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What is the possible reason that your customer marketing isn't yielding any significant wins? I want to tell you that it's "data."Data is an outcome of every marketing sprint or outreach you spend so much time on. But, the problem occurs when you are tone-deaf to customer reciprocation and keep shooting in the dark. Untargeted marketing campaigns lead to brand damage, high bounce rates, and wasted sales and marketing resources.
Running marketing campaigns on autopilot without understanding the value of the response or feedback via the customer data platform is just another lost opportunity. You don't know what your customers want, where they come from, or their actual triggers or pain points.
In marketing campaigns, emotions have to be bought in the game, along with a dedicated customer data platform to segment, categorize, and analyze raw data to assign a persona to your customer.
In this article, I have listed the top 8 customer data platforms that consolidate data into a single, actionable profile to deliver personalized experiences. Let's get into it.
According to G2 Grid Reports, these customer data platforms are top-rated in their category. I’ve also included their monthly pricing to make comparisons easier for you.
How marketers view data vs. what nature of data actually works is a long gap to bridge. On the one hand, a customer data platform is a technical tool that creates data attribution, distributes downstream data with SQL queries, and stores customer-specific databases that help in sentiment analysis and segmentation. On the other hand, marketers (like me) mostly give their attention to vanity metrics to resonate with new customers and improve acquisition.
My experience with customer data platforms opened new ways of marketing attribution, diversifying lead sources, analyzing demographics, and sorting big data into a manageable persona to improve the success of marketing campaigns.
Here is my analysis of customer data platforms that centralize and collect data from various lead sources, group them, and provide actionable insights to optimize your marketing campaigns.
I spent weeks trying and testing these customer data platforms and analyzing them based on key features. I also analyzed the key sentiments via real-time G2 reviews and evaluated the pros and cons, benefits and limitations, and pricing information for these tools to give a calculated take on each.
Further, I also used AI in the process to identify key trends and extract sentiments or common word-of-mouth reviews, common use cases, and ROI-related parameters of each tool. This helped me narrow down the most suitable tools and present unbiased insights to help you make an informed decision.
In cases where I couldn't personally test a tool due to limited access, I consulted a professional with hands-on experience and validated their insights using verified G2 reviews. The screenshots featured in this article may mix those captured using testing and those obtained from the vendor's G2 page.
This analysis is largely based on my individual investigation of these products and testing them out in real scenarios. I tested these platforms against real-life marketing studies and business datasets to evaluate the key insights and metrics. I also factored in the real-time improvements after running consumer-specific surveys via customer data platforms to have a 360* analysis and create better strategies.
It won't be just me, but a unanimous opinion of the industry that customer interactions can make or break a company's marketing strategy. Having all consumer touchpoints, reworking the engagement strategy, and analyzing key competitor data are all steps to a great marketing campaign. Exactly what a customer data platform helps you achieve.
According to me, there are some key differentiators that have proven to be effective features of customer data platforms. They are as follows:
I initially sorted and analyzed customer data platforms to evaluate the importance of data in marketing campaigns and create authentic data sources for the right customer marketing strategy.
Out of the 40+ tools I initially started with, I shortlisted 8 customer data platforms that checked all the boxes and proved suitable contenders for data management and analysis.
This list below contains genuine reviews from the customer data platforms category page. To be included in this category, software must,
*This data was pulled from G2 in 2025. Some reviews may have been edited for clarity.
Insider is a customer data platform that provides facilities like data segmentation, campaign tracking, and attribution to drive cross-channel engagement.
With an AI-intent engine, this tool helps you to predict customer behaviors and drive meaningful experiences via channels like websites, WhatsApp, SMS, and more.
What really hooked me about Insider was how easy it was to test and trial new features on our website before fully integrating them into our backend. It gave me the confidence to experiment and see exactly what resonates with our customers.
One standout feature for me was Insider's automated workflows, particularly through WhatsApp integration. These helped set up triggered, personalized messages based on specific user actions, which improved our conversion rates.
I was also impressed by Architect, their campaign-building tool, which offered intuitive drag-and-drop A/B testing features. It offered robust segmentation across various channels that personalized and improved targeting for customers for specific segments.
I also loved Insider's Instory tool, which provides automated and personalized product recommendations. The tool consistently optimized recommendations based on user behavior, which noticeably improved product visibility and engagement. Custom templates were also visually appealing and resonated particularly well with our audience base.
That said, there were a few areas that can aim for improvement. The experience with international support teams was inconsistent. While the web SDK team was prompt and helpful, the app SDK team struggled to provide timely support, leading to frustrating delays.
Overall, the platform is user-friendly but not without its issues. Launching campaigns occasionally requires cumbersome back-and-forth with developers, particularly for smaller adjustments. This slows down our workflow.
I also noticed a few discrepancies between Insider's documentation and the actual functionality of the UI, leading to a waste of time. Data consistency has been another challenge, impacting integration with various data sources. It occasionally results in data losses and stalled campaigns that impact our overall efficiency.
Insider is a great campaign tracking tool that allows us to run and manage campaigns via various marketing channels and gather real-time feedback.
"I feel Insider is a powerful tool that has helped us address various challenges in the past month. I just love that the Insider team is so supportive. They suggested using AI-powered user segmentation to personalize our home page for different audience segments. We deliver a tailored experience for every customer visiting our website."
- Insider Review, Duygu P.
"We struggled a little bit with the Insider's panel at first with its comprehensive functions. Insider provided instruction videos instead of written articles/ instructions that we did not find too helpful.
Customized features also took some time to communicate and discuss with the customer success team. So it took us some time to get a hang of some of the products."
- Insider Review, Peggy L.
Starting your role as a digital marketer but struck in endless database streams? See how market segmentation is the most useful way to categorize consumers.
Segment tracks your customer data, analyzes campaign metrics, and provides attribution-based features to track and tweak your marketing and sales campaigns.
If you have ever had to send data from one tool to another (or ten others), you know how much of a nightmare that can be. Segment acts as a middleman, taking the event data from our website and piping it into whatever tools I use, like Google Analytics, Mixpanel, or the data warehouse.
One thing I really appreciate is how easy it is to get started. The UI is pretty user-friendly, and the documentation is solid, easing the initial implementation process.
Plus, it offers robust APIs, which are great if you need to do some custom implementations. For companies that are deep into data tracking, the ability to manage schema and enforce consistency across multiple platforms really makes it stand out from the rest.
That said, Segment does have its share of challenges. My biggest gripe was the platform's pricing. It is not cheap, and the prices can add up quickly if you are a startup or a small team.
While the basic setup is straightforward, once you start diving into advanced tracking setups or dealing with complex event schemas, it does get a little tricky.
There is also some issue of scalability. For smaller use cases, the Segment runs smoothly, but once you start dealing with high volumes of data, you might notice some inconsistency.
That said, Segment is a unique and agile customer data tool that allows you to track your marketing campaigns and source customer data across multiple channels conveniently.
"Segment is very flexible with real-time data processing and analytics. Implementing Segments into the organization makes the job easy in collecting and sorting data from various platforms. Tracking customer behavior provides valuable insights into decision-making. Data forwarding and reverse ETL functions work well. Customization of pipelines helps in routing the data into specific destinations according to client needs."
- Segment Review, Varshan R.
"Sometimes poor data quality leads to inaccurate insights and decisions. Also, costs can be modified so that it is easily accessible for small enterprises."
- Segment Review, Asit S.
Check out 50+ customer data statistics to learn about market movers that leverage customer data to optimize marketing strategies.
Klaviyo is an email marketing dashboard that allows users to create, manage, and personalize emails. It offers an intuitive user interface for tracking email campaigns, analyzing email responses and giving personalized email recommendations.
What really sets Klaviyo apart is its ability to create highly personalized emails and automated email flows. The level of segmentation and targeting it offers is really praiseworthy.
I can set up advanced workflows based on user behavior, purchase history, or even browsing patterns. The automation builder also gives me control over my campaigns without needing to rely on third-party marketing tools. Speaking of third-party tools, its Shopify integration is seamless and syncs data in real-time to engage the right audience at the right time through the right channel.
One of my favorite features of Klaviyo is its ability to create detailed email funnels for customers. Whether it is a welcome series, abandoned cart delivery, or post-purchase follow-ups, Klaviyo's automation makes it easy to design and curate emails.
Another highlight is the drag-and-drop feature. I don't have to mess around with complex coding to design professional-looking emails. It also allows me to run A/B tests on email copies, subject lines and calls to action to see what works and what doesn't.
There are a few areas where Klaviyo could be better as a customer data platform. The biggest downside of Klaviyo is its pricing. As my email list grows, the cost rises significantly, which can be problematic for small businesses.
While there are a ton of help docs and community forums, it is a bit hard to get direct customer support. Some observed delays in response times can cause delays.
Reporting is another aspect where Klaviyo can be a bit overwhelming. There is a lot of data available, but sometimes, it feels cluttered, making it harder for me to extract the insights I need.
Having said that, Klaviyo is a tool that captures the data of your ideal customer across various content touchpoints and helps you personalize your engagement.
"I love how Klaviyo allows for highly personalized and dynamic content. The ability to create tailored email campaigns based on customer behavior and segmentation is incredibly powerful. I also appreciate the detailed analytics that provides real-time insights into open rates, click-throughs, and revenue attribution. The pre-built email templates and automation flows save a ton of time, and the seamless integration with platforms like Shopify makes it easy to pull in customer data."
- Klaviyo Review, Janhvi S.
"The pricing can get expensive as your subscriber list grows. There are also limitations in tracking push notification campaign metrics, making it harder to measure performance. Additionally, suppressing and unsuppressing contacts can be a bit of a hassle."
- Klaviyo Review, Sharnitha H.
Check out our analysis of the 10 best marketing automation tools to personalize digital outreaches and grow your scale in 2025.
SAS Customer Intelligence 360 provides multi-channel marketing features to personalize consumer experience and tailor your outreach based on relevant consumer insights to optimize your chances of high output.
What I love most about SAS Customer Intelligence 360 is how well it manages data. It offers real-time analytics that lets me track customer interactions as they happen, which is useful for understanding customer behavior and making data-driven decisions.
I was also impressed by the platform's segmentation tools. If you are running marketing campaigns that require highly targeted customer groups, the platform makes it relatively easy to segment and categorize the audience based on demographics, previous history, and engagement levels.
It also offers solid integration capabilities and connects seamlessly with third-party platforms. This means I can pull in customer data from various sources and better tailor my campaigns.
I also want to mention their automation feature. It helped me set up workflows that trigger personalized emails, notifications, and marketing campaigns based on user behavior. This saves time and ensures timely communication.
The reporting tools are also robust and packed with advanced features. The dashboard gives deep insights into campaign performance, allowing me to tweak things if needed.
While that is true, the platform does have its share of downsides. SAS CI 360 is not the most user-friendly platform out there. The interface feels a bit outdated, and navigating through different sections can be overwhelming, especially for a new user.
The setup process can also be complex, and while support is available, it is not always responsive. The platform can also be a bit resource-heavy, which sometimes slows things down.
Overall, SAS CI 360 offers an improved way to track campaigns, extract consumer data, and replace traditional outreach practices with omnichannel marketing workflows.
"This platform allows me to better understand our web traffic as it integrates with our main sources: Google and Meta. I can observe the consumer's behavior more closely and in detail during the sales journey. This helps me to try to identify the key or strategic points that are useful for generating sales."
- SAS Customer Intelligence 360 Review, Nicole M.
"I use this platform on a daily basis, and the only setback I have faced is the lack of updates to some integrations. Technical support has assisted me on several occasions, and I must say that the service is good, although not excellent, as they take a while to respond."
- SAS Customer Intelligence 360, Matilda G.
Salesforce Customer Data Platform enables you to connect any lead source, such as a website or email, and third-party ERPs to the main platform to build customer profiles in a centralized cloud. It also helps run drag-and-drop marketing automation campaigns across various channels.
If you work in marketing or sales, you know how crucial it is to have a unified customer view, and that is what Salesforce provides. It pulls in data from various sources, cleans it up, and builds accurate customer profiles for you and your teams.
One of the things I really appreciate is the AI-powered insights. Salesforce uses machine learning to help identify customer behaviors and predict trends, which takes a lot of guesswork out of marketing strategies.
Because it's cloud-based, I can access it from anywhere, which is a huge advantage when I work remotely. The automation features also allow me to tailor workflows based on customer preferences and events that are triggered to optimize the chance of success.
While this tool offers accurate customer insights, it does have some areas for improvement. The pricing model can be a little confusing, especially if you are dealing with a large volume of data.
If your data volume crosses certain limits, the costs can add up too quickly, which can cause issues for smaller firms operating on tight budgets.
While the platform is powerful, it does come with a learning curve. It took me a while to get used to navigating all the features, and even now, I sometimes feel like I am not using it to its full potential.
It can also be a little slow at times, especially when dealing with large datasets. I have also had moments where I wished there was a more intuitive way to integrate with other platforms.
While Salesforce offers a ton of integrations, setting them up hasn't always been seamless. I also felt there was a lack of proper sandbox environments, and this can be improved in the facet of testing changes without affecting live data in a live environment.
Overall, the Salesforce Customer Data platform offers agile data warehousing for customer data and helps you design intelligent marketing campaigns.
"Salesforce Marketing Cloud CDP is an excellent tool for consolidating and managing customer data across multiple touchpoints. As a CRM professional, I’ve had the opportunity to use it extensively to integrate data, create more personalized customer journeys, and ultimately improve marketing strategies."
- Salesforce Customer Data Platform Review, Gabriela C.
"Pricing model is a little confusing. If the data cloud team can educate all their customers about their pricing model with Agentforce, it will be better to under a large investment."
- Salesforce Sales Cloud Platform Review, Rajnish K.
Dynamics 365 Customer Insights is a powerful and agile tool that centralizes customer data, appends new actions to the database, and gives marketing teams real-time insights across the customer journey.
I have spent quite a lot of time working with Dynamic 365 Customer Insights, and I have to say, there is quite a lot going on this platform.
If you are looking for a data-driven and AI-powered customer insights platform, this one will best suit your needs, especially if you are part of the Microsoft ecosystem.
One of the biggest advantages I have noticed is how effortlessly it integrates with other Microsoft tools like Azure, Power BI, Power Apps, and even the broader Dynamics 365 suite. Since my data tends to be scattered across multiple platforms, I really appreciate how Dynamics 365 Customer Insights pulls everything into a single, unified view.
I was also impressed with the customer data unification, which let me collect structured and unstructured data from multiple sources to create a 360-degree customer profile. This alone makes it incredibly powerful for businesses that rely on deep analytics and actionable insights.
I also loved how easy it is to deploy apps and customize my experience. I am not stuck with a rigid, one-size-fits-all solution. Instead, I can spin up version-driven apps tailored for different teams and functions, making the system feel more flexible rather than restrictive.
Because I automate repetitive tasks whenever possible, the native integrations with Power Automate and custom workflows give me a lot of freedom to personalize my outreaches.
That said, the tool isn't perfect in all aspects. One area where I struggled is the user interface, which isn't as intuitive as I had hoped. Setting up workflows for customers is not that outright difficult, but there are quite a few steps involved.
I've also encountered some limitations with the custom models, which might not be a dealbreaker but are something to consider if you are looking for deeper analytics than what the tool offers at present.
While the platform has some seriously powerful features, I have to admit that it requires a significant investment to maximize its potential.
Other than licensing fees and implementation costs, businesses might not find features like real-time AI analytics and advanced deep modeling as the critical need of the hour.
If you work on the sales or consumer engagement team, the built-in CRM activities will help you track your lead progress and engage with them at the right times to increase the potential for deal closures and brand recall.
"Microsoft Dynamics 365 for Customer Insights allows gathering of information from different sources and consolidation for an actionable insight. This information can help an organization identify new customer needs and preferences."
- Dynamics 365 Customer Insights Review, Young K.
"Creating alternative lists or pulling specific info was difficult. This may just have been because of how the company set it up, but any time we wanted to make a new list or change the format of anything, we had to go through our system admin, which was a long process."
- Dynamics 365 Customer Insights, Verified User in Sports
SAP Customer Data Platform provides cloud-based data warehousing to prepare customer data, analyze data parameters, and store transactional data to tweak and personalize your omnichannel campaigns.
One of the things I really like about this platform is how well it harmonizes data and prevents you from dealing with mismatched or duplicate lead records. It brings everything together in a clean ecosystem, which makes it much easier for us to work with large datasets.
As someone who works extensively in marketing, I appreciate how well this platform integrates with third-party marketing tools in an ERP suite.
It helps streamline campaigns, making segmenting audiences and personalizing outreach easier. Pulling customer data from multiple sources is a game changer, allowing me to have a unified view of user behavior across multiple channels.
The SAP Customer Data Platform can improve in a few areas. Pricing can be a bit tricky to navigate, and I have found myself wishing that there were clearer options depending on usage needs.
Also, while the platform is powerful, it is not always intuitive. There is a learning curve, and sometimes, I find myself digging through documentation to figure out the best way to configure things.
If you are already using Salesforce, this tool feels like a natural extension, but if you are not, then it might take a little more effort to align it with your existing systems.
Overall, if you are looking for a compatible solution to track, manage, and segment customer data and build successful customer journeys, this is the tool for you.
"SAP Customer Data Platform helps us build trust with customers and reduce the time spent marketing products. It has a holistic view of customer data, which is very helpful to our management in making decisions. It complies with all of our required compliance."
- SAP Customer Data Platform Review, Rajiv T.
"It took some time for the SAP Customer Data Platform algorithms to react and present the relevant recommendations when we changed our website; initially, we found trying out different use cases across all channels challenging. Yet, with the arrival of more and more pre-built templates, we can start complicated user journeys via channels based on user affinity to interact, with literally just a few clicks."
- SAP Customer Data Platform Review, Matthew S.
Treasure Data Customer Data Platform gives you an integrated customer insight dropdown and helps reduce operational costs, mitigate risks, and run personalized marketing campaigns.
One of the features I admire most about Treasure Data is its real-time reporting and audience segmentation features. The Audience Studio makes it incredibly easy to query and refine customer profiles, allowing me to create targeted campaigns.
The automation capabilities are also top-notch, as they help trigger events based on specific customer responses. This tool also provides data visualization to give clear insights and make it easy to track performance from time to time.
Another feature I appreciate is the ability to unify customer data across multiple platforms and leverage raw data into structured data to build personalized marketing strategies.
I also want to highlight the seamless integrations that connect Treasure Data with other martech tools and its robust API capabilities, which simplify data transfers from any other tool like CRM. Scalability is another major win; whether handling thousands or millions of records, the platform is up to speed with performance and efficiency.
Customer support could also use some improvement. Response times were a little slow, and troubleshooting resolution was delayed a bit. Pricing was another sticking point. Most of the advanced features are offered with expensive tiers, and I wish there were more flexible tiers to offset that aspect.
All in all, Treasure Data offers real-time customer insights, data preparation, and data processing services to extract key customer data, deploy it to trigger marketing automation workflows and improve the response rate.
"The frequency of use of the platform for our team and the ease at which it helps implement end-to-end solutions with the ease of integration makes it a wonderful tool on a day-to-day basis."
- Treasure Data Customer Data Platform Review, Shrinidhi S.
"It shows some errors that take a lot of time to get resolved, which helps productivity, but there are no proper guidelines to resolve the issue."
- Treasure Data Customer Data Platform Review, Chitwan S.
Some of the best customer data platforms include Segment, known for its robust integration capabilities; Insider, recognized as a leader in the CDP category on G2; and Bloomreach, which offers AI-driven consumer engagement solutions.
CDP verifies and authenticates customer profiles based on accurate data received from an attribution source and validates them with a user ID match feature (also known as deterministic) and behavioral data or biometrics (known as probabilistic). These features ensure that your customer has an authentic identity.
A CDP offers data encryption, GDPR protection like CCPA or HIPPAA, and password protection, as well as encryption to align with the latest government regulations and bolster the security of customer data to prevent any risk-worthy outcomes.
The top free customer data platforms on G2 include Hull, NotifyVisitors, and Formaloo, which offer deep integration capabilities and AI-driven customer insights to optimize your sales and marketing efforts./p>
Yes. You can integrate CDP with existing martech or analytics stacks with pre-built API connectors, RESTful APIs, and webhooks. These connectors would establish a smooth data exchange between multiple servers and extend the protection coverage to the CDP platform to store your data securely.
CDP sources data from multiple third-party platforms, such as CRM, website, emails, or telephony, and authenticates it to build a unified customer profile. It records customer communication and events across marketing channels, tracks engagement to categorize your audience, and gives you meaningful insights to double down on conversion.
Without delving into the right data, you cannot create and launch customer-oriented campaigns, as you have not factored in their preferences or recommendations.
Learning this was a major takeaway after analyzing each customer data platform to its full potential. Seeking customer insights, cleansing and segmenting inbound leads, and personalizing campaigns are some of the main features of customer data platforms that can benefit sales and marketing teams the most. However, depending on your needs and budget, the final decision on what tool fits your operational workflow rests with your team.
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