Multichannel Marketing Hubs (Gartner)

Two analysts cover this market and they do not agree on who leads it.

Gartner's Magic Quadrant for Multichannel Marketing Hubs published on 22 September 2026. Forrester's most recent scored evaluation of the same market is The Forrester Wave: Cross-Channel Marketing Hubs, Q4 2024. Salesforce and Adobe are Leaders in both. The third Leader differs, and the vendor sitting on top of Gartner's field is not in Forrester's Leader tier at all.

That disagreement is the reason both pages exist on this site. The Forrester side of this same market is covered separately at Cross-Channel Marketing Hubs, and the two evaluations reach different conclusions because they are asking different questions. Gartner ranks vendors as companies across the whole market. Forrester scored products against named jobs.

The September 2026 Magic Quadrant for Multichannel Marketing Hubs, and what its Leaders share

The quadrant is credited to Audrey Brosnan, Tia Zervas, Suzanne Schwartz and Julia Multedo. Three vendors are positioned as Leaders: Braze, Salesforce and Adobe.

Braze is placed highest among the field on Ability to Execute and furthest on Completeness of Vision. The company describes the placement as its fourth consecutive year in the Leaders quadrant.

Adobe's entry in this market is not a single product. The company positions Adobe Journey Optimizer as the hub itself, with Adobe Real-Time CDP supplying the profile and Adobe Customer Journey Analytics supplying measurement. That is a suite argument, and it is the same argument Adobe made to Forrester.

The remaining placements are not established by any source reachable outside a licensed copy of the report. One vendor's published quadrant graphic and a second vendor's own announcement do not agree on a single placement in the lower tiers, so this page records the Leaders and leaves the rest of the field where the public record leaves it.

Braze tops the quadrant Forrester dropped it from

The interesting fact is not that Braze leads Gartner's field. It is where Braze sat in Forrester's.

Braze was a Leader in The Forrester Wave: Cross-Channel Marketing Hubs, Q1 2023. When Forrester merged its split evaluations back into a single scorecard in Q4 2024, the field was fourteen vendors against twenty-eight criteria, and the Leaders were Salesforce, Adobe and SAS. Braze was not among them.

So the same vendor leads one analyst's field outright and sits outside the other's top tier. Both are describing the same market, and both are describing the same product.

The explanation is partly visible in Forrester's own criteria. Its Q4 2024 evaluation put weight on the customer data layer underneath the hub, on identity resolution across devices and channels, on consented preference data and on the ability to compute a segment in real time. A vendor whose strength is the orchestration layer rather than the profile layer scores differently under those criteria than under a quadrant that weighs vision and execution across the whole market.

That is not a contradiction between the analysts. It is two different questions producing two different rankings, which is what a buyer should expect and rarely gets shown.

The Critical Capabilities report splits the same field differently

The companion Critical Capabilities for Multichannel Marketing Hubs evaluates twelve vendors against four use cases, and its results cut across the quadrant.

Braze ranks first in two of them, Multichannel Engagement and Omnichannel Workflow Innovation. Optimove ranks first in Real-Time Personalization and Decisioning, scoring 3.59 out of 5. Optimove is not a Leader in the quadrant.

A buyer whose requirement is decisioning at the individual level has a documented argument for choosing a vendor the quadrant places below the top tier. That is the ordinary relationship between a Magic Quadrant and its companion report, and it is the most useful thing in either document for anyone actually shortlisting.

The landscape Forrester published instead

Forrester's newest look at this market is not a Wave. The Cross-Channel Marketing Hubs Landscape, Q2 2026 maps twenty-eight vendors without ranking them, and its findings describe a market that has not finished moving.

Forrester splits hub functionality into core use cases that every vendor meets and extended use cases where differentiation lives. Core: campaign planning and development, customer data and profile management, personalized promotional campaigns, segmentation and audience building. Extended: brand and customer experience design, contextually relevant experiences, individualized customer understanding, marketing measurement and optimization, personalized offers and recommendations, unified customer journey orchestration.

The report names agentic AI as the category's top disruptor, and notes that this is what lets midmarket and specialist vendors compete against the enterprise suites on something other than scale.

Twenty-eight vendors mapped in 2026 against fourteen scored in the Q4 2024 Wave. The market got wider while the scorecard got narrower, and both facts are true at once.

The governance gap both scorecards leave open

Here is the finding worth carrying out of this pair.

Forrester's Landscape records that most business-to-consumer marketers deploy a cross-channel marketing hub in parallel to their enterprise AI strategy rather than as part of it. Marketing owns the hub. IT and the data team own the AI strategy. The two groups rarely share a governance model.

Gartner's quadrant is now scoring exactly the capability that gap makes dangerous. The 2026 definition of this category emphasizes decision logic, next-best-action selection, AI agent orchestration, and governed measurement and consent controls. Those are capabilities that assume someone is accountable for what the system decides.

An autonomous hub that selects next-best actions is making contact decisions on behalf of the brand at a volume no human reviews. If the team that governs AI in the organization does not govern the marketing hub, then the largest deployment of autonomous decisioning in the business is running outside the AI governance framework.

Neither document says this plainly, because neither is written to. Gartner scores whether vendors can do it. Forrester reports who owns it. Put together, the answer is that the capability is being bought before the accountability is assigned.

The architectural version of the same problem sits one layer down. A hub is only as good as the profile it acts on, and the profile lives in a customer data platform. If the CDP is governed by the data team and the hub is governed by marketing, then the decisioning layer and the data layer it depends on are answering to different owners.

Four questions for the buyer weighing two analysts

Which evaluation answers your actual question? Gartner's quadrant ranks vendors as companies across the whole market. Forrester's use cases score products against specific jobs. If you have a defined job, start with the use-case scores and treat the quadrant as context.

Where does your customer data live, and who owns it? This decides more than either scorecard. If the profile is already unified inside one of the suite vendors, the hub decision is substantially made. If it is not, hub selection is the smaller half of the problem.

Do you have a position when the two analysts disagree? Braze leads one field and sits outside the other's top tier. A buyer who cannot explain why they chose one ranking over the other has not finished the evaluation.

Who is accountable for what the hub decides on its own? If the answer is nobody yet, that is the finding, not the vendor shortlist.

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.

The Forrester evaluation of this same market is covered in full on this site: Cross-Channel Marketing Hubs (Forrester). Forrester split the market into two separate evaluations in 2021 when independent vendors were out-innovating the suites, merged them back into one scorecard for the Q4 2024 Wave, and then mapped twenty-eight vendors in a Landscape in Q2 2026 without ranking any of them.

The Gartner market next door is B2B Marketing Automation Platforms, where the same question about who owns the decisioning layer shows up one stage earlier in the funnel.