Pardot and HubSpot · the Salesforce side of it
The tools move.
The history does not.
Moving between Account Engagement and HubSpot, in either direction, is mostly a Salesforce project. Assets get rebuilt, records get exported, and the parts that decide next year's reporting stay behind: prospect activity, campaign influence and the qualification model. What follows is what moves, what does not, and what the Salesforce side costs.
I work on the Salesforce side of this move and do not build HubSpot. Vendor requirements below were read from HubSpot documentation on 25 September 2026.
The honest inventory
Three categories, and only one of them is a copy.
Migration proposals tend to list what will be moved. The useful list is the other one: what is rebuilt, and what stops existing. Both directions lose the same things, because both platforms hold engagement in their own store and write only a summary to Salesforce.
| Prospects and contactsAn export carries the records and the field values you chose to export. Decide before the export which system owns each field afterwards, because the answer stops being obvious the moment two tools write to Salesforce. | Moves |
| Lists and segmentsCriteria do not translate. A dynamic list in Account Engagement and an active list in HubSpot both recalculate, but they read different fields and different activity. Rebuild them from the criteria, not from an export of the membership. | Rebuilt |
| Emails, templates and landing pagesThe content can be copied by hand, the merge fields and the sending logic cannot. Budget this as design and build work rather than as migration, and use it to retire the half of the library nobody has sent in a year. | Rebuilt |
| Forms and form handlersEvery form that lives on a website page has an endpoint written into that page. Moving the platform without repointing the endpoint gives you a form that still accepts submissions and sends them nowhere, which nothing reports as an error. | Repointed |
| Scoring and gradingThe two platforms do not model qualification the same way, so rules cannot be carried across as rules. What carries is the thinking: which behaviour counts, what fit means, where the threshold sits. That is worth writing down before anybody touches a new tool. | Rewritten |
| Prospect activity historyOpens, clicks, page views and program steps live in the platform that recorded them. Export what the platform lets you export while you still have a licence, and accept that the new system starts its own history on cutover day. | Stays |
| Campaign influence in SalesforceInfluence is calculated from campaign membership and the touches attached to it. A new tool creates new membership, so the series breaks at cutover. Take the reports you will be asked about next quarter and save them as files before the old connector goes. | Resets |
| First touch and campaign of recordAnything written into a Salesforce field survives, because it belongs to Salesforce. Anything held only in the marketing tool does not. This is the one line worth checking field by field, because it decides whether next year can be compared to this one. | Partial |
Leaving Account Engagement
Six things to do in Salesforce while you still have a licence.
The order matters. Everything here becomes impossible, or expensive, on the day the connector is removed and the account stops renewing.
Export the prospects with the fields you actually use
Not the default export. Add the custom fields, the scoring and grading values, the opt out status and the dates, because after the licence ends the account is a screenshot at best.
Save every report you will be asked about
Pipeline by campaign, email performance by quarter, engagement by list. Save them as files rather than as saved reports, because a saved report on a decommissioned connector returns nothing.
Write down the connector field map before it goes
Which fields synced, in which direction, and which side won on conflict. Nobody remembers this a month later, and the new integration will ask you the same questions on day one.
List what completion actions do inside Salesforce
Assignment, task creation, field updates, campaign membership. Those are Salesforce behaviours triggered by the tool you are removing, and each one needs an owner afterwards.
Capture the automation that fires on marketing fields
Flows, validation rules and assignment rules that read a score, a grade or a synced checkbox will keep running against a field nobody updates any more. Find them before they quietly misroute leads.
Keep the opt out record
Consent is not a marketing asset, it is a legal one. Whatever the new platform does with it, the record of who said no has to survive the move intact and be reconstructible from an export.
Coming the other way
Four decisions that decide whether Account Engagement behaves.
Moving in from HubSpot is less about assets and more about shape. The platform qualifies differently, automates differently, and expects Salesforce to be the system of record in places where HubSpot does not.
Decide what Account Engagement will own
Coming the other way, the temptation is to recreate HubSpot inside Pardot. Decide instead which system is the source of truth for each field, and let the connector enforce it rather than people remembering.
Translate workflows into the model that exists
HubSpot workflows and Engagement Studio programs are not the same shape. Some branches will be automation rules, some completion actions, some Salesforce flows. Mapping them one to one produces a program nobody can debug.
Rebuild qualification as score and grade
Account Engagement splits behaviour and fit into two axes. A single HubSpot score has to be separated into those two before it means anything here, and the threshold has to be set from closed deals rather than carried over.
Plan the first sync, because nothing backfills
HubSpot documents this for its own integration and the same logic applies in both directions: a new connector starts working from the moment it is connected. The first load is a project with a date, not a switch.
The connector swap
Nothing backfills, in either direction.
HubSpot documents the requirements for its Salesforce integration plainly, and they are worth reading before a date is promised to anybody. It needs a Professional or Enterprise subscription, a Salesforce edition with API access, and a system administrator to install it: Group Edition is not supported. The permissions listed include API Enabled, Modify All on the objects being synced, Modify Metadata, and the right to download AppExchange packages. Read on 25 September 2026.
The sentence that decides your cutover plan is this one: records will not automatically sync after the integration is installed and set up. The first load is a deliberate import with its own scope and its own date, and the same is true coming into Account Engagement. A migration plan without that line in it is a plan with a missing week.
Before you decide at all
If the reason is that the current setup is broken, the move copies it.
A sync queue nobody reads, a scoring model that qualifies readers, lists built on criteria from a campaign that ended: none of that is a platform problem. All of it arrives intact in the new tool, along with a team that now has one to learn. Measure first, then decide. The measuring is free and you do not need me for it.
Asked often enough to answer here
Questions
Does prospect activity history move from Pardot to HubSpot?
No. Opens, clicks, page views and program steps stay in the platform that recorded them, in either direction. Export what the platform allows while the licence is live, save the reports you will be asked about, and plan for the new system to start its own history on cutover day.
What happens to campaign influence in Salesforce after the move?
It breaks at cutover and starts again. Influence is calculated from campaign membership and the touches attached to it, and a new tool writes new membership. The practical answer is to save the reports as files before the old connector is removed, and to agree with whoever reads them that the series has a break in it rather than a decline.
Can lead scoring be migrated between the two platforms?
No, not as rules. The platforms model qualification differently: Account Engagement splits behaviour and fit into a score and a grade, HubSpot does not. What travels is the reasoning, which behaviour counts and where the threshold sits, and that is worth rewriting from closed deals while you are already changing tools.
What does the Salesforce side of the move cost?
It is quoted in hours at €50 from what the setup turns out to contain, because the work is the connector, the field map and the automation rather than the marketing tool. The two published numbers here bracket it: a sync audit and repair with monitoring is from €2,000, and a full platform move to Marketing Cloud Next is €6,000. A read only data check first is €500.
Which direction is more work?
Leaving Account Engagement is usually more work inside Salesforce, because the connector, the completion actions and the automation that reads synced fields all have to be unpicked. Coming into it is more work in design, because qualification has to be rebuilt as two axes rather than one. Neither is mostly about moving email templates.
Serhii Skrypnyk · Senior Salesforce Administrator and developer · 7 Salesforce certifications · on the platform since 2018. Reviewed 25 September 2026.