Top 7 Customer Data Platforms to Watch in 2025: Ultimate Business Reviews

 

If you’re looking for top recommendations, the leading customer data platforms are Oracle CX Marketing and Segment.

Customer Data Platforms (CDPs) collect information from various online sources and gather it into a single, centralized database. This consolidation allows businesses to better understand and anticipate customer actions, helping tailor personalized marketing efforts that foster customer loyalty and increase retention.

Many tools integrate with CDPs through data integration providers to connect various data sources, including:

This guide reviews and ranks the top customer data platforms based on features, integrations, ease of use, pricing, and support.

What Are the Top Customer Data Platforms?

Below are the leading customer data platforms to consider this year. Let’s explore them.

1. Oracle CX Marketing

Overall best customer data platform, especially for quote-based solutions.

Oracle CX Marketing

Oracle CX Marketing is a cloud-based platform that merges data from multiple channels into a unified profile. This helps in delivering tailored customer experiences. Its tools support A/B testing and multi-channel marketing campaigns, connecting data from customer behavior, transactions, and demographics across marketing, sales, service, and back-office apps. This comprehensive view enables personalized communication across email, SMS, web, social media, and more. The platform also offers real-time insights and automation features to improve customer engagement and conversions. It caters to both B2B and B2C marketing needs.

Oracle CX Marketing: B2B marketing solutions

For B2B marketing, Oracle offers built-in tools such as Eloqua marketing automation, DataFox data management, and content management. For B2C marketing, tools like Responsys campaign management, BlueKai data management, CrowdTwist engagement and loyalty, and audience segmentation are available.

Key features of Oracle CX Marketing include:

  • Creating and testing dynamic, personalized content.
  • Lead nurturing, scoring, and grading capabilities.
  • Managing data quality effectively.
  • Automated alerts for sales teams.
  • Analytics and detailed reporting.
  • Tracking website visitors and measuring ROI.
  • Integrating with social media channels.
  • Compatibility with Salesforce, Microsoft Dynamics CRM, and SugarCRM.
  • AI-driven features for capturing real-time customer actions.
  • Delivering omnichannel messages at optimal moments.
  • Automating campaigns and adapting them in real time.
  • Building personalized marketing campaigns by aggregating multi-channel data.
  • Identifying key audiences and relevant targets effectively.

Insights to Enhance Conversion Rates

The tool also streamlines your sales process by providing clearer customer insights, maintaining consistent messaging, and accurately applying feedback.

It offers intelligent content and video support options for seamless multi-channel content delivery.

Pricing:
Contact the vendor directly for personalized pricing options. You can also request a free demo before making your decision.

2. Segment

Ideal for creating unified customer profiles, with plans starting from $0 to $120 per month.

Segment is a customer data platform that gathers, cleans, and manages customer information while optimizing audience engagement. It uses a single API to collect data across various areas like analytics, customer support, and sales. This helps create a comprehensive view of each customer and enables personalized marketing, such as tailored email campaigns based on customer behavior.

Key features include:

– Integrating data and managing audiences
– A universal API for collecting analytics data across platforms
– Standardized data collection to minimize errors
– Centralized data from multiple sources for easy tracking
– Building single customer profiles by unifying all touchpoints
– Omnichannel messaging through email, social media, and in-product notifications
– Automatic loading of analytics into warehouses like Amazon Redshift and Google BigQuery
– Ensuring compliance with GDPR and CCPA

Overall, Segment focuses on three main products: Connections, Protocols, and Persona.

1. Connections

Segment gathers data from all customer interactions and shares it with over 300 destinations, including analytics tools, messaging platforms, warehouses, advertising networks, and sales channels. You can control and oversee this data using various built-in analytics and A/B testing tools, as well as troubleshooting data delivery issues.

2. Protocols

This feature helps you manage data integrity by standardizing data collection and sharing across channels using a Live Tracking Plan. It diagnoses and reports issues with data quality, allowing you to fix errors by filtering out inaccurate data directly at the source.

3. Persona

Persona consolidates data from different sources to build real-time customer profiles. It analyzes each customer’s journey to create a comprehensive view of their traits and behaviors, with various tools available for further analysis and targeting. The user interface also improves communication with customers by allowing personalized recommendations and strengthening relationships.

Moreover, integration with a variety of third-party data warehouses, product analytics tools, and A/B testing platforms helps you refine your marketing strategies more efficiently.

Pricing:

Segment provides three subscription options:
– Free – $0 monthly
– Team – $120 monthly
– Business – Custom pricing

All plans include features like unified customer profiles, data privacy controls, visualization tools, and more. You can also request a free demo to see the product in action.

Emarsys:

Emarsys is an omnichannel customer engagement and data platform designed to unify data across multiple channels to support diverse business needs. It is suitable for ecommerce, retail, travel, and other industries.

This platform offers features such as multichannel campaign management, personalization, segmentation, and analytics dashboards. It provides predefined use cases tailored to different business objectives and industry-specific insights.

The platform operates through three straightforward steps:
1. Strategy: choose an approach like Purchase Frequency, Average Order Value, or Customer Lifetime Value.
2. Use Case: leverage recommended use cases aligned with your strategy.
3. Activate: implement personalized content and cross-channel workflows to engage customers.

Emarsys also includes automated AI-driven updates and predictive analysis to optimize results. Its capabilities extend to AI segmentation, content selection, and channel optimization.

By providing predictive analytics and AI-powered personalization, Emarsys helps create one-on-one interactions with customers, offering tailored promotions across multiple channels such as email, web, and social media from a single dashboard.

Key features include:
– Real-time analytics
– AI-enhanced delivery scheduling
– A/B testing with AI optimization
– Web browsing data monitoring customer interest
– Integration with third-party tools for seamless cross-channel execution
– Personalized offers for special occasions like birthdays and anniversaries
– Predictive marketing to identify and target potential buyers

Post-purchase feedback collection helps identify promoters and detractors, informing future marketing efforts to encourage repeat business.

Furthermore, Emarsys offers an integrated Customer Engagement Platform (CEP) that reduces data fragmentation and provides relevant metrics, segments, personalization variables, and analytics.

Pricing:

Emarsys offers three customizable plans—Essential, Advanced, and MAX AI—requiring direct contact with the vendor for details.

Tealium AudienceStream CDP:

Best suited for machine learning insights and recognizing visitor behavior patterns, this platform provides quote-based pricing information and is focused on leveraging behavioral data to inform marketing strategies.Tealium AudienceStream CDPTealium AudienceStream CDP

Tealium AudienceStream is a customer data platform designed to unify and manage customer data across multiple channels, enabling the creation of detailed and actionable customer profiles. This platform helps identify high-value and low-value customers and uncovers key insights about customer engagement.

It integrates data from diverse sources such as websites, mobile apps, IoT devices, servers, kiosks, and offline sources, providing a comprehensive view of each customer. This unified data collection allows businesses to better understand customer behavior and preferences. The platform also allows for tracking customer activities on your website, helping to establish personalized interactions across various channels. Its seamless integration with email marketing, online ads, automated marketing systems, and CRM tools enhances marketing strategies and customer engagement efforts.

Key features of Tealium AudienceStream include predictive insights powered by machine learning, the use of customer badges for recognizing behavior patterns, and robust consent management to ensure compliance with regulations. It also offers tools to increase customer interaction and emotional intelligence features that monitor customer behavior in real-time. Signals from customer data enable instant action triggers, allowing marketers to plan, coordinate, and execute marketing campaigns more effectively. Additionally, data connectors facilitate integration with major online marketplaces like Criteo, Facebook, and Amazon Web Services. The platform’s machine learning analytics help identify high-value prospects, allowing targeted marketing efforts and efficient allocation of resources by focusing on the most promising customer segments. The “Action Frequency Capping and Prioritization” feature lets businesses prevent over-triggering of specific actions by setting delays and prioritizing triggers based on customer behaviors.

Pricing for Tealium AudienceStream is quote-based, tailored to individual business needs.

Exponea is an end-to-end customer data platform and experience management tool suitable for real-time predictions and sophisticated customer segmentation, with custom pricing options. It integrates various online and offline data sources to create a comprehensive Single Customer View, offering deep insights into customer behavior for personalized marketing campaigns. The platform features omni-channel orchestration, enabling interactions across multiple digital touchpoints and personalizing user experiences with gathered data. Its web-optimization tools include visual editors for creating product recommendations, A/B testing for website elements, and dynamic message displays based on customer behavior. Exponea provides advanced analytics and segmentation to generate insightful reports and adapt segments dynamically. Its product recommendation engine leverages complex algorithms to analyze both historical and real-time data, ensuring relevant suggestions aligned with KPIs through continuous testing and real-time optimization. Furthermore, its predictive analytics powered by machine learning give a real-time view of customer prospects, helping to identify high- and low-value segments. The platform also offers pre-built templates for common marketing activities like email opens, purchases, churn, and in-session predictions, facilitating quick deployment. Its BigQuery integration allows analytics teams to explore data safely using preferred business intelligence tools. Additional features include a drag-and-drop campaign editor, a scheduling calendar, real-time A/B testing, and seamless third-party integrations. Pricing is customized based on the specific requirements of each client, with potential for tailored packages based on usage and scale.

6. Salesforce Marketing Cloud Interaction Studio

This tool is ideal for simplifying interactions with customers both online and offline, based on customized quotes.

Salesforce Marketing Cloud Interaction Studio

Salesforce Interaction Studio is a platform that manages customer data to improve interactions by offering real-time personalization and interaction management. Utilizing AI, it segments customer data and provides seamless cross-channel experiences at various points in the customer journey.

This platform allows you to tailor interactions based on your business portfolio and the customer’s historical and current behavior. It also recognizes individual users and accounts across all digital touchpoints, linking them to specific profiles and customizing identity-matching policies. It offers continuous monitoring of customer actions in real time, along with AI-powered product recommendations to enhance customer engagement. Additionally, it integrates smoothly with external data sources such as JavaScript, ETL processes, or APIs.

interaction studio page

Salesforce Interaction Studio further leverages AI to optimize and segment data in real time, enabling the delivery of highly relevant content tailored to each customer’s preferences and characteristics. It can recommend relevant products and content based on detailed customer insights.

Some of its key features include guiding customers toward the next best action or offer, tracking customer activity both online and offline, and streamlining interactions whether in-store, at kiosks, ATMs, or through digital channels like social media and paid advertising. It also includes tools for audience segmentation and the capability to trigger interactions wherever customers are active.

You can perform A/B testing on various algorithms to enhance conversion rates, click-throughs, and revenue. The platform also supports integration with CRM systems, offers automatic updates, delivers a consistent omnichannel experience, and incorporates robust security measures such as end-to-end encryption and anti-phishing protections.

Pricing for Salesforce Interaction Studio is customized based on your specific needs.Optimove is a customer data platform designed to help businesses develop and enhance personalized customer relationship management (CRM) marketing strategies. It collects data from various sources and consolidates it into a unified database accessible to both technical and non-technical users, simplifying data management and analysis.

The platform offers advanced features like automated web browsing, predictive analytics powered by artificial intelligence, and optimization tools. These capabilities enable businesses to generate comprehensive customer profiles and extract actionable insights from their data. Optimove also segments customer data to help tailor marketing efforts effectively. Its self-optimizing algorithms and one-click recommendation system support ongoing campaign improvements without requiring extensive manual input.

In addition, Optimove allows you to coordinate marketing campaigns across multiple channels, providing detailed performance metrics to measure the return on investment for each customer interaction. The platform’s key features include support for secure CSV file transfers, real-time analytics that evaluate the incremental value of customers, and the ability to build customized customer models aligned with your business needs. It seamlessly integrates with popular platforms like Facebook and Instagram for advertising purposes and applies sophisticated statistical models to forecast customer behavior. Furthermore, Optimove connects with various ERP, CRM, marketing, and advertising tools to streamline your marketing ecosystem.

A notable aspect of Optimove is its built-in marketing automation bot, known as Optibot. This AI-driven tool continuously scans real-time customer and campaign data to identify opportunities for improved performance. It generates actionable recommendations, such as phasing out underperforming campaigns, refining segment targeting, and identifying high-value customers, all aimed at maximizing campaign effectiveness.

Pricing for Optimove is customized based on specific business requirements, and interested users can contact the sales team for a demonstration or a personalized quote.

What is a Customer Data Platform?

A customer data platform (CDP) is a centralized, structured database that gathers and unifies customer data from various sources—both online and offline. It aggregates information from websites, mobile apps, emails, social media, and other channels, then cleans and analyzes this data to create comprehensive customer profiles. This single customer view helps marketers understand individual preferences, behaviors, and needs, enabling more targeted and effective marketing strategies.

CDPs empower organizations to leverage detailed insights for predictive analytics, facilitating smarter decision-making across sales, digital marketing, human resources, and operations. They support companies in reducing errors, enhancing personalization, and increasing overall revenue by providing a robust data foundation for informed actions.

Features to Look for in a Customer Data Platform

Different industries such as healthcare, e-commerce, automotive, and software rely on CDPs tailored to their specific needs. However, all effective CDPs should include certain core features:
– Omnichannel Integration: Systems must coordinate customer interactions across multiple platforms and communication channels, avoiding data silos. Using customer experience software helps deliver a seamless customer journey.
– Personalized Marketing Capabilities: Every customer is unique. A good CDP offers tools to customize campaigns based on individual preferences and behaviors, improving targeting and retargeting strategies.
– Behavioral Triggers: The platform should track browsing habits, engagement activities, and lifecycle events, turning these insights into personalized communications to encourage desired actions. For instance, an e-commerce business could use predictive analytics to estimate customer retention durations.
– Third-Party Integration: To ensure a smooth omnichannel experience, the CDP should easily connect with other essential applications like Slack, Shopify, Zapier, and marketing automation tools.
– User-Friendly Interface: A CDP needs to be intuitive and simple to operate, ensuring buy-in from your marketing team. Additional useful features include automated customer segmentation, detailed reporting, lead nurturing, identity resolution, and mobile compatibility.

Summary

Choosing the right customer data platform is crucial for unifying customer information, improving retention, and delivering tailored experiences. Depending on your objectives, you might prefer platforms like Segment for creating single customer views or Tealium AudienceStream for analyzing behavioral patterns. All leading CDPs support integrated, omnichannel marketing strategies, making them valuable tools for modern customer engagement.

My top recommendation is Oracle CX Marketing because of its strong emphasis on personalized experiences, integrated data solutions, A/B testing capabilities, and cross-channel campaign management. Many of these platforms offer free demos, so you can explore their features before making a decision.

Which customer data platform are you considering, and what features are most important to you? Feel free to share your thoughts in the comments.