In 2025, Salesforce and Tealium again led the Gartner Magic Quadrant for customer data platforms (CDPs).
However, the competition has fallen back, with Treasure Data and Adobe – leaders in last year's edition – now a challenger and visionary, respectively.
Interestingly, Action IQ, Amperity, and Twilio have dropped from the visionary category. This year, they are all niche players.
Meanwhile, Oracle has switched from a visionary to a challenger.
BlueConic was a challenger in 2024, but it's now a niche player as almost the entire matrix shifts toward the bottom-left quadrant.
Other CDP vendors have dropped off the grid completely. These include Blueshift, Dun & Bradstreet, Leadspace, Zeotap, and – perhaps most surprisingly – SAP.
Gartner explains that SAP’s CDP revenue didn’t meet the updated inclusion criteria.
No new CDP entrants replaced the five providers that lost their places. Perhaps most notably, Microsoft remains absent with its Dynamics 365 Customer Insights – Data product.
The Definition of a Customer Data Platform (CDP)
Customer data platforms unify systems of record to enable a centralized customer database.
These systems span CRM, CCaaS, WEM, social media management, conversational AI solutions, the company website, and beyond.
In pooling all this data, the CDP funnels it into unified customer profiles and makes it actionable for marketing teams.
However, customer service and sales teams may also leverage a CDP.
Gartner notes that a CDP must include data collection, profile unification, activation, and AI-powered reporting, amongst other common features.
From there, the research firm divides 12 CDP providers into quadrants: leaders, challengers, visionaries, and niche players. Here’s how they performed.
Gartner Magic Quadrant Leaders
Leaders in the Magic Quadrant understand enterprise buyer needs and meet those with specialized services and solutions that are a staple of the organization-wide data ecosystem. They also offer a compelling long-term vision for the CDP category. This year’s leaders are:
- Salesforce
- Tealium
Salesforce
Salesforce earns plaudits for its "platform advantage". Indeed, it can coordinate data and actions across the front office, with custom integrations to adjacent technologies, such as CCaaS platforms, to effectively leverage cross-functional insights.
The CRM leader's use of Tableau to enhance the platform's reporting and dashboards is an excellent example of this platform advantage, which Gartner omits.
Also, the study doesn't spotlight the platform's key capability advantages, which include its customer audience targeting and sophisticated selection functionality. Its global coverage is also differentiative.
However, Gartner does acknowledge Salesforce’s "AI and data innovation" and "broad ecosystem support" as core strengths. That ecosystem includes its busy Trailblazer community, which enables advanced learning and skill development alongside peer support.
Tealium
Tealium gains credit for its "real-time zero-party data capture" functionality. That stems from the 2024 launch of Tealium Moments IQ, which collects real-time insights from website visitors.
Gartner also lauds the vendor’s "privacy, consent features" and "clear, flexible pricing and packaging". The latter includes a default package for potential customers to customize.
Surprisingly, the analyst doesn’t mention its expansive partner ecosystem as a strength, which features many custom integrations that pull data across public and private networks.
Lastly, Tealium commits a large portion of its revenue to research and development (R&D) as it expands the data sources it can access and draw insight from.
Gartner Magic Quadrant Challengers
Challengers in the Magic Quadrant typically shine when coordinating data, unifying profiles, and offering functionality across customer-facing functions. However, their use cases may be more limited than leaders. They may also lack a vision of where CDPs fit into the broad enterprise stack. This year’s challengers are:
- Oracle
- Treasure Data
Oracle
Like Tealium, Oracle draws praise for its "transparent pricing", with Big Red basing its model on the total number of unique profiles clients store on its Unity CDP. As the solution sits on top of Oracle's cloud infrastructure, the company may also better manage costs.
Moreover, the tech giant wins acclaim for its "unified commercial experiences" and "B2B segmentation support". Exemplifying the latter, Oracle offers an Account Profile Explorer, which arranges insights differently across industries and departments.
Gartner doesn’t mention Oracle’s prowess in machine learning, with it offering close to 30 pre-packaged customer behavior intelligence models to derive original insight.
However, the analyst does note several cautions, including its limited zero-copy "data warehouse support" capabilities and "media network integrations".
Treasure Data
Treasure Data gains acknowledgment for its "technical use-case support", adding many features for IT teams, not just CX leaders. That's crucial as the front office increasingly relies on IT in the AI age.
Gartner also commends the vendor for its "global, multi-brand organization support" and "customer success strategy". As part of the latter, it works closely with clients to prioritize initiatives based on revenue impact.
Meanwhile, the analyst cautions as to Treasure Data’s "pricing" and "market understanding", highlighting how most of its customers are in the midmarket, despite the vendor’s enterprise focus.
The latter seems harsh. Indeed, Treasure Data proved ahead of its time in orchestrating customer engagements across touchpoints with real-time, advanced decisioning. Given the market's shift to extend the CDP across the customer lifecycle, the company has been vindicated. However, enterprises have proven slower to make this transition than the midmarket.
Gartner Magic Quadrant Visionaries
Visionaries in the Magic Quadrant embrace emerging functionalities to execute "promising" roadmaps that elevate the CDP within the broader business. Yet, their track record for execution, innovation speed, and product packaging can lag behind market leaders. This year's visionaries are:
- Adobe
Adobe
Adobe’s "GenAI vision" has allowed it to generate personalized visual content based on the unified customer profiles available within its Real-Time CDP.
Gartner recognizes this as a strength in its study, alongside the tech juggernaut's "vertical enablement" and "growth". Indeed, its broader Adobe Experience Platform subscription revenues rose 60 percent year-over-year (YoY).
Another area Gartner could have acknowledged is its data governance strength, with advanced policy management, audience targeting, and orchestration capabilities.
