What is a CDP?
A CDP, or customer data platform, is software that collects customer data from your website, apps, and other tools. It merges it into a single profile for each person, then makes those profiles available to your marketing and analytics systems.
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What a CDP does
A CDP pulls in events and records from many sources, such as your site, email tool, and point-of-sale system. It matches them to the same person and builds one profile.
It then sends audiences and attributes to other tools, so your ads, emails, and reports use the same view of the customer.
How a CDP differs from a CRM
A CRM mainly tracks known contacts and sales activity that people enter or sync. A CDP also collects anonymous behavior and stitches it to a known person once they identify themselves.
Many teams use both. The CRM manages relationships, and the CDP manages the data feeding activation.
When you need one
A CDP makes sense when customer data lives in many places and teams keep working from different numbers. For smaller setups, a well-organized data warehouse and a CRM may be enough.
Common questions
What does CDP stand for?
CDP stands for customer data platform. It's software that unifies customer data from many sources into one profile per person.
What's the difference between a CDP and a data warehouse?
A warehouse stores data for analysis and needs technical work to shape it. A CDP is built to unify customer profiles and send them to marketing tools.
Does a CDP replace a CRM?
Usually not. They do different jobs, and most organizations that use a CDP still keep a CRM for sales and relationship management.
What kind of data does a CDP use?
Mostly first-party data, such as site behavior, purchases, and form submissions. Some also take in zero-party data that customers share directly.
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