inconvenient — it’s operationally disruptive.

“One of the most common situations I’ve seen with clients is that their Marketo Admin left, and suddenly no one knew how to manage the system. Campaigns stalled, issues piled up, and the team was effectively immobilized. Everything had been built around one person’s logic, and without them, the entire operation broke down. - Laura Conway, Account Strategist 

Marketo’s flexibility can be a double-edged sword without strong documentation or shared processes. Internal training is limited, and many teams rely on expensive technical experts to execute day-to-day needs. This drives unnecessary costs and creates execution bottlenecks.

Unreliable Salesforce integration

Salesforce is a common companion platform — and a common point of failure.  

Maintaining alignment between Marketo and Salesforce isn’t just technically tricky — it’s a known pain point that slows down campaign execution and creates visibility gaps. 

Our team has supported multiple clients whose Marketo–Salesforce syncs have broken entirely, often overwhelmed by data volume. These breakdowns aren’t just inconvenient — they’re disruptive to core operations. When sync fails, the ripple effects are immediate and deeply felt across marketing, sales, and revenue teams. 

“We were surprised by how often we saw this. Multiple clients had serious issues with their Marketo–Salesforce syncs breaking down completely. In some cases, teams were managing the sync manually just to avoid risking another failure. - Anastasia Costa, Solutions Engineer 

Here’s how a broken sync typically impacts the business:

• Lead routing delays reduce speed to connect and weaken follow-up.
• Inaccurate reporting erodes trust in performance metrics.
• Conversion tracking gaps make it harder to attribute success. 
• Manual workarounds consume time and stretch ops resources.
• Sales and marketing misalignment deepens as data diverges. 

While some teams spend upwards of $15,000 annually managing the integration through internal or external support, many don’t invest at all — and pay the price through inconsistent data, stalled execution, and weakened marketing-to-sales alignment. (SFApps) 

Reporting that requires add-ons

Marketo’s native reporting often falls short — especially for teams that need attribution, funnel analysis, or cross-channel performance insights. Getting those reports right usually requires significant customization, with little available out of the box to support modern marketing needs.

• Multi-touch attribution requires outside tools like Bizible or Tableau 
• Custom Salesforce reports often needed for basic funnel tracking
• No standardized campaign hierarchy or modern dashboarding

This fragmentation slows strategic decision-making and forces ops teams to spend cycles stitching reports together manually. 

The result is faster execution, more complete data, and a CRM that becomes a true source of truth instead of an afterthought. 

Why teams are exploring HubSpot instead

Marketo remains a powerful platform — especially for organizations with the structure, resourcing, and technical chops to fully harness it.  

But for teams feeling friction, HubSpot offers a different approach: one that emphasizes speed, ease of use, and reducing reliance on specialized support.

Native attribution reporting

HubSpot makes it easy to measure how marketing drives revenue. Even without Sales Hub, teams can sync deal data from Salesforce to tie campaigns directly to pipeline and closed-won revenue. 

Out-of-the-box multi-touch attribution and lifecycle stage reporting mean there’s no need for custom tagging or third-party tools. Attribution is also visible directly within the campaign tool, helping teams act on insights faster. 

Centralized marketing performance dashboards

Instead of stitching reports together across tools, teams can track campaign performance across email, social, ads, content, and web — all within HubSpot. 

With dashboards built directly into the platform, marketers can access real-time insights without jumping between systems or relying on custom connectors. Reporting stays centralized and consistent, making it easier to act on. Teams spend less time gathering data and more time using it.

Simplified marketing operations

For marketing ops teams, HubSpot brings clarity where other platforms create complexity. Workflows, data structures, and automations are all visible in one place, making it easier to document processes, onboard new teammates, and maintain clean operations over time. 

Teams can easily audit how data moves, how logic is structured, and where automations are firing without digging through nested folders or chasing down custom scripts. With a standardized framework and intuitive interface, HubSpot reduces admin overhead and helps ops leaders scale smarter. 

User-friendly interface built for marketers

With drag-and-drop functionality for emails, workflows, landing pages and more, users can build, launch, and optimize campaigns without relying on developers or designers. 

Beyond the tools themselves, HubSpot supports users with a robust library of enablement resources — from interactive product tours to certifications, tutorials, and a deep knowledge base. This empowers teams to learn fast, build confidently, and get more value from the platform without third-party support.

C O M P A R I S O N

What HubSpot replaces and where it connects

Addressing common migration concerns

I M P A C T

When HubSpot starts to make more sense

The goal isn’t to replace what’s working — it's to reimagine what could work better. For some teams, Marketo is still the right fit. For others, HubSpot starts to make more sense when certain patterns begin to emerge. Here are a few signs it may be time to consider a different kind of platform:

1. Too much dependency on individual contributors

If progress stalls whenever someone’s out of office, your team may be relying too heavily on individual know-how. HubSpot makes campaign execution more accessible, so more team members can build, review, and launch without needing to escalate to ops. 

2.System maintenance is stalling real marketing execution

When your ops queue is full of sync issues, HTML tweaks, or logic cleanups, your team isn’t focusing on strategy or pipeline growth. HubSpot streamlines workflows so marketers can get back to what they do best.

3. Your insights live in spreadsheets, not your platform

If you're exporting your data to analyze performance and piece together your story, your system are too disconnected. HubSpot unifies marketing, sales, and CRM data in one place — making it easier to get answers, fast. 

4. Your tools don't talk to each other

A stack full of great tools won’t help much if they don’t work together. If your scoring, attribution, engagement, and lead databases platforms are siloed, you're likely seeing data gaps and duplicated work. HubSpot helps reduce the sprawl without requiring a full rip-and-replace. 

Not every team is ready to migrate. But if these signs feel familiar, it may be time to explore whether there’s a better match for how your team wants to work. 

 
What success looks like 

For many teams, making the switch to HubSpot is a turning point. One that frees up time, unlocks better insight, and makes everyday execution a whole lot easier. 

But success doesn’t look the same for every team. Some need speed. Others need scale. Most are navigating limited resources, tight deadlines, or complex internal handoffs. That’s why we don’t talk about migration in theory — we show it in practice.

Teams that make the switch often report:

• Greater agility in launching and iterating on campaigns
• More accurate, accessible attribution data
• Reduced reliance on technical admins or agencies
• Clearer alignment between marketing, sales, and ops 
• Less time maintaining systems — more time building pipeline

These are just a few of the clients who have found improved marketing success by making the switch from Marketo to HubSpot.

N E X T   S T E P S

Is it time to simplify?

If these sound familiar, it might be time to take a closer look at how your systems are really serving your team.

These questions can help:

• Are our tools delivering speed or slowing us down?
• Are we spending more time maintaining systems than extracting value?
• Do our teams trust our data — or work around it?
• Could we operate faster with fewer platforms?

Change doesn’t have to mean disruption. With the right partner and a clear roadmap, rethinking your stack can become the moment your team finally gets the tools, workflows, and visibility they’ve been asking for — all in one place.