What if your next CDP isn’t in the Gartner Magic Quadrant?

The 2025 Magic Quadrant from Gartner offers a solid overview of what we experts would call the usual suspects in the CDP space. It shows how the category has matured and how CDPs are now viewed as strategic assets of enterprise architecture. That part is pretty accurate.

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But what is missing is just as important as what is included.

There are dozens of ways to build, buy, design, or just envision what a CDP should be.  Amusingly, I’m not even sure the definition of what a CDP should be still means much today. At this point, a CDP is basically any system that can manage customer data and activate it in some way. From there, the “I’m a CDP” label gets slapped onto just about everything in the martech ecosystem.

But if we had to narrow CDPs down to just two types, this is how we see it:

• One is integrated, typically offered by marketing cloud vendors or specialized vendors. These platforms are designed for companies that want a unified CDP across their marketing and sales, often within the same ecosystem.
• The other is composable: modular, based on what is done in the data warehouse, and focused on activating data without copying it (or at least not too much). This is the path more and more organizations are choosing, especially those already invested significantly in platforms like BigQuery, Snowflake, Redshift, or Databricks.

Both models are valid. The right one depends on your architecture, your teams, and, more importantly, your level of data maturity.
Before joining fifty-five, I’ve been closely involved in both sides of this market. At Adobe, I was part of the team during the early development of Adobe Experience Platform, and saw firsthand what it means to build a CDP of that scale: 3+ years of engineering work, thousands of people, and a complete rethinking of how data flows across an enterprise. Later, at Twilio Segment as a Principal Solution Engineer, I helped shape some of the first serious integrations between CDPs and data warehouses. That experience gives me a certain lens when reading Gartner’s evaluation and it’s clear they’re still mostly looking at the traditional model. A big chunk of the market is left out.

What Gartner gets pretty right

Gartner highlights that CDPs are no longer marketing-only tools. That’s correct. More and more, these platforms are being used by other teams like product, CRM, IT, and of course data. That aligns with what we see every day in the field.

It’s also good to see composable architecture being mentioned. A lot of companies now want a CDP that connects to their data warehouse natively. This limits silos, simplifies governance, and gives teams more flexibility. Gartner also acknowledges the role of embedded AI in CDPs in the form of useful features like predictive segmentation, next-best-action logic, or churn models. Good point.

Another point they get right: CDP decisions are increasingly strategic. Beyond being marketing tools, these platforms are at the center of customer data strategy, and the buying process usually involves several teams, including the executive team.

What’s missing or off

Where Gartner falls short is in how it evaluates modern CDP approaches, especially those that work directly with the data warehouse.

Even more surprising: platforms like Hightouch or Census aren’t even mentioned. That’s a big gap. These tools are already powering customer data activation in major companies across retail, tech, and media.

The report also leaves out some important players that are especially relevant in certain markets, particularly in France. Platforms like Imagino and Mediarithmics may not be global leaders (yet), but they bring real innovation in areas like orchestration, privacy-first data activation, and retail media. Ignoring these vendors means overlooking part of the market where things are moving fast.

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The report also skips over some core technical questions that should matter in any CDP evaluation: 

• Can the platform read directly from the warehouse?
• Can it activate data without copying it?
• How flexible is it with reverse ETL? 

These questions are crucial, but they are absent from Gartner’s scoring.

What’s completely overlooked

One major blind spot is the role of CDPs in retail media and audience monetization. Many companies today use their CDP to create and push audience segments into platforms like DV360, The Trade Desk, or Meta. That’s a real use case, and it deserves attention.

Clean room compatibility is another area that’s becoming more important. With data privacy regulations tightening and more companies exploring data sharing, CDPs that support clean room integrations offer a big advantage. Again, no mention in the report.

And finally, there’s a lack of clarity around who these platforms are for. Some are designed for technical teams, others for marketers. Some are focused for B2C, others are better for B2B use cases. Gartner treats them all the same, which makes the comparison less useful when you’re actually trying to choose a solution that fits your organization.

What to keep in mind

This Magic Quadrant is a useful starting point, but it doesn’t show the full picture. It captures the established players and the way large enterprises have historically bought CDP technology. But if your company is more cloud native, or if your teams are already working from a central data warehouse, that’s not enough.

So take this for what it is: a snapshot of the traditional CDP landscape. Then look further. Explore what’s happening in the composable space. Talk to teams that are already using warehouse native tools. 

At fifty-five, we’ve supported CDP projects across full stack and composable architectures. We know what works and how to tailor the approach to your specific teams, stack, and business goals. Don’t hesitate to contact us if you would like to know more. And to get the most out of of your current or future CDP, download our free ebook for an exhaustive, step-by-step guide.