whats-best.ai

Marketing Automation

Adobe Marketo Engage

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Panel rating · 6 judges · How to read the stars

Category median

Sovereignty: not determined

0–5 in half steps. 5 means the rubric's top anchor is met on the evidence.

by Adobe Inc. · business.adobe.com

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Read this page as one judge. Each weighs the same scores by what they care about.

The Solution Architect

Weighted verdict

Has implemented three of these and knows where they fail: identity resolution, custom objects, and the API limit nobody mentioned. Wants a data model extensible without vendor services and a documented path from anonymous visitor to known contact.

Same scores as the panel view — this lens weights them the way this judge cares.

Scored by The Solution Architect

Journeys & orchestration

How this is scored

Multi-step automation: triggers, branching, waits, and — the part that decides whether it survives contact with reality — what happens when journeys collide.

0 — Autoresponders on a single trigger; no branching, no waits, no conditions.

3 — Linear sequences with simple conditions, one entry trigger per journey, and no visibility into where a contact currently sits.

5 — A visual builder with branching on attributes and behaviour, waits and goals, entry and exit conditions, and per-contact journey state visible.

8 — Event-driven entry from external systems, frequency capping and suppression across journeys, priority when a contact qualifies for several, versioning of a live journey, and testing against real records.

10 — Orchestration is coherent across the whole programme: one decision layer deciding what a person receives next regardless of which journey wants to send it, holdout groups for measurement, and a journey a colleague can read months later without a diagram.

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The Solution Architect

The captured pages show journeys only from the outside: capping and throttling configurations with deploy, undeploy and canDeploy validation, one throttling configuration allowed per organisation, and custom actions plus external data sources as first-class concepts. That is plumbing for external-system integration — and note the capping caps calls to external endpoints, not message frequency to a person. I found no public information on the builder itself: branching, waits, per-contact journey state, or arbitration when several journeys want the same contact. 1

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Lead scoring, routing & lifecycle

How this is scored

Scoring, qualification and handover to sales — including whether the customer can explain to a lead why the system decided what it decided.

0 — No scoring or lifecycle model; every contact is treated alike.

3 — A single additive score with fixed rules, no decay, no lifecycle stages and no routing.

5 — Configurable scoring on attributes and behaviour with decay, lifecycle stages, and routing to owners or teams with notification.

8 — Multiple scoring models per product or region, negative scoring, account-level scoring alongside contact-level, SLA on follow-up, and score history visible per contact.

10 — Scoring is explainable and accountable: the contribution of each signal visible per record, model changes versioned with their effect on the funnel, routing rules auditable, and predictive scoring — where offered — documented well enough for a DPO to assess it as automated decision-making.

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The Solution Architect

I found no public information on lead scoring, decay, lifecycle stages, negative scoring, or routing to owners and teams. The only adjacent capability is program membership status sync and program member removal — a campaign artefact, not a lifecycle model a sales team could hand over against. With no evidence of scoring at all, this sits at the bottom. 2

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Channels & personalisation

How this is scored

What the platform can actually send and personalise: email, SMS, push, on-site content, ads audiences — judged on what shares one profile and one suppression list.

0 — Email only.

3 — Email plus one further channel, managed separately with its own list and no shared suppression.

5 — Email, SMS or push and web forms driven from one contact profile, with dynamic content blocks and shared unsubscribe handling.

8 — The above plus on-site personalisation, ad-audience sync to the major networks, cross-channel frequency capping, and content personalised on behaviour rather than only on stored fields.

10 — Channel is a delivery detail: one profile and one consent state across every channel, next-best-channel selection, and personalisation that draws on the full behavioural record without the marketer assembling it by hand.

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The Solution Architect

The captured pages document data ingestion only; I found no public information on email, SMS, push, on-site content or ad-audience sync, nor on any shared suppression list across channels. I cannot evidence even an email baseline from what was published, so there is nothing here to score. 2

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CRM integration & data model

How this is scored

The join that decides the implementation: how the platform and the CRM stay in agreement about who a person is, and what happens when they disagree.

0 — CSV import and export; no CRM integration and no identity resolution.

3 — One-way sync into a named CRM on a schedule, with duplicates resolved by hand and no conflict rules.

5 — Bidirectional sync with at least one major CRM, field mapping, deduplication rules, and a sync error log somebody can act on.

8 — Configurable conflict resolution per field, account and contact objects both modelled, custom objects supported, near-real-time sync with retry, and a documented API with rate limits.

10 — One record, two systems, no ambiguity: identity resolution across anonymous and known states, field-level ownership defined per system, replay of failed syncs, and a data model the customer can extend without vendor services.

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The Solution Architect

This is where the pages have substance: a documented async ingestion API covering Persons, Companies, Program Members, Lists and custom objects, with dedupe attributes including native Salesforce identifiers and request status traceable through an observability data stream — and the custom object upsert that retries for 65 minutes when a linked Person does not yet exist is exactly the detail that survives real implementations. What I did not find: bidirectional CRM sync, field mapping, per-field conflict rules, Marketo's own inbound rate limits, or any documented path from anonymous visitor to known contact. Custom objects are extendable through the documented API without vendor services, which counts for a lot, but identity resolution is the join I actually need and it stays unevidenced. 1 2

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European sovereignty

How this is scored

Where behavioural profiles of named EU residents are processed, who the contracting entity is, and which subprocessors see them. Independently sourced by the sovereignty pipeline; scored here as this buyer weighs it — which given the profiling is heavily.

0 — Non-EU vendor and contracting entity, hosting unstated or non-EU, subprocessors unnamed, behavioural data leaving the EU with no stated basis.

3 — EU data residency for storage while tracking, sending or support access remain non-EU, or the contracting entity sits outside the EU.

5 — EU hosting as standard and an EU contracting entity, but parts of the chain — tracking scripts, AI scoring, analytics — are non-EU without an explained safeguard.

8 — EU hosting on named infrastructure, EU contracting entity, complete subprocessor list published, and any non-EU processing named with its legal basis.

10 — Sovereign end to end and evidenced: every profile, event and derived score processed in the EU by European subprocessors, certification published, and no transfer requiring a Schrems II argument to survive.

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The Solution Architect

The contracting entity is a US vendor headquartered in San Jose, and I found no public information on hosting location, subprocessors, certification, or any legal basis for EU behavioural data being processed outside the EU. With no sovereignty attributes on record and the documented APIs served from Adobe's platform gateway, this weighs at the bottom for a buyer holding profiles of named EU residents. 1 2

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Pricing transparency not rated — the vendor publishes no price

How this is scored

Whether a buyer can compute the real annual invoice for their contact base and send volume — including the tier where automation actually begins, overage, and mandatory onboarding — from public pages alone.

0 — No public prices at all; every tier is a sales conversation, and onboarding fees are never mentioned.

3 — A contact-tier headline exists, but the tier where journeys, scoring or CRM sync begin is unstated, as is any mandatory implementation fee.

5 — Contact-tier prices public with billing period and send limits stated, but at least one commonly needed capability sits in an unpriced enterprise tier.

8 — Every tier priced publicly with contact and volume limits, feature boundaries, overage rates, onboarding costs, minimum term and VAT treatment stated.

10 — Complete price computability: annual invoice derivable for a given contact count, send volume and feature set, including overage, additional users and any implementation fee stated outright.

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The Solution Architect

I found no public information on pricing anywhere in the captured pages: no tiers, no contact or send limits, no feature boundaries by tier, no overage rates, and no mention of onboarding costs, minimum term or VAT treatment. A buyer can compute nothing from this. 1 2

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Where this could be wrong

What we left out

A claim that does not survive our checks costs us the claim, not the page. This is what was taken off this one.

Sources (2)

The pages every claim on this page was read from — each one checked, dated, and kept verifiable.

  1. 1 Journeys & orchestration — found from sitemap developer.adobe.com Checked 1 Oct 2026 Details →
  2. 2 CRM integration & data model — found from sitemap developer.adobe.com Checked 1 Oct 2026 Details →