New AI platforms set their sights on Marketo's customers

A new wave of challengers takes aim at Marketo

A report published on October 26, 2026 by MarTech.org maps a wave of automation platforms directly targeting the customer base of Adobe's Marketo. Paminga, Inflection.io, Conversion.ai, and Phave emerge as the most frequently mentioned competitors, although they also court customers from HubSpot, Pardot, and Eloqua. According to the article, Marketo is the name that comes up most often in these conversations.

The rivalry is not subtle. Inflection openly uses the thesis that Marketo can be abandoned:

Replace Marketo, finally.

Inflection.io, company marketing material

Paminga went further and launched a feature called Marketo Translator, built specifically to help customers migrate campaigns from Adobe's platform to its own. Phave, in turn, was born within Marketo's own lineage: it was founded by people who helped build the original product.

From funnel spreadsheet to market standard

To understand why Marketo became a target, it helps to go back to 2006, when the then-SiriusDecisions created the Demand Waterfall, a model that formalized how leads should move from simple interest to sales-qualified opportunity. Marketing automation platforms were born to make that funnel scalable: thousands of contacts managed through automated email cadences and lead scoring.

The problem is that this model describes a way of buying that no longer reflects real B2B behavior well. According to the article, much of automated marketing operations is still stuck in that old logic: someone shows interest, marketing nurtures that contact, and sales takes over when the lead is "ready": a rigid rule that bears little resemblance to an actual buying journey.

The technical argument: from rules to reasoning

The core argument of this new generation of competitors isn't a prettier interface, it's architecture. Traditional marketing automation depends on predefined rules: a MOps professional has to anticipate every possible scenario and translate that decision into workflow logic, with all the exceptions and dependencies that implies.

Jon Miller, Marketo's co-founder and now CEO of Phave, describes this shift as moving from rules to reasoning: instead of the marketer manually anticipating every situation, the system evaluates context, interprets buyer signals, and decides the appropriate action based on goals and constraints, not a fixed flowchart. Rules don't disappear entirely (they're still needed for consent, compliance, and other requirements that demand predictable behavior), but the volume of manual configuration drops.

What it costs to keep Marketo running

Adobe doesn't publish a standard price table for Marketo, and contracts vary widely. But the original article, written by someone who spent years operating the platform, estimates that companies can spend between US$50,000 and US$70,000 a year using Marketo basically for email, lead scoring, nurturing, website tracking, and Salesforce syncing, a fraction of what the tool is capable of doing.

Complexity also exacts a price in learning curve. The text offers a practical example: when a Wait step in a campaign was changed from three to five days, anyone already in that step kept the old three-day duration; only those who entered after the change followed the new five-day rule. It's the kind of behavior you only discover by breaking something on the platform, and one that requires an experienced administrator to avoid generating a silent error.

Who the challengers are, and why they know their opponent from the inside

The most relevant detail of this rivalry is who's sitting on the other side of the table:

• Phave was founded by Jon Miller (Marketo's co-founder) and Nick Bonfiglio, a former Marketo product executive;
• Inflection.io's co-founders are Aaron Bird and Dave Rigotti, both former Marketo employees;
• Paminga built a tool dedicated solely to migrating Marketo customers;
• Conversion.ai rounds out the group of alternatives mentioned in the article.

These are people who know exactly why customers love Marketo, what makes switching difficult, and where the limitations are that open the door to competition.

Marketo's defenses, and what Adobe has already done

Marketo isn't defenseless. Its Salesforce integration is mature, Adobe has a broad enterprise ecosystem, and the platform has a proven track record in complex operations that the newer competitors still have to prove they can support.

There's also the community angle: administrators who spent ten or fifteen years mastering Marketo built careers on top of that expertise, and the article describes this attachment as "Bleed Purple" (a reference to the brand's color). Complaining about Marketo day to day is normal; suggesting replacing it is a different conversation.

Adobe has also responded. The company launched Marketo Sky before acquiring the company in 2018 in an attempt to modernize the interface, but it never fully reconciled the differences with the Classic interface, and Sky was discontinued in 2022. In 2026, Adobe rolled out another visual update to the Marketo experience, but the article is blunt: it's mostly new icons and an updated layout, with no structural change to the platform. In parallel, Adobe has already introduced AI capabilities into Marketo, including Marketo AI skills and an MCP server, in an attempt to evolve the operating model without giving up the infrastructure that current customers already depend on.

What this means for martech decision-makers in Brazil

This rivalry is still mostly American, but it carries direct lessons for those managing marketing stacks here in Brazil. Three points deserve the attention of whoever decides on tools and automation budgets in Brazil:

• Dollar-denominated cost weighs more here. Marketo contracts are usually quoted in dollars; the US$50,000 to US$70,000 per year range cited in the report becomes an even more challenging figure in the budget of a Brazilian company exposed to exchange-rate swings, reinforcing the case for reviewing whether the local operation actually uses the depth of features it's paying for;
• Specialist scarcity is a local risk. If finding and retaining a senior Marketo administrator is already difficult in the United States, the Brazilian market for Marketo-certified MOps professionals is even more limited, which increases dependence on a handful of people or outsourced consultancies;
• The new platforms don't yet speak Portuguese or target the local market. None of the alternatives mentioned (Paminga, Inflection.io, Conversion.ai, Phave) has a known presence or dedicated support for Brazil at this point, so the decision to switch tools here still runs into integration with local ERPs and CRMs and the lack of Portuguese-language support.

It's also worth watching Adobe's own move as a market signal: if the company is adding AI to Marketo via Marketo AI skills and an MCP server instead of rebuilding the product from scratch, it's reasonable to expect that tools already present in Brazil, like RD Station (a Brazilian marketing automation platform) and HubSpot, will follow the same path of layering AI-based automation onto their existing base rather than forcing a platform switch. For martech decision-makers here, the US movement functions less as an immediate threat and more as a gauge of where the whole category is heading.