Oracle Eloqua vs Salesforce Marketing Cloud: Introduction

With the growth of Salesforce we often hear the same questions: should we migrate to Salesforce Marketing Cloud? Is Oracle Eloqua better than Salesforce? Even though both classify as marketing automation platforms, the answer really is not that simple.

Both Marketing Cloud (formerly ExactTarget) and Eloqua have dominated the market for a long time. Both have significant differences, different pros and cons, and both are capable platforms. Oracle acquired Eloqua in 2012 to build the Oracle Marketing Cloud; a year later Salesforce acquired ExactTarget to do practically the same.

Why the comparison is difficult

Both platforms are very different and were built for different segments and purposes. Officially Eloqua has been branded as a B2B platform while Salesforce Marketing Cloud is B2C. Eloqua has been strong in inbound and data tracking since inception; Marketing Cloud is more of a powerful outbound engine.

Very often we compare marketing automation solutions on email orchestration and data automation capabilities alone. That is another reason the comparison is challenging: in recent years Marketing Cloud has grown into a full omnichannel, AI-driven solution.

It is arguably not fair to compare these two head to head. It would make more sense to compare Eloqua with Salesforce Pardot, which belong to the same category. But many companies have used Eloqua as a B2C marketing automation tool (we have configured dozens of such instances), so the comparison gets asked for.

The full series covers platform architecture and security, data model and processes, campaigns and automation, AI/ML and APIs, and platform maintenance and support.

Archive: this article dates from an earlier phase of our work, when marketing automation was our main focus. We have kept it online because the thinking still holds, but it is not where our practice sits today.