Marketo’s most serious challengers in years are being built by the people who built Marketo. Phave, which launched publicly on 23 September under Marketo co-founder Jon Miller, is the most prominent of four AI-native platforms now pitching directly at Marketo customers, alongside Inflection.io, Conversion and Paminga.

All four offer tooling or services to move a Marketo instance across. Adobe, which bought Marketo in 2018, has spent the same months shipping its own answer: AI agents inside Marketo Engage that became generally available on 25 August, and two new agentic products announced on 28 September.

The contest matters because marketing automation sits under most of what a B2B demand team runs: lead scoring, nurture, routing and the Salesforce sync that decides when sales sees a lead. Moni Oloyede, a Marketo practitioner writing in MarTech on 26 October, put typical annual spend at upwards of roughly £37,000 to £52,000 ($50,000 to $70,000), based on her own experience; Adobe does not publish Marketo pricing. What none of the coverage shows is customers leaving in measurable numbers. No vendor, analyst or Adobe has published churn or migration figures, and the MarTech piece offers none.

Who is challenging Marketo, and what are they selling?

Phave makes the clearest case for outright replacement. Miller co-founded Marketo and later Engagio; his co-founder Nick Bonfiglio ran global product at Marketo from 2009 to 2016. Phave says it reached general availability in August after about two years in stealth. It is backed by FirstMark, Ridge Ventures and Costanoa Ventures, and names SambaNova, SPS Commerce, mabl, Servion and Hypha as customers.

Its core idea is an AI layer called Maestro that computes a 30-day “Playlist” of touches for each person, aimed at an objective the marketer sets and drawn from campaigns the team has built. Consent, frequency caps and quiet hours stay as fixed rules, and sends need approval from a signed-in user. “Rules are good at what is allowed, but bad at deciding what is best,” Miller said at launch. Pricing starts at about £26,800 ($36,000) a year, charged on how many people receive something in a month rather than on database size.

Inflection.io was co-founded by two more Marketo alumni, Aaron Bird and Dave Rigotti, and sells to teams whose best buying signals sit in product usage and the data warehouse. MarTech reports its tagline as “Replace Marketo, finally”. Conversion, founded by Neil Tewari and James Jiao, calls itself an AI-native B2B marketing data platform, connects directly to Snowflake, BigQuery and Databricks, and reported a Series A of about £21m ($28m) in 2025. Paminga, the least prominent of the four, pitches a simpler platform with a built-in route out of Marketo.

What do the Marketo migration tools actually move?

Inflection.io launched AI-assisted Marketo migrations on 7 August. An agent scans smart campaigns, programs, scoring models and fields, documents the logic behind each, and recommends how it maps across, with former marketing operations staff overseeing the build. Inflection says plainly that it is not a one-to-one “new Marketo”, so the result is a translation of the old set-up rather than a copy.

Paminga’s Migration Center, which its documentation describes as still in beta, reads a Marketo instance through the API and carries over fields, folders, programs, tokens, forms, landing pages and emails, each reviewed before it goes live. The same documentation lists what does not come across: activity history, program members, and smart campaigns and flows, whose logic is not converted. For many Marketo teams those campaigns are the automation.

Phave quotes four to 12 weeks for a Marketo move, with Marketo kept running until go-live. Rather than rebuilding scoring models, nurture streams and routing rules, it recomputes them, and it says change history and analytics for retired campaigns must be exported before cutover. Conversion quotes an average of about four weeks, again with a parallel run.

Customer evidence remains vendor-published. Inflection’s case study says Nylas replaced a Marketo drip campaign with event-based onboarding journeys and saw an 80% increase in free-to-paid conversions. It gives no baseline or measurement period, credits better targeting and lead quality alongside the switch, and does not say whether Nylas retired Marketo for anything else.

How is Adobe responding to the challengers?

Adobe is answering with product rather than rebuttal. Marketo AI became generally available on 25 August after a limited beta that, Adobe said, reached nearly 2,800 Marketo Engage subscriptions. That is a reach figure, not a measure of active use. The agents clean imported lead lists, turn a brief into a campaign set-up document, build programs and Smart Campaigns, check programs against workspace rules and diagnose why a lead stalled. Adobe says none of them runs unattended: changes are reviewed and approved before they go live.

On 28 September Adobe added Marketo Optimizer, which picks next-best actions across lead, account and buying-group journeys, and Marketo Qualifier, which merges inbound lead qualification with outbound BDR prospecting. It also announced Coworker, a natural-language workflow builder inside Marketo Engage, and an MCP server that lets tools such as Claude, ChatGPT and Copilot work with the platform. Adobe describes the change as a move from marketing automation to marketing orchestration, which is close to the challengers’ own pitch, and says the new products extend Marketo Engage rather than replace it. Its announcement does not say whether Optimizer and Qualifier are generally available.

Oloyede argues that Adobe’s 2026 interface refresh mostly changed icons and layout, though she also lists the incumbent’s real defences: a mature Salesforce integration, Adobe’s enterprise footprint, and practitioners who have spent 10 to 15 years on the platform.

None of the four challengers, nor Adobe, has published figures on how many Marketo customers have switched. Paminga’s own migration guide lists smart campaign logic among the things it leaves behind.