Customer Data Platform Software Options 2026
Customer data has never been more abundant, and customer intelligence has rarely been harder to act on. Most organisations now collect behavioural, transactional, and demographic data across dozens of touchpoints - website, app, email, in-store, call centre, CRM, loyalty programme - but that data sits in separate systems, owned by separate teams, producing separate views of the customer that cannot easily be reconciled. The result is the personalisation gap: knowing in theory that joined-up customer insight drives revenue, but lacking the data infrastructure to make it real.
Salesforce Data Cloud is now Salesforce Data 360. ActionIQ belongs to Uniphore, mParticle belongs to Rokt, and Treasure Data has become Treasure AI. If you last looked at the customer data platform market two years ago, several names on your old shortlist have changed owners, changed names, or both.
The products have moved too. Most CDP vendors now sell AI agents that build segments and campaigns from a plain-English request, and most now offer a way to work with customer data where it already sits in Snowflake, Databricks or BigQuery instead of copying it into the CDP. That blurs the old packaged-versus-composable divide, and it makes up-to-date vendor facts more important when you build a shortlist.
This guide covers eleven customer data platforms for 2027, grouped by how they are built and sold, with an independent viewpoint on each. Viewpoint Analysis is an independent Technology Matchmaker, helping businesses find the right technology fast, and helping vendors get found by the right buyers.
Included Customer Data Platform Software Vendors
The eleven platforms in this guide fall into four groups. Our viewpoint on each vendor follows below.
Suite-Native: Salesforce Data 360 | Adobe Real-Time CDP | Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Insights
Independent Enterprise: Tealium | Treasure AI | Amperity | Uniphore CDP Agent (formerly ActionIQ)
Composable and Developer-Led: Twilio Segment | Hightouch | mParticle by Rokt
Commerce-Led: Bloomreach
Want to know more about any of these vendors, compare them, invite them to demo and lots more using our 'Ask HUEY' AI agent.
What Does a Customer Data Platform Actually Do?
A customer data platform collects customer data from many sources, matches the records that belong to the same person, and keeps a persistent profile for each customer that other systems can use. Those profiles feed audience segments, personalisation, analytics and, increasingly, the AI agents that marketing and service teams are starting to deploy. A CDP differs from a CRM because it is built for high volumes of behavioural and transactional data from every channel, rather than just the records a sales or service team keeps by hand.
If you are new to the category, our explainer What is a Customer Data Platform? covers the basics. CDPs sit between the Customer Experience Technology and Data Technology markets, so buyers usually come from marketing, digital, data or CX teams. The projects that go best involve all of them from the start.
💡 Four CDP name changes to know before you shortlist |
• Salesforce renamed Data Cloud to Data 360 in October 2025, as part of its Agentforce 360 launch. • Uniphore announced its acquisition of ActionIQ in December 2024. The product is now sold as Uniphore CDP Agent. • Rokt acquired mParticle in January 2025, and the platform now trades as mParticle by Rokt. • Treasure Data rebranded as Treasure AI on 20 April 2026. |
Should Your CDP Hold Its Own Copy of Customer Data?
The biggest split in this market is where the customer profile lives. A packaged CDP collects data into its own store, resolves identities there and pushes audiences out to channels. A composable CDP leaves the data in your cloud data warehouse and adds identity resolution, audience building and activation on top, so nothing is copied. Most packaged vendors now offer zero-copy or federated options as well, which is why many platforms in this guide are best described as hybrid.
The right answer depends more on your data team than on the CDP vendors. If customer data is already well modelled in a warehouse such as those in our Data Warehouse Software Options guide, a composable or hybrid approach avoids paying twice to store it. If your data is scattered and data engineering time is scarce, a packaged CDP that handles collection and identity for you will usually reach value sooner. Organisations planning a lakehouse should also read our Data Lake Software Options guide before choosing.
Where Should a CDP Search Start?
Start with the problem, not the product. A retailer trying to match in-store and online purchases has a different CDP need from a subscription app trying to cut churn, and the same vendor will rarely be the best fit for both. Write down your top five use cases, the channels they rely on and the systems that hold the data today before you speak to a vendor.
Viewpoint Analysis's Longlist Builder turns that context into a tailored list of CDP vendors matched to your industry, data volumes, existing marketing and data stack, and team skills. Unlike this guide, which covers the whole market, the Longlist Builder output is filtered to the platforms most likely to fit your environment.
If you would rather the vendors came to you, the Technology Matchmaker Service works like Dragons' Den or Shark Tank for software selection. Viewpoint Analysis interviews your team, writes a Challenge Brief covering your customer data requirements, current stack and goals, and then invites the most relevant CDP vendors to pitch directly to you.
Suite-Native Customer Data Platforms for 2027
These CDPs are built into a wider CRM or marketing suite. They make most sense when your organisation has already standardised on that suite, because the customer profile feeds straight into the same vendor's sales, service and marketing applications.
Salesforce Data 360 is the customer data platform at the centre of the Salesforce platform, renamed from Data Cloud in October 2025 when Salesforce launched Agentforce 360. It unifies data from Salesforce applications, websites, data lakes and legacy systems into a single customer profile that Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, Marketing Cloud and Commerce Cloud can all read. Zero-copy federation with platforms such as Snowflake means data can stay where it is and still be used in segments and AI models. Data 360 is also the data layer that gives Agentforce agents their customer context, which has become a main reason Salesforce customers are looking at it. Pricing is consumption-based, and Salesforce says existing Data Cloud contracts carry their capabilities over under the new name.
Our Viewpoint: Data 360 gives Salesforce-centred organisations one customer profile that sales, service and marketing teams, and their Agentforce agents, can all work from.
Adobe Real-Time CDP runs on Adobe Experience Platform and is built for large organisations that personalise across both known and anonymous visitors. Its Experience Data Model gives every source a common schema, and edge segmentation supports in-session personalisation at high traffic volumes. Federated Audience Composition lets teams build and enrich audiences directly from warehouses such as Snowflake without a full data copy, while Real-Time CDP Collaboration supports privacy-safe audience work between advertisers and publishers. Adobe has also added an Audience Agent, run through Experience Platform Agent Orchestrator, to take on routine audience building. It connects natively to Adobe Journey Optimizer, Adobe Target and Customer Journey Analytics, and is sold in B2C, B2B and B2P editions.
Our Viewpoint: Adobe Real-Time CDP is a proven base for experience-led brands that want real-time, in-session personalisation at scale, with agentic tools arriving inside the platform they already use.
Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Insights has two parts that can be bought together or separately: Data, the CDP layer that unifies profiles and builds segments and predictions, and Journeys, which runs real-time marketing orchestration. It is built on Dataverse, so profiles are available across Dynamics 365 sales and service applications and the Power Platform. Microsoft now positions the Data application as a knowledge source for Copilot and AI agents, and its 2026 release plans include simpler access to Customer Insights data from agents built in Copilot Studio. For organisations already running Dynamics 365 and Azure, it avoids a separate integration project.
Our Viewpoint: For Microsoft-standardised enterprises, Customer Insights turns existing Dynamics 365 data into usable customer profiles with very little extra plumbing, and gives Copilot agents the context they need.
Which Independent CDPs Suit Large Enterprises?
These vendors are not tied to a CRM or marketing suite. That suits organisations running a mixed technology estate, and those that want their customer data layer to outlast any one channel tool.
Tealium began in tag management and has grown from real-time data collection into a full customer data platform. Tealium iQ tag management, the EventStream API hub and the AudienceStream CDP capture behavioural data as it happens, enrich profiles in real time and send audiences to downstream tools through a large integration marketplace. CloudStream, announced in June 2025, adds zero-copy segment building and activation directly from cloud data platforms, so Tealium can work alongside a warehouse rather than in place of one. Consent and data governance controls sit in the collection layer itself, which appeals to buyers in regulated industries.
Our Viewpoint: Tealium is a sound choice when real-time data collection and consent control are the starting point, with the flexibility to activate from its own profiles or straight from the warehouse.
Treasure AI, known as Treasure Data until April 2026, is an enterprise customer data platform with long experience in large-scale data management and a solid base in automotive, consumer goods, retail, travel and financial services. Arm acquired the company in 2018, and it became an independent, SoftBank-backed business in 2021 when Arm's IoT Services Group was left out of its planned sale to NVIDIA. The rebrand marks a change in product focus. The Intelligent CDP remains the core, with AI Suites for engagement, personalisation and service on top, and Treasure AI Studio gives marketers a conversational workspace for building segments, journeys and reports in plain English. A hybrid architecture separates the control plane from the data plane, so customers can keep data in Snowflake or Databricks while using Treasure AI for identity, segmentation and decisioning. It has a particularly large customer base in Japan and Asia-Pacific alongside North America and Europe.
Our Viewpoint: Treasure AI suits large, multi-brand enterprises that want an established CDP core with AI agents doing real marketing work on top. If you last evaluated it as Treasure Data, it deserves a fresh look.
Amperity is a Seattle-based customer data platform, now describing itself as a Customer Data Cloud, best known for the quality of its identity resolution. Its Stitch technology uses machine learning to match customer records across point-of-sale, e-commerce, loyalty and CRM sources, which is exactly where large consumer brands with years of inconsistent data tend to struggle. In early 2026 Amperity added an AI Customer Data Agent that turns natural-language requests into live segments and customer journeys, along with Audience Monetization, which helps brands package permissioned first-party audiences for advertisers. Co-founders Kabir Shahani and Derek Slager returned to lead the company as co-CEOs in June 2026. Customers include Alaska Airlines, DICK'S Sporting Goods and Wyndham Hotels & Resorts.
Our Viewpoint: Amperity fits retail, travel and hospitality brands whose first problem is messy customer data, giving them accurate profiles to build everything else on.
Uniphore CDP Agent (formerly ActionIQ) is the enterprise CDP that Uniphore, an enterprise AI company, agreed to acquire in December 2024 alongside data engineering firm Infoworks. ActionIQ built its name on a connect-rather-than-copy architecture, running against customer-managed infrastructure such as Snowflake, BigQuery and Databricks so data teams keep control of where customer data sits. Uniphore now sells it as an AI-first composable CDP within its Marketing AI product line, covering identity, audiences, journeys, real-time experiences and analytics. Its visual audience builder lets non-technical marketers create complex segments without SQL, a capability large retail, financial services and media organisations have long valued.
Our Viewpoint: Uniphore CDP Agent lets data teams decide where customer data lives while giving marketers self-service audience building, now backed by a wider enterprise AI platform.
Composable and Developer-Led Customer Data Platforms
These platforms suit organisations with engineering or data teams that want to own the data model, whether that means instrumenting events across apps and websites or activating customer data straight from the warehouse.
Twilio Segment started as event collection infrastructure for engineering teams and, according to Twilio, is now used by more than 20,000 businesses. Connections collects behavioural data from websites, apps and servers through a single API and routes it to several hundred destinations, while Protocols enforces tracking plans and data quality. Unify, the product originally called Personas, resolves identities into customer profiles, and Twilio Engage adds audience building and multichannel activation on top. Twilio kept Segment after a strategic review and is tying it more closely to its messaging, voice and email services.
Our Viewpoint: Twilio Segment gives engineering-led teams a dependable way to collect clean event data once and send it anywhere, with profiles and activation ready when marketing needs them.
Hightouch was founded by former Segment engineers and pioneered reverse ETL before repositioning as a composable CDP. It works directly on Snowflake, BigQuery, Databricks and Redshift, building identity graphs, customer profiles and audiences inside your own warehouse and syncing them to hundreds of marketing, sales and service tools without keeping a separate copy of the data. Customer Studio gives marketers a no-code audience builder over warehouse data, and AI Decisioning and Hightouch Agents add automated testing, targeting and campaign work. In 2026 Hightouch began describing its platform as an agentic CDP, with the warehouse-native architecture unchanged underneath. Customers include Domino's, PetSmart and Warner Music Group.
Our Viewpoint: Hightouch is an excellent fit for data-mature organisations that want marketers working directly from the warehouse, with AI agents to speed up everyday campaign work.
mParticle by Rokt has particular strength in mobile and app-first businesses such as media, gaming, travel and consumer subscription services. E-commerce technology company Rokt acquired mParticle in January 2025. Native SDKs cover iOS, Android, React Native, Flutter, web and server-side sources, and data plans enforce event schemas so bad data is caught before it reaches downstream tools. Cortex adds predictive audiences such as churn and next-best-action scoring, and Composable Audiences lets teams activate data directly from Snowflake, BigQuery or Databricks. Newer features such as Match Boost focus on improving ad platform match rates for first-party audiences.
Our Viewpoint: mParticle by Rokt is well suited to app-first brands that need clean, governed event data across every device, now with commerce and advertising expertise behind it.
Commerce-Led Customer Data Platforms
Bloomreach is a commerce personalisation company whose Bloomreach Engagement product combines a real-time customer data platform with marketing automation, analytics and more than a dozen owned channels, including email, SMS, mobile and web. The CDP is sold as part of Engagement rather than on its own, which suits retailers and e-commerce brands that want data and activation from one vendor. Bloomreach Discovery adds AI-driven product search and merchandising using the same customer and product data. Its Loomi AI capabilities now include Loomi Marketing Agents, launched in June 2026, which assemble campaigns from a conversational brief, select audiences, draft on-brand content and time behaviour-triggered messages, with audit trails and role-based access.
Our Viewpoint: Bloomreach gives e-commerce and retail teams customer data, personalisation and campaign execution in one place, shortening the path from customer insight to revenue.
Where Do CDP Projects Go Wrong?
Most CDP disappointments trace back to a small number of causes, and few of them are about the software itself.
1) The first is identity resolution on real data. Demos use clean sample data; yours has duplicate loyalty accounts, typos and shared household email addresses. Ask each vendor to run a match test on an extract of your own records and compare the profile counts and merge decisions it produces. Work on data quality and master data management before or alongside the CDP project often makes a bigger difference than the choice of vendor.
2) The second is paying to store the same data twice. If your customer data already lives in a governed warehouse, check how each CDP charges for profiles, events and compute, and whether its zero-copy option covers all the use cases you need or only some of them.
3) The third is consent. A CDP that cannot carry consent signals through to every activation channel creates risk under UK GDPR, PECR and the Data (Use and Access) Act 2025. Map how consent is captured, stored and enforced before you sign. Our Data Governance Software Options guide covers the wider controls.
4) The fourth is newer: AI agents acting on poor data. Every vendor in this guide now offers agents that build segments or campaigns on request. They are only as good as the profiles underneath, so test them against your own use cases and check the approvals, audit trails and permissions around them.
💡 Run a proof of value on your own data |
Before final selection, give your two strongest candidates the same anonymised extract of customer records and the same three use cases. Compare match rates, time to first usable audience and the effort your own team needed. It takes a few weeks and tells you more than any number of demos. |
How Should You Evaluate Customer Data Platform Vendors?
Agree your architecture direction first, because it removes much of the market from consideration. Then score each shortlisted vendor on identity resolution accuracy against your data, activation speed for your priority channels, consent handling, total cost across licence, storage and compute, and how well its AI features match the way your team works.
Our guides on how to select data technology and how to find and select the best CX software both apply here.
For a structured process, Viewpoint Analysis offers a Rapid RFI to test the market quickly, a Rapid RFP for a formal comparison, and 30-Day Technology Selection to take a buying team from longlist to decision in a month. For the full method, the Enterprise Software Selection Playbook 2026 sets out each stage from requirements through to contract.
A CDP rarely works alone. If you are reviewing the wider stack, see our independent guides to Marketing Automation Software Options and Customer Experience Software Options. If CRM is part of the decision, our CRM Buyer's Guide explains how to buy well.
Summary
Choosing a CDP for 2027 is first an architecture decision and only second a vendor decision. Suite-native platforms from Salesforce, Adobe and Microsoft make most sense inside their own ecosystems. Independent enterprise platforms such as Tealium, Treasure AI, Amperity and Uniphore CDP Agent suit mixed estates and complex data. Composable and developer-led options such as Twilio Segment, Hightouch and mParticle by Rokt reward organisations with capable data teams, and Bloomreach serves commerce teams that want data and activation together.
Whichever route you take, test identity resolution on your own records, confirm how consent travels to every channel, and treat AI agents as something to prove in your environment rather than a reason to buy.
Next Steps for Customer Data Platform Buyers
Viewpoint Analysis supports marketing, data and IT leaders at every stage of a CDP selection, from first market scan to signed contract.
• Use the Longlist Builder to get a tailored CDP vendor list matched to your industry, data architecture and use cases.
• Let the Technology Matchmaker Service bring the right vendors to you. We write your Challenge Brief and invite the most relevant CDP vendors to pitch.
• Run a Rapid RFI, Rapid RFP or 30-Day Technology Selection to move from longlist to decision in weeks.
• Follow the Enterprise Software Selection Playbook 2026 for a rigorous, time-efficient process from requirements to contract.
For wider context, visit our Customer Experience Technology and Data Technology pages, or see our full IT Buyer Help Services.
Talk to Viewpoint Analysis
Are you evaluating customer data platform software and looking for independent guidance on the right architecture and vendor for your organisation? Request a call and a member of the Viewpoint Analysis team will be in touch.
Or are you a customer data platform vendor who would like to talk to us? We would be glad to hear from you.
