Customer Data Platforms For B2C

The second edition of Forrester's B2C customer data platform scorecard is smaller than the first in every dimension that can be counted, and its vendor list now reads in part as a record of who bought whom. Two of the ten providers on it arrived by acquiring companies that were on the first one.

The first edition, published in September 2024, was the category's first formal evaluation. The second, The Forrester Wave: Customer Data Platforms For B2C, Q3 2026, scores ten providers against twenty five criteria. The first scored twelve against twenty nine. Four providers were named Leaders then. Two are now.

The shape of the change is not a market shrinking. It is a leader tier emptying out, and the two names that remain at the top of the chart are the two that were never independent to begin with.

The independents left the Leader tier

The Q3 2024 Wave named four Leaders: ActionIQ, Adobe, Salesforce and Treasure Data. Two of those were suites with a customer data platform inside them, and two were companies whose only product was the platform.

Neither independent is a Leader in the 2026 edition. ActionIQ is on the chart inside Uniphore, which acquired it in December 2024. Treasure Data is on the chart as Treasure AI, a rebrand it took in April 2026 when it repositioned around an agentic experience platform. Both are Strong Performers.

That leaves the Leader tier to Adobe and Salesforce, and it leaves the tier smaller than it has ever been. The category's first scorecard produced four Leaders from twelve vendors. Its second produced two from ten.

The two Leaders are also not level with each other. On the published graphic Adobe sits highest of any vendor on strength of offering, and Salesforce sits furthest right of any vendor on strength of strategy. A buyer who reads the two axes as separate questions gets a different answer from each: Adobe for the Real-Time CDP inside Experience Platform, Salesforce for Data Cloud and the customer records already living in its estate.

There is a version of this story in which the category simply matured past its independents, and the 2026 chart would support it. There is another version in which a first edition with no baseline to correct against produced a Leader tier that did not survive contact with the market. The evidence for the second is that the same report that demotes both independents still lists them, and that one of them is the vendor Forrester spent 2024 praising for the most ambitious roadmap in the field.

The scorecard behind The Forrester Wave: Customer Data Platforms For B2C, Q3 2026

The report scores ten providers against twenty five criteria. The Q3 2024 edition scored twelve against twenty nine, so both the field and the criteria set are smaller, and the criteria count has fallen in a category where the earlier trend ran the other way.

Adobe and Salesforce are the Leaders. Amperity, Hightouch, Treasure AI, Uniphore and Zeta Global are Strong Performers. BlueConic, Rokt and Tealium are Contenders. No vendor is a Challenger, which was also true of the 2024 edition.

The vendor list in full: Adobe, Amperity, BlueConic, Hightouch, Rokt, Salesforce, Tealium, Treasure AI, Uniphore and Zeta Global.

The companion research has moved too. The B2C Customer Data Platform Landscape, Q1 2026, authored by Joe Stanhope, maps twenty three vendors and names agentic AI as the top disruptor for the category. Its most quoted finding is a cost one: 72 percent of senior marketing decision-makers describe their customer data platform as moderately or significantly expensive to implement and maintain over a three year window. Value realization, not capability, is what buyers complain about.

That finding is the bridge between the two editions. The 2024 Wave scored platforms on what they could do. The 2026 Wave scores them in a market where the buyer's objection is not about capability at all.

The vendor list is now partly a record of who bought whom

Four acquisitions sit behind the 2026 chart.

Uniphore bought ActionIQ in December 2024. Rokt bought mParticle in January 2025 for a reported USD 300 million. Treasure Data rebranded as Treasure AI. And Contentstack bought Lytics the same month Rokt bought mParticle, which matters here only because it is the same pattern applied to a vendor that was not on either chart.

Two of those acquirers are now scored in their own right. Uniphore is a Strong Performer. Rokt is a Contender, and it sits at the bottom of the published graphic on strength of offering, below every other vendor in the field.

That placement scores Rokt's platform, not mParticle's, and the two are not the same product. It is still the single sharpest fact on the chart. A company that bought a Strong Performer from the previous edition enters the next edition one tier below where its acquisition sat, and the report is under no obligation to credit the acquisition.

For a buyer the practical question arrived before the chart did. The retired version of this page made the point when ActionIQ and mParticle were both still names on a scorecard: when a vendor is acquired, the scores describe a previous owner's product and a previous owner's roadmap. The 2026 chart is what that looks like once the paperwork settles.

Four names from 2024 are not on the chart

Eight vendors appear on both editions, counting the two renames. Four do not appear at all: Microsoft, mParticle, Redpoint Global and Twilio.

mParticle's absence is explained by the acquisition. Twilio's is explained by the same logic the retired page quoted from Twilio's own blog, which asked whether the standalone customer data platform era was ending and answered mostly yes. Redpoint Global and Microsoft simply are not in the field this time, and the criteria that excluded them are not published the way the Market And Competitive Intelligence criteria are.

Two vendors are new: Hightouch and Rokt. Hightouch is the purest composable architecture in the field, activating data from a customer's own cloud warehouse rather than copying it into a separate platform. It enters at Strong Performer, the same tier as Amperity, which is the other vendor in the field whose appeal rests on not being a separate data store.

That is the strongest signal in the edition. In 2024, Forrester judged Amperity's lakehouse approach overly technical and placed it in Contenders. In 2026 the architecture it was penalized for is the architecture a new entrant is scored on, and both are Strong Performers.

One vendor climbed, and Forrester once called it too technical

Amperity is the only vendor in the field that moved up a tier. It was a Contender in 2024 and it is a Strong Performer now, and on the published graphic it sits highest among the Strong Performers on strength of offering.

It also carries the chart's only halo, which is the mark Forrester uses for above-average customer feedback. No vendor carries a double halo, which means this edition names no Customer Favorite at all. Neither Leader has one, and neither do the three Contenders.

A halo is relative to the other nine vendors and is not a product score, so it should not be read as customers rating Amperity the best platform in the field. It is worth knowing anyway, because customer feedback is the only part of a Wave that vendors do not write themselves. It is also the part a buyer can least easily check.

The two facts belong together. Amperity is the vendor the previous edition marked down for a technical architecture, and it is the vendor whose reference customers were the most positive in this one. Both can be true, and the combination is a reasonable description of a company that was early rather than wrong.

Treasure AI, meanwhile, reports the highest possible score of 5.00 in Vision and in Data Governance and Storage, which are the two criteria a rebrand around agentic marketing would most need to win. That is the vendor's own account of its scorecard rather than a published table, and it is consistent with its position as the furthest right of the Strong Performers on strength of strategy.

What the chart cannot tell you

The 2026 edition publishes placements, tiers and halos. It does not publish the criterion weights or the per-criterion scores the way the Q3 2026 Market And Competitive Intelligence Wave does, so the arithmetic behind these positions cannot be checked the way that report's can. Everything above that is not a tier or a halo is read from the graphic.

Three things follow for a buyer working from it.

Ask what your vendor's ownership has done to its roadmap. Two of the ten providers are on the chart because they bought their way on, and one of those purchases was of a Leader from the previous edition. The scores describe the current owner's product. The only way to know whether that is the same product is to ask for the roadmap with dates and owners attached.

Ask whether you are buying a platform or a warehouse pattern. Hightouch and Amperity both score well without asking you to move your data into a new store, and the suite Leaders both assume you will consolidate into theirs. That is a decision about your architecture, not about the vendors, and it is the one the 2026 chart makes visible by putting composable and suite vendors in the same tier.

And ask what the next edition will be scored on. The Q1 2026 Landscape names agentic AI the category's top disruptor, the report's buying guidance asks buyers to check whether a platform's AI complements their own strategy rather than replacing it, and the two vendors whose customers were most positive are not the two Leaders. A scorecard that measured profile building in 2024 will not be measuring profile building next time, and the criteria count has already started to fall.

The previous version of this page ended by saying the next Wave would document the replacement of a market that had stopped existing in its first edition's form. It does. The database became a feature, the independents that led the category's first evaluation are no longer Leaders, and the field is smaller by two vendors, four criteria and two Leaders.

The decisioning layer these platforms feed is scored on its own terms in Customer Analytics Technologies, where accountability for automated decisions is now a scored criterion in its own right.

Forrester does not endorse any vendor named here, and tier placement should not be read as a recommendation to buy.