Two vendors, one rule: tax by billing address, no state named

Adobe taxes Marketo Engage by the customer’s billing address, under a policy it last updated in twenty twenty-five, and no state appears anywhere in that policy. Oracle’s Eloqua agreement puts the same duty on the customer, charging tax only “if the law requires it,” again without naming a state, a calculation basis, or who carries the nexus. Neither vendor builds a per-state or per-jurisdiction tax engine into the product itself, though Eloqua’s own contract volunteers that it is not built to be a sales engine at all.

An exemption certificate that takes days to clear, on one side only

Marketo’s terms require an exemption certificate before an order is placed, and Adobe then refunds the tax already charged within five to ten days. Eloqua’s agreement says nothing at all about a certificate, a review window, or a refund timeline for tax already collected — a silence, not a shorter process, since no comparable clause is published anywhere on the pages checked.

Two purchase paths: a negotiated deal, and a standing invoice

Marketo is bought through a negotiated Sales Order with no standard term, a late fee of one percent a month, and a buyer purchase order that is void without a signature on both sides; the separate Adobe Store channel accepts purchase orders starting at two thousand five hundred dollars, with no ACH payment or W-9 form mentioned. Eloqua instead runs on invoice, net thirty days, with no self-service purchase path at all — the page routes every new customer to “request a demo” or “contact sales,” and purchase orders, ACH and a W-9 are all absent from what Oracle publishes.

A compliance label that covers the infrastructure, not the app being sold

Adobe assigns Marketo a SOC two Type two report, SOC three, ISO twenty-seven thousand one hundred one, and calls it “HIPAA ready,” while excluding it from FedRAMP Tailored, a status reserved for Analytics and Campaign only. Oracle’s stack carries FedRAMP, the DoD DISA cloud requirements, FIPS one forty, HIPAA-HITRUST and TX-RAMP — but all of it sits with Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, not with the Eloqua application itself, and StateRAMP and GovCloud appear nowhere. HIPAA on Eloqua instead means buying a separate line item, “Eloqua HIPAA Advanced Data Privacy,” at sixty thousand dollars a year — and the word “BAA” itself is absent from that page.

One entry price is published, the other routes straight to a quote

Eloqua’s entry price is two thousand dollars a month for its lowest contact band, published on a price list from mid-twenty twenty-five, though the live pricing page itself is blocked to automated readers and so the figure cannot be reconfirmed there. Marketo publishes no price at all, in any currency or billing period; its pricing page routes to a quote, and the only numbers attached to its entry-level Growth plan are ten users and twenty thousand daily API calls.

Seats for one, a contact band for the other

Marketo’s floor is a headcount: ten users on Growth, twenty-five on every tier above it. Eloqua drops seats for a contact band instead, its lowest band topping out at ten thousand contacts, while a separate module, Guided Campaigns, keeps its own ten-user minimum at one hundred dollars per user per month, with each additional user billed at eight hundred forty dollars a year.