Does Gartner Have a CDP Magic Quadrant?

People often ask if Gartner has a Magic Quadrant for Customer Data Platforms (CDPs). The answer is yes—in 2024, Gartner published its inaugural Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Customer Data Platforms. Get complimentary access to this research here.

Gartner Magic Quadrant for Customer Data Platforms (2024)

Authored by Lizzy Foo Kune, Rachel Smith, Suzanne White, Benjamin Bloom, Adriel Tey, and David Walters, this report evaluates 17 different CDP vendors on 15 criteria. We believe the Gartner Magic Quadrant is a valuable resource to understand the Strengths and Cautions of CDP vendors.

Gartner placed Treasure Data in the Leaders quadrant for its Completeness of Vision and Ability to Execute. Get your own complimentary copy of the report here.

In addition to the Magic Quadrant, there are other Gartner reports and resources that are helpful if you want to see how a leading analyst firm categorizes the vendors in the CDP market.

Market Guide for Customer Data Platforms (2020)

A year after putting CDPs into the Marketing Hype Cycle, Gartner published a Market Guide for Customer Data Platforms from analysts Benjamin Bloom and Lizzy Foo Kune (note: a Gartner subscription may be required to access this guide). The report contains these sections:

• Overview
• Strategic Planning Assumption
• Market Definition
• Market Description
• Market Direction
• Market Analysis
• Representative Vendors
• Market Recommendations
• Gartner Recommended Reading

In the market guide, Gartner notes that interest in CDPs remains strong. Client inquiries about CDPs doubled in the first half of 2018 and remained steady since then. According to Gartner, the market forces driving interest in CDPs are:

• The need to sustain a 360-degree view of the customer
• The desire of marketers to have autonomous tools that are purpose-built for their use case
• The desire from marketers for extensible platforms
• The belief from marketers that CDPs are an investment worth planning for and protecting in an economic downturn
• A growing interest from consumers and regulators in how brands use customer data
• The realization from marketing technology teams that they’re unprepared for data stewardship realities

To help readers understand the CDP vendor landscape, Gartner designates four CDP vendor types:

• Marketing Cloud
• CDP Engines and Toolkits
• Smart Hub
• Marketing Data Integration

Treasure Data is designated by Gartner as a Smart Hub CDP.

According to the guide, “These vendors emphasize marketing orchestration and personalization that by nature require both granular customer data analytics and controls for event-triggered and planned campaigns or journeys.”

When deciding whether or not to deploy a CDP, the Gartner guide recommends asking these questions:

• Is the CDP the best technology to solve our problem?
• Do I have a large amount of individual-level data?
• How will we govern and protect customer data?
• Who will own — and manage — our CDP?
• How can you align to your integrated suite or best-of-breed martech strategy?
• What data will go into our CDP?
• Do we have the skills in-house to deploy the CDP?

Build the Business Case for a CDP (2018)

Marketers looking to build a business case for a CDP (for their own management and leadership) can also look at this Gartner blog post by contributor Chris Pemberton. Titled “Make the Case for a Customer Data Platform,” Pemberton’s post details how marketers can convince business leaders to invest in a customer data platform. The sections of the post are:

• Develop an effective executive summary
• Use metrics and examples to detail unmet needs
• (Quickly) articulate your ideal vision
• Compare potential solutions
• Detail implementation and success measures

Pemberton published a related blog post, “The Marketer’s Guide to Customer Data Platforms” and Gartner published a research report with a similar title, “A Marketer’s Guide to Customer Data Platforms” (Note: registration and/or a Gartner subscription may be required to access the report).

Also in 2018, Gartner analyst Benjamin Bloom published a blog post, “Smart Hubs vs. Dumb Spokes: CDPs and the Undiscovered Country.” In the post, Bloom lists the CDP attributes sought after by multichannel marketers:

• Storage
• Unification
• Analytics
• Orchestration

According to Bloom, “Vendors that accomplish the above could be smart hubs, implying that the spokes of the final mile don’t need to be so brainy,” since a CDP could serve as the brains instead. Bloom published a related report, “Smart Hubs and Dumb Spokes — A New Approach to Multichannel Marketing” (Note: Gartner subscription may be required).

Treasure Data has also published a guide to CDPs, as well as a guide and template to create a request for proposals (RFP), including a list of more than 200 questions to select for inclusion in CDP RFPs.

Gartner Peer Insights

According to Gartner, “Peer Insights is Gartner’s peer-driven ratings and reviews platform for enterprise IT solutions and services covering over 300+ technology markets and 3,000 vendors.” Peer Insights provides a Customer Data Platform category page listing 20 vendors, including Treasure Data.

Every review on Peer Insights is verified by Gartner to ensure that reviews are authentic. While this site does not include direct commentary from Gartner analysis and does not have anything resembling the Magic Quadrant, you can browse CDP vendors, read customer reviews and even compare one vendor with another.

Visit this Peer Insights page on our site to read featured reviews of Treasure Data’s CDP.

Bottom Line: Lots of CDP Resources

As you can see, there’s plenty of resources to inform your CDP selection. You can also visit CDP Case Studies to learn how CDPs are helping companies worldwide to customize customer journeys, provide customer analytics, and help with marketing tasks such as targeting and segmentation, targeted personalization, data unification, single customer views, customer analytics, and campaign orchestration.

Gartner Disclaimer 

Gartner, Magic Quadrant for Customer Data Platforms, Lizzy Foo Kune, Rachel Smith, Suzanne White, Benjamin Bloom, Adriel Tey, David Walters, 14 February 2024. 

Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product, or service depicted in its research publications, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with the highest ratings or other designation. Gartner research publications consist of the opinions of Gartner’s research organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. Gartner disclaims all warranties, expressed or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose. 

GARTNER is a registered trademark and service mark of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates in the U.S. and internationally, and MAGIC QUADRANT is a registered trademark of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates and are used herein with permission. All rights reserved.