Report:

Magic Quadrant for Personalization Engines

Top Vendor Products for Personalization Engines in 2023

• Adobe
• Dynamic Yield
• Insider
• Salesforce
• SAP
• Sitecore

Personalization Engines Vendor Product Comparisons 2023

• Adobe - Leader
  

  Pros:

  • Multichannel reach: Adobe Target real-time personalization capabilities enable consistent experiences across a diverse set of channels, including websites, mobile apps, screens in vehicles and offline touchpoints like digital kiosks and call centers. These can be applied to various use cases, including personalized marketing, commerce and customer support.
  • Testing: Target blends an easy-to-use interface and overall user experience with comprehensive testing approaches, including advanced A/B testing, full factorial multivariate testing (MVT), autoallocation and autotargeting to best experiences.
  • Scale: Its presence in Adobe Experience Cloud allows Target to deploy personalization in a broader, integrated software solution. Boosted by its global operations base (offices, data centers and public clouds), a large partner ecosystem and flat-fee pricing, it can support larger enterprises with additional capabilities.

  Cons:

  • Cross-product considerations: The Target out-of-the-box (OOTB) customer profile captures contextual and session data for personalization. But access to Adobe Real-Time CDP is needed to enhance personalization activities with a unified customer profile. Buyers should assess whether a Real-Time CDP purchase is required for their planned real-time experiences.
  • Customer support feedback: Despite Adobe's global reach, the product's long history and the company's broad partner ecosystem, Target customer service remains an issue. Gartner Peer Insights users cite support challenges, including slow responsiveness to help requests and support that is too general to be directly helpful. Buyers must consider the complexities of required use cases to avoid support bottlenecks. Adobe's future planning does not reference support changes.
  • Customer maturity growth: A low proportion of Target customers have evolved their personalization maturity over the last calendar year. This is despite a comprehensive rollout of customer enablement content, including digital foundation starter packs, basic consulting packages and basic training provisions. Prospects should consider the speed desired to mature their personalization capabilities.


• Algonomy - Visionary
  

  Pros:

  • Touchpoint coordination: Algonomy's algorithmic decisions are available across multiple channels through its journey canvas, which supports customer-level frequency capping both across and within channels. Algonomy presented one of the most coordinated multichannel demos in this evaluation.
  • Advances in algorithmic decisioning: Algonomy maintains its track record of developing novel algorithms to address specific use cases with the addition of composite recommendations. These consider a user characteristic or segment — such as beginner, intermediate or expert — to better coordinate a set of complementary items based on a narrow group of consumers.
  • No-code builders: Algonomy has a growing set of experience "builders" to simplify brands customizing their guided selling experiences, audience creation and recommendation strategies. These features combine to allow organizations to increase the amount of personalization applied in product discovery and recommendation experiences.

  Cons:

  • Complexity: The focus on individual-level decisioning combined with the diversity of included algorithms makes Algonomy a tenuous fit for those beginning their personalization journey. Gartner Peer Insights reviews note the general complexity of the platform. Buyers should plan to fully leverage the included training to increase the likelihood of sufficient platform adoption to meet business goals.
  • Awareness: Algonomy is in the bottom quartile for vendors in this research regarding customer interest indicators, such as client inquiries, social followers and Google Search trends. Prospects should ensure that colleagues have sufficient familiarity with Algonomy when comparing solutions.
  • Price: Algonomy has among the highest annual contract values, including the highest proportion of deals over $500,000 per year, in this evaluation. Prospects should have a clear roadmap of use case adoption to ensure that sufficient value is delivered, especially if marketing or service and support use cases are the focus of the planned deployment.


• Crownpeak (Attraqt) - Niche Player
  

  Pros:

  • Product discovery: Crownpeak offers robust product discovery capabilities across websites, mobile apps and email. Supported by third-party and OOTB algorithms, it leverages AI to support product search. It provides personalized discovery through a native guided-selling feature that delivers product recommendations based on visitor-selected attributes.
  • Personalized recommendations: Crownpeak offers predictive personalized recommendations supporting one-off, recurring and subscription-based purchase cycles. Marketer-controlled slots blend with AI-driven recommendations, a helpful algorithm library and a simple interface to support configuration and setup.
  • Retail expertise: Crownpeak has focused on the B2C space and serves a large client base spanning multiple retail sectors. It has been successful in designing product discovery and e-commerce solutions, thanks to a strong understanding of customer journeys and how to support customer progression.

  Cons:

  • Adapting to B2B: Although Crownpeak has plans to expand into the B2B space, its core capabilities around product discovery and personalized recommendations are currently geared to supporting shorter, less complex buying journeys that mirror those more typically seen in B2C areas. Prospective buyers operating in more traditional B2B industries with longer sales cycles and multiple stakeholders should assess whether its personalization capabilities can meet their needs.
  • Triggering: Crownpeak's Product Discovery triggering capabilities are limited to email and website channels. There are limited prebuilt templates that can be stored in the user library. Potential customers should verify whether the template library is sufficient for their personalization needs.
  • Customer support resources: Crownpeak's share of employees dedicated to support and service management is among the lowest of vendors in this evaluation. Prospective buyers should investigate the availability of local, in-market professional services and support, and assess whether these can meet their needs.


• Dynamic Yield - Leader
  

  Pros:

  • Strategic vision and innovation: Dynamic Yield's market-leading vision embraces the composability of personalization through its Experience OS capability. Brought to market in Experience OS, the platform has evolved to become an operating system. It enables marketers to compose the optimal suite of modules and integrations required within the platform, using an intuitive dashboard to set up and execute a scalable personalization strategy.
  • Testing: The platform has extensive testing capabilities set up through a sophisticated visual editor that leverages prebuilt templates to create tests. The editor also includes a live preview feature that enables the emulation of multiple devices/screens. AI/ML features enable content generation and customer affinity matching to customers' profiles to test variations.
  • Product and content promotion: Dynamic Yield's platform has multiple options to configure and execute product and content promotion through an intuitive drag-and-drop UI. It has a collection of OOTB algorithms that can be deployed, but also can customize rules using multiple attribute sets to blend personalized product and content recommendations together.

  Cons:

  • Suitability for nonenterprise clients: Dynamic Yield's strategic focus is enterprise clients. Nonenterprise customers and those with low personalization maturity should consider whether they have the interaction volumes and comfort with machine learning to maximize value from a platform of this scale.
  • Commercial model: The pivot to a composable personalization platform through Experience OS will impact the commercial model through the bundling of composable applications and extensions. Customers should explore this shifting commercial model to understand the applications and extensions needed to support current use cases and the potential cost impact.
  • B2B focus: Although Dynamic Yield has extensive industry coverage, the majority of its clients are B2C-focused, with some smaller B2B clients in financial services. B2B customers should explore the platform's capabilities to support complex B2B use cases, such as multilevel account personalization.


• Insider - Leader
  

  Pros:

  • Product discovery: Insider offers broad features to enhance browsing experiences for shoppers who aren't looking to buy a specific product. Beyond personalized search results and site navigation, it includes multiple configurable experiences, such as swipeable templates, an editor for immersive experiences similar to Instagram Stories and a quiz commerce engine.
  • Within-touchpoint experiences: Insider supports personalized shopping experiences that can be completed within another channel. Guided selling and interactive product recommendations are supported within WhatsApp and email. WhatsApp support allows for completion of the entire purchase, reducing the need for users to click to an external website.
  • Comprehensive roadmap: Insider's roadmap strategy covers multiple areas, demonstrates the influence of customer requests and offers a good record of delivery. The current roadmap is AI-heavy to support marketing operations, indicating multiple features to accelerate onboarding and planned enhancements for multiple new channel-specific personalization tactics.

  Cons:

  • Reporting enhancements: Some Gartner Peer Insights reviewers note that Insider's reporting and measurement capabilities are in need of improvement. Prospects should evaluate if in-platform reporting is sufficient, especially around ROI measurement, ease of customization and insights regarding growth opportunities.
  • B2B templates: The richness of OOTB B2B marketing templates trails what is available for B2C, potentially weakening Insider's ease of use. It plans additional B2B templates in the coming year, but potential B2B buyers should verify that existing templates meet near-term needs and that long-term needs align with Insider's roadmap.
  • Year-over-year (YoY) scaling costs: Insider's net revenue retention exceeds the industry average and other vendors in this research (well over 100%), meaning the average retained customer spends more each year as they increase platform usage. While this is a sign of platform adoption, prospects should anticipate a scenario with rapid annual platform fee increases (between 30% to 50%), and ensure that measurement of platform impact is sufficient to justify.


• Monetate - Visionary
  

  Pros:

  • Action builders: Monetate's action builders enable customized personalization with no code, facilitating a broad range of digital experiences through inserting, editing or hiding them based on visitor profiles or actions. Once built, actions can be used repeatedly or copied and edited to accelerate new personalized elements.
  • Tailored recommendations: The platform provides marketers and merchandisers granular control of recommendations through an interface that facilitates audience filtering, burying/boosting of products, algorithm testing and algorithm selection. A new feature broadens the potential appeal of recommendations by allowing flexible deduplication based on product attributes.
  • Customized services: Monetate tailors its professional services model based on client goals and maturity. It promotes client self-sufficiency with the platform, but recognizes the need for professional services and supports clients with a dedicated success manager. The portion of Monetate's team supporting professional services is among the highest of vendors reviewed.

  Cons:

  • Another transition: Three years after Kibo's acquisition of Monetate and Certona, Centre Lane Partners bought Monetate in October 2022. This change may free Monetate to think more broadly about personalization over time, but has consumed technical and account resources. It also may have slowed growth, with Monetate's 2022 revenue growth rate among the slowest in this research.
  • Customer experience: Monetate uses APIs and secure FTPs (SFTPs) to integrate with survey and customer support applications. It lacks OOTB connectors to these application types that simplify integration and support the platform's vision of optimizing every interaction. Prospective buyers seeking to tie purchases to onboarding, repairs and other service touchpoints should contact customer references to confirm sufficient capabilities.
  • Product experience: Monetate's look and feel trails Leaders in this research, reflected in below-average Gartner Peer Insights evaluations for product experience. General evaluations of Monetate included top marks, but varied more than other vendors', reinforcing that prospects should seek a customized demo to assess the platform's capabilities.


• Salesforce - Leader
  

  Pros:

  • Support across the customer life cycle: Marketing Cloud Personalization, often in combination with other Salesforce products, delivers personalized experiences across the customer life cycle, from awareness to loyalty. This use case breadth is above-average compared to other vendors in this evaluation. For example, a client can use its recipes to tailor recommendations in the Service Cloud or drive personalized emails with Journey Builder.
  • B2B personalization: Salesforce stands out in B2B efficacy, with investment and focus on its B2B buyer persona and capabilities evidenced by continued product innovation in its Sales and Service Cloud integrations. For example, leads or contacts can be enriched with affinity data, or next best promotions and actions from personalization.
  • Ecosystem interoperability: Salesforce continues to invest in the cohesiveness of its overall enterprise products ecosystem, resulting in extended personalization capabilities across tools. Its roadmap continues this focus, with investments in Salesforce CRM and Salesforce Data Cloud integrations.

  Cons:

  • Less flexible customization: The platform's controlled way of inserting content, compared to other Leaders in this research, is due to personalized content and recommendations having to work within predefined developer-created "zones." While templates are provided, prospects seeking a business-user approach to configuring personalization should review their ability to use development resources to create "zones" or amend configuration provided to business users.
  • Salesforce-focused roadmap: As Salesforce continues to grow its ecosystem's native integrations and features for personalization, its roadmap focuses less on non-Salesforce integration. This may offer value for existing clients, but prospects should explore the available integrations and associated features.
  • Support often required: Platform users cite setup and configuration as taking more time, effort and training than expected. While "Salesforce Premier" offers expert coaching, success paths and self-serve learning through its Trailhead learning platform and Trailblazers community, it recommends that potential clients invest in support from its professional services or an accredited implementation partner.


• SAP - Leader
  

  Pros:

  • Measurement and reporting: The Emarsys platform has market-leading measurement and reporting capabilities with a rich reporting dashboard that can be contextualized using OOTB reporting personas. Performance reports can be shared by email with stakeholders. Users can create custom dashboards and alert thresholds based on specific performance KPIs.
  • Targeting: AI-driven targeting is a core platform strength enabled by prebuilt tactics to identify audiences and segments based on multiple data attributes and sources. Its intuitive UI gives users tactics to drive optimal outcomes, based on predictive scenarios such as reengaging a customer likely to churn.
  • Journey orchestration and triggering: Its intuitive drag-and-drop UI uses prebuilt templates and tactics to configure personalized journeys across web, email and mobile channels. Templates and tactics can drive activation, such as data capture, loyalty and push messages. It also can share audience data with other platforms such as CRM and social media for targeting.

  Cons:

  • Incremental cost model: Emarsys' tiered commercial model allows customers to scale capabilities in-line with maturity. Incremental capability modules designed to enable advanced integrations, omnichannel marketing, industry accelerators or loyalty come at an additional cost. Prospects must understand that modules are required to deliver the organization's personalization strategy.
  • Content promotion: Although the platform can configure and execute content promotion rules across multiple channels, it is limited to serving merchandising/campaign content, not webpages or blogs. Clients seeking to promote a range of content types should develop desired content promotion use cases to test platform capabilities.
  • SAP product dependencies: Elements of the platform require other SAP products to enable specific features. For example, collaboration and workflows between marketing and sales for personalization execution require SAP Sales Cloud. Buyers without a heavy SAP technology footprint should determine where these dependencies lie because they may struggle to drive value from core capabilities.


• Sitecore - Leader
  

  Pros:

  • Client success commitment: Recognizing the complexities and challenges of creating value through personalization, Sitecore invested in Sitecore360 to safeguard success outcomes for clients. This option is based on a fixed scope to reach predefined outcomes.
  • Industry breadth: Through continued expansion of capabilities like content search, audience sharing and unified tracking across channels, Sitecore has expanded its ability to fit a broader set of industry needs and requirements. This has improved its relevance and coverage to an extended set of prospective clients, which over time will increase its depth of client and industry expertise.
  • Advanced decisioning: Sitecore supports diverse and complex client use cases for decisioning through its differentiated decision canvas. This approach, unique in this analysis, provides a strong foundation for its evolving user experience, which includes plans to introduce a Journey Builder.

  Cons:

  • Reporting fragmentation: Despite a broad set of dashboards to simplify workflow, Sitecore needs to consolidate and enhance its reporting capabilities, which offer basic sharing capabilities and span different fixed dashboards and interfaces. Prospects should review their dashboard and insights needs, and explore Sitecore's planned improvements, including the Experience Analytics feature.
  • Shifting decisioning paradigms: Its decision canvas has a steeper learning curve to value realization than other parts of the platform. It plans to introduce a new Journey Builder that adds a different paradigm to decisioning workflows. Buyers should verify their personalization decisioning needs against Sitecore's current and planned methods.
  • Advanced technical skills needed: Sitecore can still require a comprehensive level of technical skills for certain use cases, as mentioned in several Gartner Peer Insights reviews. Organizations seeking to develop more advanced or custom personalization use cases should detail them in advance and work to assess feasibility and skills impact.


• SiteSpect - Niche Player
  

  Pros:

  • Experimentation: SiteSpect users applaud its dedicated optimization experts to support the development and delivery of their testing strategy. This feature provides a solid platform for clients that are evolving their testing when combined with SiteSpect's visual editor workflow and ability to deliver low-latency A/B, MVT and multiarm bandit experiments via its proxy-based architecture.
  • Client success investment: SiteSpect offers a proof of concept to show value and partnership. Depending on the scope, this may be a paid, discounted or complementary engagement. SiteSpect also features 24/7 in-house customer support, training and a dedicated optimization team to facilitate strategy.
  • Remote-app personalization: SiteSpect can personalize and experiment with apps remotely across any internet-connected device, including app and OTT, with advantages like not having to manage multiple software development kits (SDKs) for different devices and operating systems. Changes can be made to apps without requiring app store resubmissions, which can present great value and efficiency for prospects with a large app, OTT presence and roadmap.

  Cons:

  • Roadmap breadth and velocity: SiteSpect's roadmap stretches resources across many areas, with improvements spanning both the technology foundation and client-facing features. Several roadmap items were deprioritized in 2022, especially those related to data and advanced analytics. Prospects should scrutinize their near- and long-term goals against SiteSpect's current features and roadmap to ensure a good fit.
  • Technical learning curve: SiteSpect users cite the need for technical skills to set up and use all of its capabilities. It presumes that users possess or have access to comprehensive technical skills for operation. Its roadmap includes improvements to UX and its WYSIWYG visual editor for experiment creation, ongoing campaign metric management and analytics investments.
  • Orchestration capabilities: SiteSpect lacks the ability to orchestrate triggers using a journey canvas to support conditional logic for multistep personalized campaigns. It is best-suited for experimentation and next best offers, but must be supplemented by and integrated with tech from other providers to support journey orchestration.

Reference

• Gartner, Magic Quadrant for Personalization Engines, 6 September 2023, ID G00776378

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