Customer Data Platforms
As CDPs evolve beyond martech into strategic enterprise investments, buyers must assess cost-to-value for cross-functional stakeholders. This research helps CMOs select platforms to support enterprise tech and data needs, enhancing customer-facing functions and upstream business applications.
Market Definition
Gartner defines customer data platforms (CDPs) as software applications that support marketing and customer experience use cases by unifying a company’s customer data from marketing and other channels. CDPs optimize the timing and targeting of messages, offers and customer engagement activities, and enable the analysis of individual-level customer behavior over time.
The purpose of a customer data platform (CDP) is to centralize data collection and unify customer data from disparate sources into profiles. CDPs enable analysts and data engineers to perform data management tasks that support higher-order business processes, primarily marketing, but increasingly cross-CRM functions, as well as finance and product management. While CDPs originated to serve marketing use cases, interest from data management roles, IT and other customer-facing business user roles (e.g., sales, service and support) is on the rise. The majority of buying groups for the technology predominantly consist of IT roles.
CDPs orchestrate a variety of business applications and CRM systems, enabling businesses to enhance and better coordinate go-to-market (GTM) execution (e.g., unified commercial motions for B2B and customer journey orchestration for B2C business). While many of those systems also manage customer-level data and audiences for targeting, they do so in a way that makes both data governance and orchestration across channels — and across competitive vendor solutions — a challenge. CDPs aim to address this challenge by collecting and unifying disparate customer data in a centralized location, making it accessible to customer-facing teams engaging across the customer life cycle.
The CDP is not yet a substitute for an enterprise’s master data management, but it can ensure that customer profile data, transactional events and analytic attributes are available to marketing and other customer-facing functions for coordinating interactions. CDPs govern the bidirectional flow of data between the front office and back office (e.g., GTM and R&D/operations).
Report 2025
Here is a summary of the vendors featured in the Gartner magic quadrant 2025 report.
For the full analysis and detailed insights, you can read the report
here
and view the magic quadrant graphic
here.
| Market Status | Market Vendor |
|---|---|
Leader |
Salesforce |
Leader |
Tealium |
Visionary |
Adobe |
Niche Player |
ActionIQ |
Niche Player |
Twilio |
Niche Player |
Redpoint Global |
Niche Player |
BlueConic |
Niche Player |
mParticle |
Niche Player |
Amperity |
Niche Player |
Zeta Global |
Challenger |
Treasure Data |
Challenger |
Oracle |