Salesforce CDP: is Data 360 the right one, or should you plug in another?

Data 360 is the product people still search as "Salesforce CDP". Salesforce itself calls it "the Salesforce CDP (Data 360)", and it was known as Data Cloud until its latest rename. Existing Data Cloud contracts keep their pricing until the end of their current term, and customers on the older Data Services credits face no forced migration; switching to Flex Credits or Profile pricing means swapping all those credits at once.

Its edge is that it lives inside your org. Profiles and segments are readable by Agentforce and Marketing Cloud Next without a sync to build: Salesforce builds its CDP directly into Marketing Cloud Next. It lists 200+ connectors, and Zero Copy reads Snowflake and Databricks in place, so you don't pay to duplicate a warehouse.

Pricing comes in three models. Flex Credits cost $500 per 100,000 credits, spent on any action (prep, unification, segmentation, queries). Profiles cost $240 per 1,000 profiles a year, with one Flex Credit per profile, 100 segments and 25 calculated insights included. Enterprise Profiles cost $420 per 1,000 profiles a year, with two credits per profile, 500 segments, Data Masking and the Ad Audience add-on. For 50,000 profiles, that lists at $12,000 a year on Profiles and $21,000 on Enterprise Profiles, before any negotiation. Batch ingestion and Zero Copy are free, and Salesforce customers can provision Data 360 for free with limited storage and credits.

The catch is predictability on credits. Every action has a unit and a multiplier, and a calculated insight consumes credits again each time it refreshes: set it to refresh daily and you pay daily. On Flex Credits, the multiplier drops as your consumption crosses tiers, so volume lowers the unit cost but makes the bill harder to forecast. Set up the Digital Wallet, a free usage tracker, on day one.

Want help to scope it? A Salesforce agency can size your credits before you sign.

Segment is the reference for collecting events from your website, app and servers, then routing them to 550+ destinations. Salesforce is one of them, through the Salesforce (Actions) destination. It writes leads, contacts, cases, opportunities and custom objects, authenticates with OAuth 2.0, and can batch writes to Salesforce's Bulk API 2.0 to cut rate-limit errors.

Prices are public up to the Team plan. Free costs $0 a month for 1,000 visitors and 2 sources. Team starts at $120 a month with 10,000 monthly tracked users, then $12 per extra 1,000 users up to 25,000, and $11 per 1,000 from 25,000 to 100,000. At 25,000 tracked users, Team comes to $300 a month, or $3,600 a year billed monthly. Paying annually saves up to 20%. Identity resolution and profiles come only with the Customer Data Platform plans, priced on a quote, and audiences are an add-on on the pipeline plans.

The trap to know: one Salesforce user can connect up to 5 Salesforce destinations. Connect a sixth and Salesforce revokes the oldest one. Create one integration user per environment. The old "classic" Salesforce destination is being retired, so move any legacy setup to Actions.

Leaving Segment? Read our Segment alternatives. Wiring it to Salesforce by hand? The Segment node in n8n covers simple flows.

Hightouch starts from the other end. Your data team builds a customer table in Snowflake, BigQuery or Databricks, and Hightouch syncs its rows into Salesforce standard and custom objects. It supports four modes: Insert, Update, Upsert and Archive. It can also publish platform events that trigger Salesforce Flows and Apex.

Use an External ID field for matching. Hightouch then calls Salesforce's native upsert API instead of searching first, which is faster and avoids duplicates. Be careful with Archive: it deletes every Salesforce record returned by your model, for good. It is not a recycle bin.

The free Basic Reverse ETL tier gives you up to 2 active syncs with unlimited destinations and seats. The Composable CDP and the Agentic Marketing Platform are usage-based and quoted after a demo, with no cap on monthly tracked users, sources or destinations. Hightouch uses the legacy Bulk API by default; Bulk API 2.0 is an opt-in setting, worth testing on large syncs.

Fivetran signed an agreement to acquire Census in 2025, and Census now runs as Fivetran Activations. Like Hightouch, it reads your warehouse and writes into Salesforce. It mainly uses the Salesforce Bulk API, to sync in the most quota-efficient way. That matters if your org already runs close to its daily API limit.

Setup needs an integration user with "API Enabled" checked, and External ID fields marked Unique on the objects you sync. Sandboxes work, with one trap: each time a sandbox is refreshed from production, you recreate the Activations user and reauthorize the link.

The Fivetran Free plan includes 3,500 monthly active rows for activations, then usage-based billing on monthly active rows, and an annual contract saves up to 22%. If your company already pays Fivetran to load Salesforce into the warehouse, keeping both directions on one contract is the simplest path.

RudderStack does what Segment does (collect events, route them, sync your warehouse back out) with the warehouse as its storage layer. Its blog is one of the top results for "Salesforce CDP", and it pitches exactly that: keep the customer data in your own infrastructure rather than in Salesforce.

Its prices are among the clearest in this list. RudderStack Core Free costs $0 for 250,000 events a month. Growth costs $265 a month for 1 million events, with 25 reverse ETL connections, and annual billing saves 15%. Billed monthly, Growth is $3,180 a year. Its audience product, Lookout, starts at $1,000 a month billed annually ($12,000 a year) with 40,000 activated records a year.

The Salesforce v2 destination creates or updates leads from identify calls, and other objects by type. Two details to know: you install RudderStack's External Client App package in the org first, and if a lead arrives without lastName or company, RudderStack fills both with "n/a". Add those fields to your tracking plan or your reps will see "n/a" leads. RudderStack also asks you to switch off two-factor authentication on the connecting account: use a dedicated user for that, never a personal admin.

Tealium sells AudienceStream as a vendor-neutral CDP with more than 1,300 ready-made integrations. On the Salesforce side, its connector lists 14 actions: insert, update and upsert leads; convert a lead to a contact; insert and update contacts; add leads and contacts to campaigns; insert, update and upsert custom objects (upsert batched or not); and send a full visitor or event to custom Apex.

Tealium also lists a Salesforce Data 360 connector and a Journey Builder connector, which makes it a good fit for teams that keep Data 360 for unification and Tealium for real-time collection. The connector authenticates with the OAuth Client Credentials Flow and needs your org's My Domain URL, not login.salesforce.com. A separate solution, Tealium for Salesforce, uses Apex classes and triggers to send lead and contact updates back to Tealium.

Pricing is a custom quote after a demo. Tealium makes sense for an enterprise with many sites and apps to tag. For a team of five, it is too much machine.

mParticle is now part of Rokt and sold as Rokt mParticle. It collects customer events from your sites and apps and forwards them to other tools. Its Salesforce Sales and Service Cloud integration is built on the Bulk API 2.0 and can route events to a single custom object or create one object per event type.

For Marketing Cloud, mParticle sends audiences as data extensions, with bulk forwarding rather than one update at a time. Know this before you build journeys: once a user is added to a data extension, mParticle cannot remove the record. It sets a membership status field to false instead, so filter on that field in every send.

Pricing is a custom quote: the pricing page sends you to a "Talk to an expert" form. Pick it if you already stream events through mParticle and want sales and service reps to act on them in Salesforce.

Entry prices tell you little. Here is the list price for a year on each model, before any discount.

• 25,000 profiles: Profiles $6,000 a year.
• 50,000 profiles: Profiles $12,000 a year; Enterprise Profiles $21,000 a year.
• 1 million Flex Credits: $5,000, spent on whatever actions you run.

Profile pricing un-meters the actions that build profiles, but querying data still draws Flex Credits. If your use case is mostly segments for Marketing Cloud, the profile model is easier to forecast. If you mostly query and feed agents, credits fit better.

Data 360 lets you create up to two identity resolution rulesets. Use the second one to A/B test match rules before switching. After the first publish, unified profiles take up to 24 hours to appear, and later rule changes run once a day. So don't promise a demo the morning after setup.

Start strict (exact email, exact normalized phone), check the consolidation rate in the processing history, then add fuzzy name rules if you see too many duplicates left.

Salesforce's own Trailhead project says it: to reduce costs by limiting jobs, disable "Run jobs automatically" on your identity resolution ruleset. Calculated insights follow the same logic: each refresh consumes credits again, so a daily refresh on a growing table costs a little more every day. Do your first runs by hand, watch the Digital Wallet, and only then schedule them.

Salesforce also emails a Monthly Usage Summary to your billing contact. Forward it to whoever owns the Data 360 project, not just finance.

Whatever tool writes into Salesforce, add a custom field marked External ID and Unique on each object you sync (Text, Email or Number types work). Hightouch then uses the native upsert API, and Census recommends it as the most reliable identifier. Without it, tools search first or create duplicates.

For Salesforce automation around these syncs, see the Salesforce node in n8n.

Every third-party CDP writes through your org's API allowance. Look at it in Setup, then System Overview, before you schedule a full backfill. Prefer tools that batch through the Bulk API (Segment Actions with batching, Census, mParticle). If you see TOO_MANY_APEX_REQUESTS errors, your Apex triggers and flows can't keep up with the batch: halve the batch size, then raise it slowly.

Shared credentials break syncs. With Segment, one Salesforce user can connect up to 5 Salesforce destinations, and connecting a sixth revokes the oldest. RudderStack asks you to switch off two-factor authentication on the account it uses, and Fivetran Activations needs "API Enabled" with no session security level required at login. Those are three reasons for a dedicated integration user per tool and per environment, with only the permissions it needs; your audit log stays readable too.

Deletions are where CDP projects leak data. Adobe's Salesforce source only detects soft-deleted records, so a hard delete in Salesforce never reaches Adobe Experience Platform. mParticle flags audience members instead of removing them from Marketing Cloud data extensions. Hightouch's Archive mode deletes for real. Write down, per tool, what a deletion does before a privacy request lands.

Adobe Real-Time CDP has a real Salesforce CRM destination: it writes audiences to leads or contacts through the Salesforce composite API. It makes sense if your stack is Adobe first (Experience Manager, Analytics, Commerce), not if Salesforce runs your marketing. Bloomreach starts at $60,000 a year for smaller brands, and its CDP serves personalization and search. Amperity, which several alternatives guides list, has a Salesforce Sales Cloud destination too. Bloomreach is compared in our ranking of CDPs for ecommerce, and Adobe in our general CDP ranking.

Running a SaaS rather than a store? The CDPs for SaaS weigh product analytics more. Thinking of leaving Salesforce altogether? See our Salesforce alternatives. And if your team needs to learn the platform first, a Salesforce training is a sensible first step before a CDP project.