Pardot to HubSpot migration.
Leave Account Engagement with the scores intact. Pardot has been writing to Salesforce for years through a connector nobody wants to touch. Migrating means untangling prospects from leads, rebuilding Engagement Studio as workflows, and deciding what happens to scoring and grading on the other side.
A prospect is not a lead, and both are a contact.
Pardot keeps its own prospect database, synced to Salesforce leads and contacts through a connector with its own rules about who wins a field conflict. HubSpot has one contact. Collapsing three record models into one is the actual migration, and it is a data modelling exercise before it is an export.
Three records. One person.
Pardot — the connectorWhat the connector was quietly doing.
Engagement Studio
Multi-branch nurture programs rebuild as HubSpot workflows. The logic translates; the timing semantics do not always, particularly around wait steps and re-entry rules, so each program gets walked rather than diagrammed.
Scoring and grading are two things
Pardot separates behavioural score from profile grade. HubSpot has one score plus properties. Deciding how that collapses, and whether sales notices, is a conversation with the sales leader rather than a mapping decision.
Completion actions everywhere
Completion actions hang off forms, files, custom redirects and emails, and they are invisible until you look at each asset. They are the most commonly missed piece of a Pardot migration.
Custom redirects and tracked links
Custom redirect URLs are live in emails, on partner sites and in ads. They keep resolving until Pardot is switched off, and then they do not. Every one needs an inventory and a replacement.
Dynamic lists and the sync queue
Dynamic list membership depends on the connector being current. A migration run while the sync queue is backed up produces lists that look wrong and are, until the queue drains.
The Salesforce connector itself
Turning it off changes what writes to lead and contact fields in Salesforce. If Salesforce is staying, the HubSpot integration has to take over those writes deliberately rather than by accident.
The sequence, start to cutover.
Discovery
Object counts, custom fields, automation and the integrations that will break on the way out, read from the source system rather than from a questionnaire.
Mapping
Field by field, including what will not carry across, agreed and signed before anyone exports anything.
Dry run
A complete rehearsal into a sandbox portal, reconciled against source counts so the gaps surface a month early rather than on cutover night.
Automation rebuild
Workflows, sequences and routing rebuilt to the new model rather than transliterated from the old one, which is how a migration inherits a decade of workarounds nobody remembers writing.
Cutover
A dated switch with the legacy system read-only for a defined window, and a rollback that was tested rather than assumed.
Post-migration support
A named engineer through the first full reporting cycle, which is when the questions actually arrive.
Sales finds out on cutover day.
Pardot migrations are run by marketing and felt by sales. The grade disappears from the lead view, the Engage alerts stop, and the notification that used to arrive when a prospect hit the pricing page never comes. We map the sales-facing surface first and rebuild it before anything else moves.
What people ask before they commit.
Does our prospect data map cleanly to HubSpot contacts?
Mostly, but the interesting part is the duplicates. Pardot prospects, Salesforce leads and Salesforce contacts frequently describe the same person three times with different field values. Deduplication rules get agreed in discovery, because they decide which version of the truth survives.
Can we keep Salesforce and just replace Pardot?
Yes, and that is the most common shape. HubSpot Marketing Hub replaces Pardot, Salesforce stays as the CRM, and the HubSpot Salesforce integration replaces the connector with a boundary written down rather than inherited.
What happens to scoring?
Behavioural score carries as a number and a rebuilt scoring model. Grade usually becomes properties plus a fit score. We rebuild both to match how sales actually prioritises today, which is often not what the old model says.
How long does it take?
Six to twelve weeks. Engagement Studio program count and the state of the Salesforce connector are the two things that move that number.
Is Pardot being discontinued?
No. Marketing Cloud Account Engagement is actively sold and supported. Teams move for cost, for the number of people it takes to run, and to stop maintaining an integration between two systems that should have been one.
Where people go from here.
Leave the connector behind.
Tell us what you are running
What the system does today, where it breaks, and when it has to work. An engineer reads it — you get an answer inside one business day, not a sequence.