Go beyond a basic Customer Data Platform for marketing teams. Organizations choose Data Cloud to unify and activate real-time enterprise data — securely and bi-directionally — across Salesforce, data lakes, warehouses, and business applications. Keeping it current, consistent, and ready for AI agents, smarter insights, and faster decision making.
Salesforce Data Cloud is designed to work with the systems you already have, acting as your central hub. It bridges data silos, harmonizing information from your lakes, warehouses, and critical business applications. As the central hub, it makes unified, harmonized data readily available for use across Salesforce and any other connected system where it's needed.
| Data Cloud | Adobe Real-Time CDP | ||
|---|---|---|---|
| Connect to any data | Native Salesforce Connectors | Yes | Yes |
| Zero Copy Bi-directional | Yes |
Limited | |
| 250+ connectors (structured & unstructured) | Yes | Yes | |
| Unstructured data ingestion (Sharepoint, Zendesk, Google Drive, email, PDF, video & audio files)Intelligent Document Processing | Yes | Limited | |
| Intelligent Document Processing | Yes | No | |
| Batch Ingestion | Yes | Yes | |
| Streaming Ingestion | Yes | Yes | |
| Real-time ingestion | Yes | Yes | |
| Data Sharing (DW/DL, business apps & ad platforms) | Yes | Yes | |
| Harmonize Profiles | Identity resolution | Yes | Yes |
| Real-time Customer profile updates | Yes | Yes | |
| Real-Time Segmentation | Yes | Yes | |
| Unified & Standardized Data Model | Yes | Yes | |
| Data Prep & Transformations | Yes | Yes | |
| Govern data with AI | Policy Based Governance (ABAC, RBAC, Access Policies & Dynamic Data Masking Policies) | Yes | Limited |
| AI Tagging & Classification | Yes | No | |
| Data Space Management | Yes | Yes | |
| Data Encryption | Yes | Yes | |
| Private Connect | Yes | No | |
| Activate Anywhere | Agentforce | Yes | No |
| Data Cloud triggered flows | Yes | No | |
| Segments | Yes | Yes | |
| Insights & Predictive Models | Yes | Yes | |
| Seamless C360 activation in the flow of work | Yes | No | |
| AI Capabilities | BYOM (Amazon Sagemaker, Google Vertex, Databricks) | Yes | No |
| Generative AI | Yes | Yes | |
| Agentforce / Agent customization | Yes | No | |
| Prompt Builder | Yes | No | |
| Out of the box Agents | Yes | Yes | |
| Retrieval Augmented Generation / Atlas Reasoning Engine | Yes | Limited |
Learn why Gartner named Salesforce a Leader.
Data Cloud Governance: Protecting Your Data in the Agentic Landscape
Data Cloud Governance: Protecting Your Data in the Agentic Landscape
Data Cloud Governance: Protecting Your Data in the Agentic Landscape
Data Cloud Governance: Protecting Your Data in the Agentic Landscape
Data Cloud can truly activate use cases across all customer touch points — sales, service, marketing & commerce. Adobe lacks CRM and native sales and service data. Adobe is a marketing automation solution, it has to rely on partners for sales and service related customer and account data.
Data Cloud is built on our secure and trusted Salesforce Platform, helping every organization unify and activate their data and metadata. Salesforce Data Cloud creates a deeply unified platform by ingesting and harmonizing customer data from all sources into a single, real-time Customer 360 profile. This comprehensive view serves as a grounded data foundation, enabling AI-powered insights and personalized experiences across all touch points for a consistent and enriched customer journey.
Data Cloud offers connectors to ingest data from Adobe Analytics, Adobe Commerce, Adobe Marketo Engage and Data Cloud, in conjunction with MuleSoft can also offer activation to Adobe products.
With Salesforce Data Cloud consumption pricing, customers only pay for what they use. In contrast, Adobe Real-Time CDP pricing starts with profile volumes and editions, but quickly becomes complicated with the various add-on licenses which use different consumption pricing models.
Data Cloud’s Zero Copy Architecture lets you access your data where it already lives — without having to move or duplicate it. This reduces storage costs, minimizes risks, and allows you to take action faster. Whether your data is on-premises or in the cloud, you can leverage it in Salesforce Data Cloud instantly, breaking down silos while maintaining full control of your data.
Salesforce Data Cloud can work with any data format. Most businesses are sitting on a mountain of unstructured data— from emails and PDFs to audio and video files—that’s hard to analyze and even harder to activate. Salesforce Data Cloud transforms this chaotic data into actionable insights, giving you a clearer picture of your customers, operations, and business needs. Salesforce also ingests and activates data from any source using a wide range of flexible connectors to handle all your structured data across your enterprise.
No. You are not required to duplicate data to ingest to Salesforce Data Cloud. Data Cloud’s Zero Copy Architecture lets you access your data where it already lives — without having to move or duplicate it. This reduces storage costs, minimizes risks, and allows you to take action faster. Whether your data is on-premises or in the cloud, you can leverage it in Salesforce Data Cloud instantly, breaking down silos while maintaining full control of your data.
Adobe offers limited Zero Copy integration with data warehouses and lakes via Adobe Federated Audience Composition.
Adobe Federated Audience Composition has some similarities to Salesforce Data Cloud Zero Copy integrations. In both solutions, there is minimal data movement/copy. The Zero Copy implementations use live queries to the external data platforms.
However, there are notable limitations in Adobe’s solution: Adobe Federated Audience Composition Zero Copy integration is only applicable to composing audiences using data from external data platforms and Adobe Experience Platform. The external datasets cannot be used for any other purposes, like profile unification. The data from the external datasets is not persisted in Adobe Real-Time CDP.
Data Cloud offers zero copy integrations with most major data lakes or data warehouses that you may have invested in. Data Cloud is designed to work with the systems and enterprise apps you already have, like Snowflake, Databricks, AWS RedShift and Google BigQuery. Data Cloud can help unify and activate real-time enterprise data — securely and bi-directionally — across Salesforce, data lakes, warehouses, and business applications. Data is kept current, consistent, and ready for AI agents, smarter insights, and faster decision making.
Salesforce Data Cloud offers data governance via dynamic data masking, attribute-based access control, AI-based tagging and classification, row/column/field level security. Salesforce also offers platform level data encryption and private connect support.
Adobe offers data governance via its Adobe Experience Platform. Its capabilities include role definitions, role-based access controls, data sensitivity labels, identity labels for contacts. Governance policies can then be created based on these data usage labels. However, Adobe does not offer AI based tagging/classification, dynamic data masking, explicit row/field level security. Furthermore, Adobe also does not offer private connect support except as it relates to Adobe commerce.
Adobe offers an AI Assistant, which is a natural language chat experience embedded directly within Adobe Experience Platform (AEP) apps. Its primary use cases include answering questions about product knowledge, providing operational insights on customer data for analysis and brand grounding.
Adobe has announced 10 out-of-the-box agents and an Agent Orchestrator framework with a reasoning engine to operate across these 10 agents. Adobe does not offer customization of agents or prompts even with the newly announced agents.
Salesforce offers AI with Agentforce. Agentforce is a proactive, autonomous AI application that provides specialized, always-on support to employees or customers. You can equip Agentforce with any necessary business knowledge to execute tasks according to its specific role. With Agentforce, you can quickly configure any agent from scratch with existing Salesforce tools like prompts, flows, Apex, and APIs using AgentBuilder. The Atlas Reasoning Engine is the brain of Agentforce. Users can equip agents to respond naturally and adapt to situations so they're faster, more multi-turn, and more capable and more accurate.
