If you’re looking for an enterprise customer data platform (CDP) or you have a mobile app, there’s a good chance you’ve stumbled across mParticle. But is it the best choice, or are there better alternatives available?
Today, many teams evaluating CDPs want more than event collection, they’re looking for real-time activation, no-code workflows for marketers, and AI-powered decisioning that helps them personalize experiences and drive outcomes across channels. That shift is changing what “best CDP” actually looks like.
This article will cover:
- What is mParticle?
- How does mParticle work?
- Pros and cons of mParticle
- What are the alternatives to mParticle?
What is mParticle?
Founded in 2013, mParticle is a traditional CDP focused on mobile event collection, allowing you to capture behavioral events and sync that data to hundreds of destinations without the need to manage and maintain custom integrations and APIs. The platform helps you unify your customer data so you can power personalized marketing to deliver better experiences. Over the years, mParticle has expanded their suite of CDP solutions and is now focusing on launching new warehouse-native features. For teams that already centralize customer data in the warehouse and want real-time activation and AI-driven decisioning on top of that data, a composable CDP approach is often a better fit.
How Does mParticle Work?
mParticle provides tools to help you collect and unify your customer data so you can build and manage audiences for various marketing campaigns.
At a high level, mParticle is built around an event-collection and profile layer that sits outside your warehouse. This works well for mobile-first teams that want to route event data quickly. However, many modern marketing orgs prefer keeping the warehouse as the source of truth, then layering on no-code activation and AI decisioning so marketers can act on all customer data in real time, not just what’s captured in an event stream.
You can break mParticle’s capabilities down into five key categories:
- Data Collection: mParticle allows you to collect behavioral data from mobile apps, websites, and servers through input and output connections. Input connections ingest data into mParticle, while output connections push that data to downstream tools. The platform provides server and client-side tracking and allows you to collect two types of data: event and user data.
- Identity Resolution: To unify your customer data, mParticle provides two identity resolution solutions. IDSync is their core identity framework, which assists you in building unified customer profiles by using an Identity API to pull in all known user identifiers. Then, those identifiers are mapped to individual profiles, where you can merge and de-duplicate your known and anonymous users. The other solution is ComposeID, which lets you resolve unidentified user data and profiles directly within your data warehouse.
- Audience Management: To build your audiences, mParticle provides an audience management tool that can be divided into two types: Real-time Audiences and Standard Audiences.
- Analytics: mParticle's audience analytics tool allows you to visualize your customer journey to identify drop-off points within your product. You can also analyze customer behavior and create user segments to tailor your campaign, as well as various reports and dashboards to monitor key metrics across your business.
- AI: Cortex is an AI-powered machine learning platform that creates predictive models to help you predict user behavior, generate recommendations, and efficiently identify high-value user segments.
Pros and Cons of mParticle
Here is a quick summary of the pros and cons of mParticle to help you decide if it is right for you.
Pros
mParticle started as a mobile app solution, so it has a strong feature set for collecting behavioral data on the server and client side. It’s a great fit for teams that primarily need mobile event collection and fast routing to downstream tools.
The platform also has a modern, marketer-friendly UI, and the company has made strategic acquisitions to improve its product suite. It offers a range of security features to help protect the data stored outside your infrastructure, and its journeys feature makes it easy to trigger personalized experiences based on customer behavior.
Cons
mParticle is a traditional CDP and has only recently added support for data warehouses. Since the platform is primarily designed around event collection and customer profiles stored outside your warehouse, the native deployment limits you mainly to behavioral data. If you want to incorporate additional customer data, you’ll typically need to rely on the warehouse sync feature.
For teams that want to keep the warehouse as the source of truth and enable real-time activation and AI decisioning on top of all customer data, this approach can feel less flexible over time, especially as you expand beyond mobile use cases.
Some essential capabilities are also restricted behind premium tiers, such as changing the retention policy period. Heavy implementation work can be needed to ensure GDPR, CCPA, and HIPAA compliance. mParticle’s audience management restricts you from creating audiences from the last 30 days of data unless you pay for an upgrade. And the data you collect must conform to the data model templates provided by mParticle.
What are the Alternatives to mParticle?
mParticle can help you with your event collection needs, but what if you want to focus more on other CDP solutions? The right alternative depends on whether you prioritize event collection, or whether you want a platform built for warehouse-native customer data, no-code marketer workflows, and real-time activation with AI decisioning.
Hightouch
Hightouch is a composable CDP and AI decisioning platform built for marketers, with real-time activation at its core. It sits on top of your data warehouse and gives you access to all of your customer data, providing more flexibility because you can leverage your existing infrastructure and choose only the products you actually need.
Hightouch is easy for both marketers and technical teams to use. Marketers can build audiences and run no-code activation workflows, while data teams keep customer logic, governance, and identity resolution centralized in the warehouse. With Hightouch’s identity resolution, you can store your identity graph in the warehouse rather than having it owned by the CDP.
Because Hightouch doesn’t require copying customer data into a separate system, implementation is typically faster, often going from months to weeks or even days.
Segment
Segment is a traditional CDP that focuses on event collection and data activation and allows you to move that data into your downstream tools. The platform is built for data teams and technical marketers and helps you collect and unify customer data across your websites, apps, servers, or cloud applications. It has a user-friendly interface where marketers can easily build and manage audience segments and then sync those audience segments to downstream destinations.
Treasure Data
Treasure Data is an enterprise CDP designed to collect and transform customer data, enabling the creation of audience segments for personalized marketing campaigns. Originally a big data platform, it grew into a CDP aimed at developers and large enterprises, leveraging a data lake architecture powered by Hive and Presto. While the platform can do a lot, the underlying architecture built on legacy technologies can make it difficult to implement and maintain.
Adobe Real-Time CDP
Adobe Real-Time CDP is a customer data offering available within Adobe Experience Cloud which helps you unify customer data across your various Adobe-specific applications so your marketing teams can build audiences to power downstream use cases. The platform offers several capabilities related to identity resolution and audience management and direct integration support with other Adobe-specific applications like Target, Analytics, Marketo, etc.
Closing Thoughts
mParticle can be a great option if you just need a solution to capture behavioral data. However, if you have more sophisticated use cases where you need to combine behavioral data with billing, product usage, support, and offline sources, the only platform that reliably houses all of that customer data is your data warehouse. Trying to conform your data to the requirements of a CDP vendor while maintaining two sources of truth is difficult, and it becomes harder as your personalization needs grow.
For many enterprise teams, the next generation of CDPs is less about storing customer data and more about activating it in real time, with marketer-friendly workflows and AI decisioning that helps optimize outcomes across channels. That’s where composable, warehouse-native platforms like Hightouch have a structural advantage.
Hightouch sits on top of your existing data infrastructure, giving you access to all of your customer data, fast implementation, and real-time activation without heavy ongoing engineering support. If you’re interested in learning more about Hightouch, book a demo with one of our solution engineers.
