Customer Data Platform (CDP) Pricing Index 2026

This index compares 20 customer data platform (CDP) vendors on what they actually publish. Three disclose enough to estimate a bill, six show only a starting price or free tier, and eleven are quote-only. Pricing units differ (monthly tracked users, events, profiles, credits), so one audience can cost very different amounts. Every row links to its source page and carries a check date.

Who this is for: procurement, finance and architecture leads building a shortlist. You get the dataset, the method and a citation block. For your own volumes, use the 3-year TCO calculator. More assets live in the tools hub.

Methodology

Which vendors

The 20 vendors cover the direct sellers in the 2026 Gartner Magic Quadrant for CDPs 22 (Salesforce, Adobe, Tealium, Treasure AI, Hightouch, Amperity, BlueConic, Twilio), the consolidation-era names (mParticle, Lytics, Fivetran Activations), privacy-led and open-core vendors (RudderStack, Snowplow, Meiro, Piwik PRO, Zeotap) and adjacent suites (Bloomreach, Insider, Klaviyo, HubSpot). Oracle, Uniphore, HCL and Redpoint are not in this edition. PrivyCDP is a 21st row for transparency and is excluded from every count.

What counts as a public price

• yes: a paid plan has a published price plus enough rate information (bands, per-unit rate, seat and credit prices) to estimate a bill at stated volumes.
• partial: a number is published (free tier, "from" price, worked example) but not enough to estimate cost at 1M, 10M or 50M.
• no: the page names no figure, or pricing is on request.

Only official vendor pages opened on the check date count as evidence. Analyst estimates, marketplaces, forums and review sites are never used for prices. Figures are USD list prices as shown, before tax and discounts.

Normalisation to 1M, 10M and 50M profiles

Where a published formula exists we compute annual list price at three sizes. Only Segment (monthly tracked user bands) and Salesforce (per-profile rates) publish a volume formula that scales to these sizes; HubSpot's seat-and-credit model does not scale by profiles. Event, credit and action-priced products cannot be converted to profiles without assumptions about events per profile and operations, so they show "n/a" and the calculator exposes those assumptions.

Quote-based vendors

Quote-based rows have a blank entry_price and "quote-based" in entry_unit. We do not estimate. Third-party estimates appear only in our guides, labelled secondary, never in the dataset.

Update cadence

Full recheck quarterly. Event-driven updates follow a pricing-page change, acquisition or rename (Treasure Data became Treasure AI; Census became Fivetran Activations). Each row carries last_checked.

The dataset

Download all 14 columns: cdp-pricing-index.csv. Deployment values are separated by semicolons. BAA values: tier means a BAA is tied to a plan or add-on; verify means not confirmed on the pricing page.

Fivetran's unit is monthly active rows, mapped to profiles because the schema has no rows value. Some pages contradict themselves (Segment, RudderStack, Piwik PRO); the notes column records each case.

Normalised list prices

Read these carefully. A monthly tracked user (MTU) is not a profile: if 30% of 1M profiles are active in a month, Segment counts about 300,000 MTUs, including anonymous visitors. We apply the published Team bands (USD 12, 11 and 10 per 1,000 MTUs above the 10,000 included in the USD 120 base) beyond the volumes the page shows, so treat Segment figures as extrapolation; the Business plan is custom. Salesforce figures exclude Flex Credit consumption for operations (rates are not on the public page) and storage (not priced there). Details: Salesforce Data 360 pricing explained and Twilio Segment pricing and alternatives. 12

Observations

1. Transparency is the exception. 3 of 20 vendors publish enough to estimate a bill (Segment, Salesforce, HubSpot). 6 publish a number only. 11 (55%) publish nothing.
2. Enterprise prices are almost never public. Only 3 of 20 show an enterprise tier price: Salesforce Enterprise Profiles, Piwik PRO Enterprise and HubSpot Enterprise (from USD 2,000 per month).
3. Four units dominate among the 11 vendors that name one: profiles or rows (4), credits (3), events or actions (3) and MTU (1). The other nine are quote-based.
4. Metering drivers differ. MTU counts anonymous visitors. Event and action pricing tracks traffic and instrumentation, not audience size. Credits track operations such as segmentation and activation, so cost can grow without audience growth. Per-profile models behave differently at scale; see why per-profile pricing breaks at scale. Monthly active rows (Fivetran) are counted per activation, so more destinations cost more.
5. Entry price versus platform floor. Self-serve entry points run from USD 0 to 265 per month. Published platform floors sit at USD 24,000 to 60,000 per year (HubSpot Enterprise, Piwik PRO, Bloomreach). For small volumes, metered SaaS is hard to beat.
6. Deployment is SaaS by default. All 20 sell SaaS. Single-tenant appears for 3, bring-your-own-cloud for 3, self-hosted for 3 and on-premises for 2 (listed options, not tested).
7. BAA is tier-dependent where stated (Segment Business, RudderStack Enterprise, Piwik PRO Healthcare Enterprise, Adobe Healthcare Shield). For the rest, ask in the RFP using the BAA checklist.

Use the index in five steps

1. Filter to vendors whose deployment_models fit your residency and audit needs.
2. Normalise your volumes: monthly active users, profiles, events per profile, destinations.
3. For yes rows, price your volume from the source page; for others, request a quote with your numbers.
4. Run the TCO calculator to add infrastructure, people and exit costs.
5. Compare with the 3-year TCO model, then read CDP pricing explained.

How to cite