Marketing Cloud Next was announced at Connections ‘25, with its name in shining lights. But with so much movement in the Salesforce marketing product space in the past few years – mainly rebranding and new edition launches – Marketing Cloud Next’s arrival may have caused some confusion.
In this guide, I will attempt to demystify the differences between the five offerings under the Marketing Cloud umbrella, starting off by briefly describing them, their convergence (the pathways from one to another), and what could be in store for the future.
Salesforce Marketing Cloud: Product Overview
As promised, let’s start off by clearly defining these products, their purpose, and their history.
- Marketing Cloud Engagement (MCE): Formerly ExactTarget, MCE has been Salesforce’s primary B2C marketing offering for over a decade. As an acquired product, MCE exists on its separate infrastructure. There are numerous modules (‘builders’ and ‘studios’) that take care of segmentation, automation, and communication across multiple channels (read more).
- Marketing Cloud Account Engagement (MCAE): Formerly Pardot, MCAE has been Salesforce’s primary B2B marketing offering for over a decade due to its compatibility with Salesforce’s main sales objects (leads, contacts, opportunities, etc.). Despite being an acquired product, MCAE has been moving gradually towards object alignment – Salesforce and MCAE are using the same objects. The best example of this is the campaign object (read more).
- Marketing Cloud Growth (MCG): Launched in 2024, this was the first iteration of “Marketing Cloud on core” (read more).
- Marketing Cloud Advanced (MCA): Following hot on MCG’s heels, MCA was announced at Dreamforce ‘24. This delivers more features than MCG (read more).
- Marketing Cloud Next (MCN): This is the culmination of what Salesforce has been working towards to converge the other products listed above. Built on Data Cloud, the rebuilt personalization engine means that rich agent activity can be utilized across all of the Salesforce product suite – not just confined to marketing (read more).
What’s Different About Marketing Cloud Next?
After a quick succession of new editions (plus a huge list of enhancements delivered in each release), the arrival of MCN could have left some people confused.
Announced at Connections ‘25, Marketing Cloud Next is an umbrella that collates multiple agentic offerings, e.g. Agentforce Campaign Creation, Agentforce Lead Management, Agentforce Segment Intelligence.
So, “why is this new?” some of you may be asking, especially if you are familiar with the Marketing Cloud Growth and Advanced editions. In a nutshell, these are the three areas that make Marketing Cloud Next the new era of marketing on Salesforce:
- Combining: Salesforce have made many acquisitions in the MarTech and customer data spaces over the years. Marketing Cloud Next combines nine of these ‘best of breed’ acquisitions.
- Rebuilding: Marketing Cloud Next is built on top of Data Cloud (which is colloquially referred to as the ‘core platform’). Additionally, Salesforce have rebuilt their personalization engine onto Data Cloud, which means that there is one shared service for all Salesforce platform products (e.g. Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, Commerce Cloud).
- Simplifying: It’s truthful to say that, in the past, there were a cocktail of offerings under the “Marketing Cloud” umbrella. Now, not only can B2B and B2C models be serviced by the Marketing Cloud Next same application, Salesforce have been striving to reduce the TCO (total cost of ownership) by minimizing integrations within their marketing stack, and between other platform products.
The Great Convergence
Salesforce have been working towards the single marketing app vision for several years. In an effort to get existing customers using the new editions with all the powered-up functionality that’s on offer, Salesforce have created ‘pathways’ to ease customers into Marketing Cloud ‘on core’. MCG, MCA, and MCE+ can be considered ‘stepping stones’, where two editions can be used in parallel, which will or could lead us to the Marketing Cloud Next destination.
As the ‘on core’ editions are at feature parity (and beyond), this is a sensible initiative to move us in the right direction – towards a robust infrastructure that can support AI agents and a rich, single view of the customer across all teams in your organization.
We could summarize the timeline as follows:
- MCAE → MCG or MCA: Salesforce made MCG and MCA (depending on your MCAE edition) available for Account Engagement customers mid-way through 2024.
- MCE → MCE+: Marketing Cloud Engagement+ is expected to become GA in October 2025.
Salesforce emphasized that what’s happening here is not a migration – but a convergence – as your previous investments into automation, segments created in Data Cloud, etc., can be reflected in Marketing Cloud Next.
“Keep What Works and Add What’s Next”
How far MCE and MCN can converge can be summarized by looking at the diagram below. As of now, Journey Builder journeys and Flow can be connected, as in “Build your Next messaging and flows, and invoke existing [Journey Builder] journeys”.
The ‘one click’ connect from MCE to MCN isn’t currently clear for some aspects of the marketing lifecycle. For example, content. That’s your email templates, images, files, etc. Note that this is available for MCAE → MCG/MCA. The current word is that Salesforce are working on mechanisms for MCE → MCN to make the translation from the ExactTarget platform to the core platform smooth.
What Does the Future Look Like?
Years have passed since Salesforce started hinting at their driving mission to have a unified marketing offering (that caters to both B2C and B2B, so you don’t have to choose). Marketing Cloud Next has been an impressive unveiling of this new technology.
But what could be in store for the future? The keyword here is ‘convergence’. Salesforce is very strongly opinionated on the topic, and won’t be sunsetting their MCE/MCAE offerings – and perhaps never will. For one, this would be impossible, especially in the MCE arena, where some of the world’s largest enterprises have embedded their marketing operations into the platform – so no easy ‘lift and shift’.
Whether all SKUs are still available to buy for net-new Marketing Cloud customers this time next year remains a question mark (something that Ran Michael explored in his recent article).
All in all, it’s an exciting time to be a marketer on the Salesforce platform – and any top-notch, resilient marketer loves a challenge!
