Customer Data Platforms

The customer data platform market is bifurcating into platformization and agentification. Buyers should assess their needs for orchestration or autonomy, prioritize warehouse-native and composable architectures, evaluate cost-to-value and invest in agentic AI and automation.

Market Definition

Customer data platforms (CDPs) are software applications that support customer experience use cases by unifying a company’s customer data from marketing, sales, service, commerce and other sources. CDPs unify customer data to facilitate its output to coordinate profiles between cross-functional systems, create segments and/or audience targets, optimize offers and/or decisions, and inform analysis while distributing insights that create triggers for other experiences.

Today’s CDP technology is an enterprise data strategy and technology decision: enterprise IT organizations view the investment as an essential component for both upstream technical users and downstream business users. As such, the purpose of a CDP has evolved.

Traditionally, its focus is to centralize data collection and unify customer data from disparate sources into profiles, improving contextual experiences across customer-facing functions. But today’s buying groups are cross-functional and responsible for a variety of engagement touchpoints across the customer life cycle. The 2025 Gartner Business Buyer Survey reveals that an average of two to three functional groups typically contribute requirements and objectives for a CDP purchase.1 These groups include functions such as central IT, sales, marketing, supply chain management, finance, customer service and even HR. In light of that, the purpose of CDPs is bifurcating: business users either adopt CDPs to innovate and attempt to evolve their work with limited IT support or to collaborate with enterprise data functions and elevate the role of customer data.

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 customer-facing functions for coordinating interactions. CDPs govern the bidirectional flow of data between the front office and back office, such as go-to-market (GTM) and R&D/operations.

Nontechnical users look to CDPs to orchestrate a variety of business applications (such as marketing, sales, service, support, commerce), CRM systems, and cloud data warehouses. The goal of nontechnical users is to better coordinate GTM execution (such as unified commercial motions for B2B and customer journey orchestration for B2C business). While many of these 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.

Report 2026

Here is a summary of the vendors featured in the Gartner magic quadrant 2026 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	Uniphore
Leader	Oracle
Leader	Hightouch
Visionary	Adobe
Niche Player	Amperity
Niche Player	Twilio
Niche Player	BlueConic
Challenger	Tealium
Challenger	Treasure Data

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