Customer Data Platforms For B2C

The Forrester Wave: Customer Data Platforms For B2C, Q3 2024, was published on 17 September 2024. It evaluated twelve vendors. Within four months, two of the twelve no longer existed as independent companies.

That is not a market moving quickly. It is a category whose first formal evaluation arrived just as the thing being evaluated started to disappear.

Forrester has not yet published the next edition of the Wave. Its most recent research on the category is The B2C Customer Data Platform Landscape, Q1 2026, published in March, and vendors expect the Wave update later in 2026. Until it lands, the record to work from is the Q3 2024 Wave, the 2026 Landscape, and what happened to the twelve vendors in between. The in-between period is the actual story.

The database was never the product

A CDP was sold for a decade as the single source of customer truth. One database where the customer record that exists in seven systems becomes one record, where the email platform finally stops believing a customer is two people.

Forrester's Landscape, Q1 2026, draws the line under that era. CDPs are now table stakes, the report finds, and 72 percent of senior marketing decision-makers say their CDP is moderately or significantly expensive to implement and maintain over three years. The value argument has moved. Vendors still selling data unification are falling behind; the market is splitting between those that moved up the stack into decisioning and journey orchestration and those that did not.

So the answer is not the unified profile. That part is solved, or close enough. The answer is what the organization does with the profile at the moment a decision has to be made.

That is a different purchase. A database is evaluated on completeness. A decision engine is evaluated on speed, on the quality of its segmentation, on whether the next best action is computed before the customer is gone. Most of the twelve vendors Forrester scored in 2024 understood this. Not all of them had built it.

Reading The Forrester Wave: Customer Data Platforms For B2C, Q3 2024

The evaluation, authored by Joe Stanhope with Emily Collins, Pippin Evarts, and Christine Turley, was Forrester's first Wave for B2C customer data platforms, scoring twelve providers against twenty nine criteria across current offering, strategy, and market presence. Forrester evaluates B2B CDPs as a separate market; its Q4 2023 B2B Wave covered eight vendors, with Oracle's Unity CDP the Leader.

The B2C field of twelve: Adobe, Amperity, BlueConic, Microsoft, mParticle, Redpoint Global, Salesforce, Tealium, Treasure Data, Twilio, ActionIQ (now Uniphore), and Zeta Global.

Four vendors were named Leaders.

ActionIQ was credited for a composable architecture and top marks in data ingestion, data management, and data governance. Forrester called its roadmap "a compelling vision for CDPs as the capstone of data and AI infrastructure" and named it "a top choice for enterprises that require composable implementation options." Two months after publication, Uniphore acquired it, citing data sovereignty among its reasons. A Leader ceased to exist as a stand-alone company before most buyers finished reading the report.

Adobe's placement rests on the Real-Time CDP inside Experience Platform, scored for policy management, journey orchestration, data governance, and anonymous audience targeting that reaches beyond known customers into acquisition. Forrester positioned it for the entire marketing lifecycle, with a partner ecosystem to match. It is the suite answer to the category: no integration project required if the buyer already lives in the Adobe stack.

Salesforce's Data Cloud drew praise for what Forrester called an ambitious vision that extends beyond marketing into customer experience, supported by centralized data management, traditional and AI-driven audience targeting, Tableau-powered reporting, and the global reach of the Salesforce estate. It is the CRM answer to the category, strongest for buyers whose customer records already live in Sales Cloud or Service Cloud.

Treasure Data received the highest possible scores in seven criteria, including vision, data management and models, data governance and storage, and consumer privacy. Forrester credited it for extending beyond marketing into the contact center and for robust engagement and insights integrations. Unlike Adobe and Salesforce, it has no suite of adjacent products to fall back on, and it is now one of the few large independents left in the category at all.

Four Strong Performers followed.

Zeta Global was scored for data hygiene, data enhancement, and identity resolution that Forrester called some of the strongest in the evaluation, held back by a limited partner network and global reach. The report said it must make a stronger case as a standalone CDP.

mParticle earned Forrester's "category-leading" mark on customer success support, plus praise for event-data ingestion and AI-powered model generation, alongside the observation that its innovation releases had been inconsistent despite the Vidora and Indicative acquisitions.

BlueConic, per Forrester, "sets the standard" for CDP marketing use cases, with strong consent, zero-party data, and privacy management, plus a visible gap on generative AI adoption.

Tealium has mastered data connectivity, Forrester wrote, with a partner ecosystem above 2,500 and productized consumer consent management, but the report found it significantly lags competitors in journey orchestration.

Four Contenders completed the field. Redpoint Global, praised for AI-driven customer targeting, flexible data management, and straightforward pricing, is throttled by sub-par usability and anonymous audience targeting. Amperity's comprehensive, accurate customer profiles won top marks, including for professional services, while its lakehouse approach was judged overly technical. Twilio pairs a CDP with customer communications in a combination Forrester called unique, with a data-routing foundation for new AI decisioning features, though its CDP vision stays narrow. Microsoft offers affordability, a scalable pricing model, and tight pairing with Customer Journey Orchestration, but its focus lands overwhelmingly on its own integrations, with Azure and Dataverse constraining data sources and governance.

No vendor landed in the Challenger tier.

The ninety days that undid the scorecard

This Wave has a shelf-life problem no first edition should have: there was no baseline Wave to correct against, and within months its vendor list stopped describing the market.

Uniphore acquired ActionIQ in December 2024. Rokt paid $300 million for mParticle in January 2025. Contentstack picked up Lytics the same month. Not one of the twelve, but the same species. Twilio's own blog asked whether the standalone CDP era was ending, and answered mostly yes: CDP capability is becoming a feature inside larger platforms.

David Raab of the CDP Institute, who popularized the term customer data platform back in 2013, read the deals the same way: an acquirer buying a CDP buys the right to define itself as a platform rather than a point solution.

For a buyer the consequence is concrete. Two of the twelve scores in the current report describe companies that no longer exist as scored. ActionIQ's composable roadmap now lives inside Uniphore's AI strategy. mParticle's customer success engine now reports to an ecommerce advertising company. The report remains useful. Its shelf life is simply shorter than the publication cadence.

What the Landscape quietly admits

Forrester's own follow-up research says the quiet part out loud. The B2C Customer Data Platform Landscape, Q1 2026, authored by Joe Stanhope, maps twenty three vendors across use cases, deployment models, geography, and market size. Its two most important findings are not flattering to the category.

First: 72 percent of senior marketing decision-makers describe their CDP as moderately or significantly expensive to implement and maintain over a three-year window. Value realization, not capability, is the defining problem. Vendor marketing has spent a decade pricing CDPs by data volume. The complaint is about what the data volume produced.

Second: the market consolidated around a definition at exactly the moment it consolidated as a business. Forrester notes a top tier has emerged, and the gap is widening between vendors that moved into decisioning and orchestration and vendors still selling data management.

The honest reading: the category's central promise (unify the data and the value follows) turned out to be the easy half. Unification is now table stakes. The hard half is deciding what to do with the profile, in real time, across channels, inside consent rules. That is where the next Wave will be won, and it is a different product from the one most of the twelve were originally built to sell.

The European answer to the acquisition question

For European buyers, the consolidation wave is not a corporate-finance footnote. It is a compliance question.

When Uniphore announced the ActionIQ acquisition, its stated rationale included data sovereignty. Tealium's consent management was scored by Forrester as productized: a feature, not a consulting engagement. BlueConic was credited for consent and zero-party data handling. Treasure Data scored maximum points on consumer privacy. The criteria themselves show what the report expects: consumer privacy is one of the twenty nine.

A buyer whose CDP vendor gets acquired inherits the acquirer's privacy posture. Where the data is hosted, which jurisdictions it passes through, whether a works council will accept the new controller's data processing agreement. None of that appears in the scorecard, and all of it changes when ownership changes.

Ask for the data processing agreement of the acquirer, not the vendor.

Agentic AI is about to rerun the evaluation

The Q1 2026 Landscape names agentic AI as the top disruptor for the category. That is the closest thing to a preview of the next Wave's scorecard.

The logic is already visible. Forrester flagged mParticle's inconsistent AI releases and BlueConic's slow embrace of generative AI in 2024. Two years later, the question is not whether vendors have AI features. It is whether the model sits inside the decisioning path (generating segments, scoring audiences, choosing the next best action, orchestrating the journey) or somewhere decorative.

An agent that can plan and run a campaign does not need a marketer to operate the CDP. It needs a CDP trustworthy enough to be given the keys: clean identity, live segments, consent enforced at every step. The vendors that spent the consolidation era building decisioning on top of clean data are positioned for that handover. The ones still selling the database are positioned to be replaced by it.

Questions that outrank the tiers

Four questions decide more than any tier placement in the current report.

Has the vendor's roadmap survived its ownership change? If the company you are evaluating was acquired, the scores describe a previous owner's product. Ask the acquirer to show the twelve-month roadmap with names and dates attached.

Are you paying for unification or decisioning? The 72 percent cost finding says buyers feel the price exceeds the value of unified data alone. Ask the vendor to price against orchestration outcomes (audiences moved, journeys run, revenue attributed) not against profiles ingested.

Where does your data sit, and who else gets access? Sovereignty, residency, and consent were scored criteria in the Q3 2024 Wave. They deserve the same weight in contract review, and the document that matters is the acquirer's data processing agreement.

What is the agentic AI plan, and does it respect your consent architecture? If the next edition of this Wave is won on decisioning, the vendor's answer here is the best available proxy for its placement in it.

The first Forrester Wave for B2C CDPs arrived after the category's decade-long argument about definitions had settled, and it documented a market that was about to stop existing in that form. The next one will document the replacement. Read the current scores as a photograph, not a map.

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.