Working around the pain
If you’re evaluating alternatives to Marketo, you probably aren’t starting from scratch. You’ve likely spent years building programs, scoring models, and nurture tracks. You know the platform inside and out.
You also know where it breaks down. The custom object that can’t trigger a workflow. The warehouse data you can’t access without filing an engineering ticket and stitching together middleware. The email builder that somehow got worse with its “update.” The processing queue that backs up when you launch a high-volume campaign.
None of these are dealbreakers on their own. But stacked together, they’re costing your team hours every week in workarounds and manual effort. And they’re keeping you from doing the work that actually moves pipeline.
Everything you rely on in Marketo, without the baggage
Most alternatives to Marketo ask you to give something up. A weaker Salesforce integration. No campaign structure. A workflow builder that can’t match Smart Campaign depth. That’s not the trade-off here.
Conversion was built by people who understand what makes Marketo work for enterprise B2B teams, and what holds it back. Campaigns in Conversion function like Marketo programs: member statuses, Salesforce Campaign syncing, and hierarchical folder organization all carry over. Workflows are the modern equivalent of Smart Campaigns, with the same trigger-and-filter logic in a visual builder that’s faster to configure and easier to debug.
Where Marketo forces you into rigid patterns, Conversion gives you building blocks. Nurture sequences are a good example: instead of Marketo’s engagement programs with limited flexibility, you build nurtures with the same workflow primitives you use for everything else. Branching, delays, conditional exits, AI-powered path selection. Same outcome, far more control.
Scoring, lead routing, email sends, A/B testing, forms, landing pages, reporting tied to pipeline: it’s all here. The goal isn’t to make you relearn marketing automation. It’s to give you the platform Marketo should have become.
The data model gap
Most frustration with Marketo traces back to its data model. Marketo was built around a flat lead database at a time when B2B go-to-market was simpler. Custom objects exist, but they’re second-class: read-only in smart lists, limited in the triggers they support, and difficult to manage at scale. Representing account hierarchies, multi-product relationships, or product usage data means building workarounds on top of workarounds.
Conversion starts with a flexible data model. Custom objects are first-class: you can trigger workflows from changes on any object, access any field in Liquid templating and conditional logic, and build segments across objects with a visual statement builder that supports deeply nested conditions. No workarounds, no limitations on what data you can act on.
For teams running contact-first models or complex account structures, the difference is immediate. Conversion natively supports Account writes, Contact-first person creation, and smart account matching, areas where Marketo’s lead-centric model requires creative workarounds.
Your warehouse data, without the middleware
This is increasingly the reason teams start looking. Product usage signals, billing data, expansion indicators, enrichment outputs: it all lives in Snowflake, BigQuery, or Databricks. Getting any of it into Marketo means buying and maintaining reverse ETL tools like Hightouch or Census, configuring pipelines, and relying on engineering to keep them running.
That’s not a Marketo limitation you can patch. It’s an architectural gap. Marketo was built before the modern data stack existed, and it shows.
Conversion connects directly to your warehouse. Tables and views become usable objects in the platform. Use them in segments, personalization, workflow triggers. No middleware, no engineering tickets, no batch-sync delays. For teams with product-led growth motions or usage-based expansion plays, this is the unlock that Marketo fundamentally can’t provide.
AI that’s native, not bolted on
Every platform is adding AI. The question is whether it actually changes how your team works or just adds a chatbot to the sidebar.
Marketo offers predictive scoring through Adobe Sensei. It’s useful, but it’s where the AI story ends. Campaign creation, content personalization, lead routing, and ops workflows still require the same manual effort they always have.
Conversion’s AI is embedded across the platform. AI nodes in workflows can ingest your full customer context, CRM data, warehouse fields, behavioral signals, and output routing decisions, field updates, or next-best-action recommendations. An AI assistant with deep platform access can answer questions about your data, build segments, and take action across the platform. This isn’t a feature demo. It’s how your ops team reclaims hours every week.
Tool consolidation, not tool sprawl
If you’re running Marketo today and need to activate product data, you’re likely looking at adding a CDP or customer engagement platform on top. That means another vendor, another integration, another data silo to manage.
Conversion replaces that entire stack. It’s a B2B marketing automation platform with native warehouse connectivity, product event support, and lifecycle automation built in. Forms, landing pages, email, workflows, scoring, attribution: all in one platform, all operating on the same unified data model. Fewer tools, fewer integration points, less surface area for things to break.
A better Salesforce sync, where it matters
Marketo’s Salesforce sync is mature and reliable for core use cases. We’re not going to pretend otherwise.
Where Conversion’s sync pulls ahead is in the details that MOps teams care about: customizable field mappings with per-field sync rules, native support for writing to Account objects, the ability to create people directly as Contacts instead of Leads, and faster Campaign membership updates. The sync is built on modern Salesforce APIs with full audit logging, so you have complete visibility into every change.
For teams with complex Salesforce configurations, these aren’t nice-to-haves. They’re the difference between a sync that works and a sync that works the way your business needs it to.
Migration without disruption
Switching platforms after years of investment is a legitimate concern. We hear it in nearly every conversation, and we take it seriously.
Every Conversion migration is led by a dedicated deployment strategist: a real person who manages recurring calls with your team, migrates your campaigns, templates, scoring models, and integrations, and stays with you through launch and beyond. Average migration timeline is about four weeks, customized to your instance.
Your team keeps running in Marketo during the transition. There’s a parallel-run period before cutover, so nothing goes dark. The goal is zero disruption to active campaigns.
Built for what comes next
Conversion ships new capabilities fast. The platform is built on modern infrastructure without the technical debt that comes with 15 years of legacy architecture. That means the features your team needs next quarter are already being built, not stuck in a multi-year Adobe roadmap.
Dedicated support with deployment strategists who know your instance. A product team that ships weekly. And a platform designed for how B2B marketing actually works today: warehouse data, AI-powered workflows, flexible data models, and enterprise Salesforce integration without compromise.