If you run marketing on Pardot — sorry, Marketing Cloud Account Engagement — you've probably heard some version of this question in a planning meeting: "Wait, is Salesforce killing Pardot?"
Short answer: no. Your instance isn't going anywhere, your automations still run, and Salesforce is still shipping updates to the platform.
Longer answer: the ground is shifting, and pretending it isn't would be doing you a disservice. Let's walk through what's actually happening, what Marketing Cloud Next is, and what a sane response looks like.
Pardot was renamed Marketing Cloud Account Engagement back in April 2022. I wrote a full explainer on that rebrand here: Did Pardot Change Its Name? The short version: same product, new label.
As of 2026, that rebrand is fully complete. The Pardot name no longer appears in Salesforce's product catalog, documentation, or support tickets. Even the certifications got renamed — "Pardot Specialist" is now "Marketing Cloud Account Engagement Specialist," and existing Pardot credentials carried over automatically.
So if you're searching "Pardot" and finding less and less, that's why. The product lives on. The name doesn't.
Here's where the real question lives.
Marketing Cloud Next (MC Next) launched at Salesforce Connections 2025. It is not a rebrand of Account Engagement, and it's not the old Marketing Cloud Engagement either. It's a new marketing platform built directly on Salesforce core — the same foundation as Sales Cloud and Service Cloud — powered by Data Cloud and Salesforce's AI stack.
That architecture matters. Account Engagement has always lived slightly apart from your CRM: separate database, a connector syncing prospects back and forth, and reporting that requires effort to reconcile. (If you've ever chased down why your Pardot numbers don't match your Salesforce reports, you know exactly what I mean.) MC Next removes that gap by living on the platform itself — one data model, no sync.
Salesforce has been clear about the direction: MC Next represents the future of its marketing ecosystem, one platform for both B2B and B2C engagement.
Salesforce has not announced an end-of-life date for Account Engagement. It continues to receive release updates, and thousands of B2B companies run their demand gen on it today.
But read the signals honestly. The Pardot name is fully retired. The certifications have been renamed and consolidated. New investment and announcements center on MC Next. And Salesforce is actively making it easy to try MC Next — Account Engagement customers get access through free permission set licenses (you provision Data 360 credits to actually use it).
That's not the behavior of a company planning to sunset a product next quarter. It is the behavior of a company building a bridge and hoping you'll walk across it on your own schedule.
My take: Account Engagement has years of life left, but it's in maintenance-and-migrate territory. The smart move isn't panic. It's positioning.
Marketing Cloud Growth Edition was the first step in this direction — a lighter-weight marketing tool on Salesforce core, aimed at smaller businesses, released before MC Next. If you evaluated it in 2024–2025 and found it thin, know that MC Next is the more complete evolution of that same idea. I covered how Growth Edition blurred the Marketing Cloud lines in my Marketing Cloud vs. Pardot comparison.
Here's what I'm telling clients right now.
1. Don't migrate reactively. MC Next is new. Account Engagement is mature, stable, and deeply understood. A rushed migration trades a working system for an unproven one — and you'd be rebuilding scoring, nurture, and attribution from scratch on a platform that's still filling out its feature set.
2. Do clean house now. Whenever the migration comes — next year or in three — you will not want to carry over 200 stale automation rules, a scoring model nobody trusts, and folders that spark fear. A clean Account Engagement instance migrates well. A messy one migrates its mess. This is the single highest-leverage thing you can do today, and it pays off even if you never migrate.
3. Turn on the free MC Next access and look around. You already have permission set licenses available. Let your team explore it in parallel — no commitment, real learning. Six months of side-by-side familiarity beats a panicked evaluation later.
4. Fix your data model. MC Next is built on Data Cloud, which means your migration story is really a data story. Duplicate prospects, junk fields, and inconsistent campaign structures will hurt twice — once now, once at migration. (Start with the sync error queue — it's the fastest read on how healthy your data plumbing really is.)
Pardot the name is gone. Account Engagement the product is alive and supported. Marketing Cloud Next is the clearly signaled future — and the transition will be measured in years, not months.
The companies that will handle this well aren't the ones that migrate first. They're the ones whose systems are clean enough that migration is a project, not a crisis.
If your Account Engagement instance is more "crisis" than "clean" right now, that's literally what we do — see our Account Engagement services. Let's talk — or if you're just getting started with the platform, check out our free Pro Bono Quickstart program.
Founder of Thompson Technology. Salesforce and Account Engagement consultant for B2B companies.
