The Best Customer Data Platform: The 2025 CRM Industry Leader Awards

The Market

Customer data platforms were born in marketing, but they’ve outgrown the martech realm and now touch many more departments, which is causing the market to expand rapidly. Fortune Business Insights valued the global CDP market at $2.7 billion in 2024 and projects it to reach $3.3 billion by the end of this year and $13 billion by 2032, with a compound annual growth rate of 21.7 percent

Several factors are driving this growth, including increasing demand for personalized, omnichannel customer experiences; the growing integration of artificial intelligence in CDPs, enabling more sophisticated data analysis and predictive capabilities; and the need to take customer data out of decentralized, siloed systems that have made it difficult to collect data in a single frame and analyze it.

Additionally, composable architecture and AI are now non-negotiable, Gartner says, and zero-copy data sharing, integration flexibility, and real-time orchestration are now critical for CDP relevance.

And as the market moves forward, look for CDPs to become more integrated with other technologies. Customer data management has been fragmented for a long time, but Gartner predicts that by 2028, the data management market will converge into a single market, enabled by data fabrics and generative AI.

The Top Five

Adobe’s Real-Time CDP was already one of the most collaborative data platforms on the market, and that capability only grew with Adobe’s release of Real-Time CDP Collaboration earlier this year. Adobe Real-Time CDP Collaboration delivers a secure environment for advertisers and publishers to jointly discover, activate, and measure high-value audiences through consent-driven first-party data. And its CDP product road map is deeply intertwined with its Creative Cloud and Firefly AI, which Gartner says is great for enterprises in the Adobe ecosystem, but not so great for everyone else.

Data has always been central to Oracle’s CRM business, and that isn’t going to change anytime soon. “Oracle continues to invest in its Unity platform and [Oracle Cloud Infrastructure] to deliver data-driven experiences across sales, marketing, and service,” says Rebecca Wettemann, founder and CEO of Valoir. And Gartner agrees, noting in its recent Magic Quadrant for CDPs that “Oracle’s Unity CDP is all about integrating front and back office—sales, service, finance—to deliver unified commercial experiences.”

Salesforce already occupied a leadership position in the CDP market, as its Data Cloud delivers a significant platform advantage and serves as the data fabric for the entire enterprise. And with its recent acquisition of Informatica, a top provider of AI-powered cloud data management, for $8 billion, Salesforce only got stronger. That deal, signed in late May, is expected to enhance Salesforce’s trusted data foundation, critical for deploying powerful and responsible agentic AI. After all, “Salesforce’s CDP is key to its AI and Agentforce strategy,” Wettemann says. And with deep connections to Einstein, Agentforce, Tableau, and many other products, “Salesforce leads with deep AI and enterprise data orchestration, but only if buyers commit to its full stack,” Gartner said in its recent Magic Quadrant for CDPs.

Privacy and consent orchestration are critical for CDPs, and this is where Tealium’s AudienceStream CDP really shines. With it, companies can create a unified view of customers across channels, segment audiences to power personalized experiences, and orchestrate that data to fuel actions and analysis across their digital marketing activities. But analysts this year also singled out Tealium for its clear pricing, real-time zero-party data capture, and data governance.

Rumors circulated earlier this year that Twilio might abandon the CDP market it entered in 2020 with its purchase of Segment for a whopping $3.2 billion. That talk was put to rest by new CEO Khozema Shipchandler, who instead determined that CDPs would only grow in importance in the context of rising AI and conversational commerce. Now, with Thomas Wyatt at the helm of the Segment business, Twilio has decided to integrate its communications, Flex contact center, and CDP technologies to enhance customer experiences. It has also bolstered its CDP product with new personalization and journey management tools, event-based triggers, and more.