Pardot · Marketing Cloud Account Engagement
Pardot is not being switched off.
Its new AI features arrive through Marketing Cloud Next.
Those are different facts and they need different answers. There is no announced end of sale and no forced migration: Salesforce says every Account Engagement customer gets Agentforce Marketing features through Account Engagement+, with no migration required. What has changed is where the newest capability is built, which makes the question about your timing rather than their deadline.
Updated 24 September 2026. Facts below are limited to what Salesforce has actually stated, and anything that is my reading is labelled as such.
The state of it
What has actually changed, and what has not?
A great deal has been written about Pardot ending. Most of it is inference. Here is the part that is documented, separated from the part that is speculation.
The name changed once
In April 2022 Pardot became Marketing Cloud Account Engagement. Salesforce still calls Pardot the legacy name for the same product, the one your team logs into, which is why this page is at this address.
The newest capability is built in Marketing Cloud Next
Account Engagement still receives features in each release. But Agentforce Marketing runs on Data 360, formerly Data Cloud, and Salesforce requires Data 360 before Agentforce, SMS or cross object merge fields work in Account Engagement. That is the meaningful change, and it is why a five year plan built on Pardot alone deserves a second look.
Marketing Cloud Next comes with Account Engagement, not instead of it
Announced at Connections in June 2025 and built on the Salesforce Platform with Data 360 and Agentforce. Every Account Engagement edition on the price list today includes a Marketing Cloud Next edition, and Salesforce says access comes with no migration required.
There is no announced end of sale
No published date, for sale or for support. Anyone quoting you a deadline is either reading a private communication you have not seen, or inventing urgency. Ask them which.
What it means for you
Which of these three are you?
The right move depends far less on the platform roadmap than on what your own setup is doing right now.
Pardot works and your team uses it
Then do nothing this year. A platform that is still sold and still updated is not an emergency, and moving a working system to a newer platform for its own sake is how marketing teams lose a quarter. Revisit when your renewal is inside twelve months.
Pardot is running but nobody trusts it
Scoring untouched since 2023, prospects failing to sync silently, Engagement Studio programs nobody has opened. Migrating this copies the problem into a newer platform where fewer people know how to inspect it. Measure the foundation first.
Your renewal is coming and the decision is live
This is the case where timing genuinely matters. Migrating while a working instance still exists gives you a fallback and lets you compare results. Migrating after the licence has lapsed gives you neither.
Support
How Pardot work happens here now.
This practice does not run a help desk and never has. Pardot work is done as scoped engagements, on request, by the person who would also do the architecture. That has one consequence worth stating plainly.
There is nothing open ended to sign
No ticket queue and no service level agreement. Every engagement has a written scope, a fixed price and an end date. If what you need is somebody available every week indefinitely, this is the wrong practice and I will say so on the first call.
Small things are still worth asking about
A sync error nobody can trace, a scoring model that stopped making sense, one Engagement Studio program behaving oddly. Describe it in three lines. If it is an hour, I will often just tell you the answer. If it is a project, I will say what it costs.
Everything is left in your own org
Configuration, documentation and decisions live under your licence, written as the work happens rather than summarised at the end. When the engagement finishes, nothing stops working and nobody has to be paid to keep it running.
Describe it in three lines.
What is happening, which clouds you run, and whether there is a date attached. That is enough for me to tell you whether it is an hour, a project, or nothing at all.
Serhii Skrypnyk · Senior Salesforce Administrator and developer · 7 Salesforce certifications · on the platform since 2018. Reviewed 24 September 2026.
This creates a record in Salesforce and sends you a confirmation. Elsewhere, an estimate is recorded only when you act on it, as the privacy policy lists, and a readiness result only when you ask for its breakdown.
Written out in full
Six things worth reading before you spend money on Pardot.
Each of these is written so you can run the check before deciding whether to hire anybody. That is deliberate: the checks are cheap, and knowing which one you have is worth more than a conversation about all six.
Twelve sync errors, with the exact message each one shows
Where the queue lives, what stops working the moment a prospect lands in it, and how to read the size of the queue.
Five ways a form works and the lead goes nowhere
Nothing raises an error, because from Pardot's side nothing failed. Includes the thirty minute audit that finds all five.
Scoring that rewards the wrong signals
Six architectural reasons a model breaks, and what a rebuild costs.
Six ways account based marketing breaks inside Pardot
The programme usually exists in the deck and not in the system. Six checks that tell you which it is.
Implementing Pardot in 2026, and when not to
Three cases decide it, and only one of them ends in an implementation. What the scope actually contains, and the published prices that bracket the cost.
Moving off Pardot to Marketing Cloud Next
What the move costs, and the part that matters more: whether this is the right quarter to make it.
Questions
Asked often enough to answer here.
What is Pardot called now?
Marketing Cloud Account Engagement. Salesforce renamed it in April 2022 and still calls Pardot the legacy name for the same product, which is why most teams, and this page, still say Pardot. Nothing about the software changed at the rename: the same login, the same URLs, the same automation.
Is Pardot being discontinued in 2026?
No date has been announced for end of sale or end of support. The product was renamed Marketing Cloud Account Engagement in 2022, is still sold and still receives updates, while its newest AI features arrive through Marketing Cloud Next.
Is migration from Pardot to Marketing Cloud Next mandatory?
Not currently. Salesforce says every Account Engagement customer gets Agentforce Marketing features through Account Engagement+ with no migration required, and it has not required existing customers to move. The decision is about what your setup needs, not about a deadline.
Will Marketing Cloud Account Engagement keep receiving new features?
Yes. It still receives features in each release, and every edition on the price list today includes a Marketing Cloud Next edition. The AI features, including Agentforce and SMS, need Data 360, so plan that part as a separate decision.
Should we fix Pardot or migrate off it?
Measure before deciding. A migration copies your architecture into a new place, so if scoring drifted and sync drops records silently, both problems arrive intact along with a platform your team has not learned yet. Fixing first usually costs less in total.
How does Pardot support work at Solutions4sf?
Describe it in three lines by email. Small things are often answered without an engagement. Larger ones get a written scope with a fixed price and an end date, and nothing here runs indefinitely either way.