Adobe Marketo Engage
Enterprise B2B marketing automation platform, founded as Marketo in 2006 and acquired by Adobe in 2018, now sold as part of Adobe Experience Cloud. The core covers lead management, email, landing pages and forms, lead scoring, target account management and native CRM sync with Salesforce and Microsoft Dynamics, sold in four editions with separately priced add on modules.
Since the Adobe Summit 2026 announcements the platform has added Marketo AI agent skills for operational work such as program validation, lead import and data normalization, an AI assistant grounded in Adobe documentation with citations, a conversational interface, and MCP connectivity alongside callable smart campaigns. Adobe publishes no prices for any of it.
Capability Axes
Capability grades
17 of 17 axes rated · 14 graded A or B
The 2026 agentic push is substantial and specific: named agent skills for program validation, lead import, data normalisation and analytics, a conversational interface for issuing commands, and MCP connectivity. It runs on a platform that has been the enterprise B2B automation standard for two decades. On the removal test the AI comes off and smart campaigns, lead scoring, forms, landing pages, journey orchestration and CRM sync all continue unchanged. The company's own framing supports this reading, describing the agents as augmenting the core rather than replacing it.
The posture is stated and it is guardrailed assistance rather than autonomous action: agents assist with audience selection, content creation and program optimisation while people retain strategy and approvals, and the operational agents work on internal housekeeping such as validation and normalisation rather than outbound sending. Enablement is administratively gated, requiring the account to accept core generative AI terms and supplemental terms and then grant user level access. The gap is containment: nothing published states what a misfiring agent can reach or what stops a run once it starts.
Better than the category norm on two counts. The assistant's product knowledge answers are grounded in official Adobe documentation and return citations, which makes the output checkable rather than merely fluent. And a published data information sheet covers data scope, governance controls and personally identifiable information handling for the AI features, with the underlying model layer reported as Azure OpenAI. The gap is downstream: nothing addresses whether marketing content generated by the platform is identified as AI generated, and predictive scoring logic remains unexplained.
Real outcome evidence with named customers and figures, published at volume: an Australian IT services customer reporting a sales accepted to won ratio rising from under 2 percent to 8.3 percent alongside 200 to 400 sales accepted leads a month, a data protection vendor running more than 1,800 campaigns a year, a financial services firm reporting 41.5 percent of customers on digital communications. Named references extend to Nokia, BNY Mellon, Lumen and Trane.
What is missing is the measurement basis: no stated period, population or metric definition accompanies the figures, and no attribution method separates platform effect from everything else the customer changed at the same time.
Compliance is enforced in the platform and stated as a condition of use. Adobe requires that customers send marketing communications only to people who have opted in, unsubscribed records are automatically blocked from marketing sends, and ISP feedback loops auto unsubscribe complainants with an internal email compliance function taking up the complaint. One click list unsubscribe has been applied to all marketing messages since January 2024. Documentation names GDPR, CAN SPAM and CASL and states the two day window for honouring an opt out. Operational email correctly bypasses the unsubscribe block, which is disclosed rather than hidden.
A full privacy program a buyer can actually inspect: a product level data protection white paper published ungated on the trust centre, sub processor use disclosed and scoped to the specific features that rely on it such as predictive content, and in product privacy controls for CCPA and GDPR consent handling. The gap is the familiar processor boundary. Lawful basis for the records a customer loads is the customer's to establish, and the platform's own opt in requirement is a contractual condition rather than a technical control.
No prospect database is sold and no third party contact data is bundled: the records are the customer's own, acquired through the customer's forms, lists and CRM. The sourcing standard the platform imposes on those records is published and unusually direct, requiring opt in and prohibiting unsolicited sending. Provenance of enrichment through sub processors on specific add on features is disclosed in the data protection white paper. Short of the top band because no legal footing or indemnification position accompanies the requirement.
Low exposure. Sending runs on the platform's own infrastructure with published outbound IP ranges, and third party systems are reached through official interfaces: native Salesforce and Microsoft Dynamics sync, a documented REST API, a partner integration ecosystem, and MCP connectivity for outside agents. No automation of a platform that prohibits it was located. As elsewhere, no conformance position of its own is stated, so the grade rests on architecture rather than a documented commitment.
The cross client boundary is answered in writing and the answer is contractual rather than promotional. Customer data is not used to train or fine tune the underlying models, generated outputs stay inside the customer's own environment under the existing residency, governance and retention controls, and the AI features are governed by core generative AI terms plus supplemental terms the account must accept before enablement.
A published data information sheet sets out data scope, governance controls and personally identifiable information handling. This is the strongest answer to the training question in the index so far, and it stands in direct contrast to peers in the same category that leave it unaddressed.
Sender side mechanics are handled well and are graded on the compliance axis: real sender identity, enforced opt in, one click unsubscribe. What is absent is the newer question. Nothing published states whether email content generated by the platform's AI carries any indication of its origin, and no Article 50 position is stated for the conversational and agentic surfaces introduced through 2026. For an enterprise platform sending regulated marketing at volume into the European Union, that silence is now a posture.
Among the deepest documented integration surfaces in go to market software. Native bidirectional sync with Salesforce and Microsoft Dynamics at object level including lead, contact, account and campaign, a public REST API with extensive published reference documentation, a partner integration ecosystem, published outbound IP ranges for allowlisting, and callable smart campaigns that let outside systems trigger platform logic as events. MCP connectivity announced in 2026 makes the instance addressable by external agents, which is early for an enterprise platform of this size.
Multi tenant cloud with genuine regional choice, which is more than most of this index offers. Instances are reported across the United States, United Kingdom, Netherlands and Australia with a Canadian data centre in development, and AI generated output is stated to remain subject to the customer's existing residency controls.
Short of the top band because the region set is documented through trust profiles and account provisioning rather than a plainly published residency page, and nothing public establishes what is dedicated versus shared at the instance level.
A live trust centre with a product level compliance list that names this product explicitly rather than covering it by implication, plus an ungated product specific data protection and security white paper that describes data flows, sub processor use and encryption in transit and at rest.
Certifications are enumerated across the recognised set including SOC 2, ISO 27001 and business continuity certification, with single sign on through SAML, multi factor authentication and audit capability documented. An outsider can read all of it without a sales conversation or a non disclosure agreement.
The most disclosed vendor in this index on every other dimension publishes no price at all. Four editions exist by name, add on modules each carry a separate annual fee, and the agent capabilities are sold on a usage based AI credit model, and not one number appears anywhere public. The pricing page routes to a sales contact form.
There is no free tier, no published rate card and no stated unit of pricing, so a buyer cannot form even an order of magnitude estimate without entering a sales process. In a category where competitors publish tiers, silence at this scale is a choice.
A real export path exists and is documented: the public REST API supports programmatic extraction of person, activity and program data, which is how customers migrating off the platform actually leave, and the integration surface means most records also live in a connected CRM. The gap is the terms.
No published statement covers post termination data rights, deletion timelines, what happens to campaign and activity history at the end of a subscription, or renewal notice mechanics, all of which sit inside enterprise agreements a prospect cannot read before signing.
Sending discipline is documented as an operating practice with named mechanisms at every stage. Every account starts on a shared pool; a dedicated IP is a paid option the vendor recommends only above roughly 100,000 emails a month with consistent cadence, and deliverability consultants provide a customised warmup ramp because cold IPs get throttled. A trusted IP shared pool is available by application to senders who meet strict practices.
Reputation monitoring is built in through a deliverability tool with sender reputation reporting, bounce categorisation available as campaign triggers, and ISP feedback loops that auto unsubscribe complainants. Guidance names the 0.3 percent complaint threshold and covers SPF, DKIM and DMARC.
The claim is enterprise and mid market B2B with complex buying groups, and the evidence matches it precisely: named customers spanning telecommunications, financial services, industrial manufacturing, IT services and healthcare, across North America, Europe and Australia, with regional case study libraries maintained per market. Edition structure maps to database size, making the intended segment legible from the packaging itself. Independent install base tracking puts active customers in the low thousands, consistent with the enterprise positioning rather than a volume SMB business.
Pricing
What this vendor charges, what it commits to in writing, and where the bill can move. Figures the vendor publishes itself are labeled Vendor Published. Figures labeled Estimated come from other sources and the vendor has not confirmed them.
- ›There is no price published anywhere. The page is actually titled pricing and packaging, it runs to 121 kilobytes, and it contains no figure at all, just four different buttons asking you to request pricing.
- ›It does not even tell you how you would be charged. Not per person, not per contact, not per email sent. That is the first thing you need to know and the page does not answer it.
- ›Most companies in this position at least publish the shape of the deal. This one publishes the word packages.
- ›Because nothing is published, the outside guides have nothing to copy either, so unlike other quote only companies there is no agreed outside estimate to fall back on. No figure is recorded here rather than an invented one.
- ›Setup is likely to be a real project for this kind of product, with data migration and system integration, and none of that is priced either. Ask what the metered unit is and what year one setup costs before anything else.
How the price works
What you are charged for, and what makes the bill go up.
Not published in any form. The vendor maintains a page titled pricing and packaging which contains no figure, no tier name, no band, no starting point, no unit of sale, no seat minimum, no contract length and no trial term. The page describes the offering as simple, capability rich packages and routes to a quote request in four separate places.
Critically, the metering basis itself is unpublished. Nothing on the page establishes whether the product is charged per user, per contact stored, per message sent, per record or per package, so a buyer cannot construct even a rough model of how their bill would move with their own growth. Across this tranche, several vendors that publish no figures nonetheless publish the shape of the model, and this one does not.
No credible third party estimate was located to record in place of vendor figures. Unlike the quote only vendors elsewhere in this tranche, where independent procurement analyses converge on a range, this product's pricing does not appear in the public record with sufficient corroboration to be recorded as an estimate, so none is recorded.
The product is sold as part of a larger enterprise suite, and adjacent products in the same group are commonly bundled into the same agreement, which means any figure a buyer eventually receives may not be separable into a price for this product alone.
What the contract says about your data
What the vendor commits to in writing once your data is in the product.
Not established, and this record makes no claim either way. The pricing surfaces reached carried no security, processing or subprocessing links in the material retrieved, and no legal index was reachable from them. This vendor sits inside one of the larger enterprise software groups, which publishes extensive trust and compliance material elsewhere, and none of it was reached from the pricing route examined here.
That is a retrieval limitation rather than a finding, and it is a different kind of limitation from the pricing absence recorded above. The pricing absence is a deliberate editorial choice, evidenced by a page that exists for the purpose and declines to price anything. The compliance absence is simply an artifact of approaching this vendor through its pricing page, and should be resolved by going to the group's trust center rather than by inferring anything from silence here.
What can be said about custody comes from product shape rather than disclosure. This is a marketing automation platform, so a configured account holds the customer's marketing database, behavioral and site tracking data, campaign and messaging history, and scoring models derived from all three. The database consists largely of records about people who are not the customer's users. A buyer should read the group's processing terms against that shape and should establish, in particular, retention for behavioral data, which is the category most often left undefined in this product class.
Getting started
What it costs and what is included before the product is running.
Not published, and for this product class that omission is more consequential than the missing seat rate.
Marketing automation platforms at this tier are ordinarily deployed rather than switched on. Implementation typically involves database migration, integration with a customer relationship system, scoring model configuration and template rebuilding, and is normally contracted as a professional services engagement either with the vendor or with a certified partner. Nothing about any of that is published on the pricing surface reached: no setup fee, no onboarding charge, no migration rate, no professional services rate, no partner rate card and no minimum term.
No trial term, free tier or self serve path was located. Every route through the page terminates in a request for a quote or a request to be contacted.
A buyer evaluating this vendor should therefore treat the entire cost structure as unknown in advance, and should establish four things in the first sales conversation rather than the last: what the metered unit is, what the first year implementation figure is and who performs it, what the contract length and renewal uplift are, and what the cost is of the adjacent products in the same group's suite that the platform is commonly sold alongside.
What to watch for
Where this pricing can surprise a buyer who has not read it closely.
A page whose title is pricing and packaging, whose subject is pricing and packaging, and which contains no price.
The document runs 121 kilobytes. It is headed as pricing and packaging, describes the product as offering simple, capability rich packages, and then presents four separate invitations to request pricing: get pricing, get pricing for the product by name, get customized pricing, and see pricing. Not one figure appears anywhere in it, in any currency, in the rendered text or in any embedded data. There is no tier name, no band, no starting point, no unit of sale, no seat minimum, no contract length and no trial term.
Your brief predicted this vendor would publish nothing usable on price while disclosing heavily elsewhere, and on the pricing axis that prediction holds exactly. It is worth noting how it differs from the other vendors in this tranche that publish nothing. Several of those at least publish the shape of the model, that licenses are per user, or that a platform fee exists, or that costs scale with contacts. This page publishes the word packages and nothing else. A buyer cannot determine from it whether they would be charged per seat, per contact, per send, per record or per package, which is the first question rather than a detail.
The absence is also editorially specific in a way that matters. This is not a marketing page that happens to omit price. It is a page built and titled for the purpose of pricing and packaging, indexed as such, which a buyer or an answer engine will reach precisely when asking what the product costs. What it returns is a form. The distinction is between a vendor that has not got round to publishing pricing and a vendor that has built the destination for that question and chosen to place a contact request there, and this is firmly the second.
One consequence for this index specifically. Because the vendor publishes no figure, no band and no model, there is nothing for a third party guide to transcribe either, and consequently no consensus estimate of the kind that has filled the gap for the other quote only vendors in this tranche. Where the other unpriced vendors could at least be recorded against a range that several independent analyses agree on, this one cannot, and no estimate is recorded here rather than an unsupported one.
No dollar figure is recorded in the numeric field, and no third party estimate is recorded in the display field. Nothing is published and nothing sufficiently corroborated was located to record in its place.