First Take on Gartner’s 2025 Magic Quadrant for Multichannel Marketing Hubs

Every year or two when Gartner releases its Magic Quadrant for Multichannel Marketing Hubs (MMH), my inbox lights up. Vendors boast, competitors complain, and clients ask me, “Do we take this seriously?” The answer, of course, is “Yes… but also, not really.”

Gartner’s MQs are like the Oscars. Winning matters because it moves the market, even if the Academy’s taste doesn’t always match reality. Companies spend huge sums trying to land in that Leader Quadrant. And when they do, they splash it across every sales deck and banner ad you’ll see for the next twelve months. But ask practitioners in the trenches and you’ll often hear a different story: the tools that sit in Leaders aren’t necessarily the tools they want to buy, and the so-called Niche Players are often the ones actually driving innovation.

With that in mind, let’s unpack this year’s MMH Magic Quadrant: what Gartner got wrong, what it got right, and what they completely missed.

Platforms Rated Too High

Let’s start with the elephant in the room: Salesforce Marketing Cloud. Their aging email platform should instantly disqualify them from the Leader Quadrant. Full stop. Email remains the dominant channel in every multichannel platform — it’s the workhorse, the channel that actually drives the bulk of revenue in most marketing programs. If you can’t compete there, you can’t be a leader, no matter how many AI slides your salespeople wave around. And the truth is, marketers know it. We see brands leaving Salesforce Marketing Cloud for nextgen players every quarter. That’s not the profile of a Leader.

Adobe is a more nuanced case, but equally frustrating. Gartner gives them credit for “Ability to Execute,” but what exactly are they executing? To do the work that an Iterable or a Braze delivers in one platform, an Adobe client has to cobble together Adobe Journey Optimizer, Adobe Experience Platform, Adobe Real-Time CDP, and Adobe Customer Journey Analytics. That’s four separate modules stitched into one Franken-stack. Complexity on that scale doesn’t increase execution, it hinders it. Gartner seems to be rewarding Adobe’s breadth of product catalog rather than asking whether actual customers find it usable without an army of consultants.

Then there’s Emarsys. The story here is similar to Salesforce: an email foundation that hasn’t kept pace with next-generation innovation. Yes, Emarsys talks a multichannel game, but when you peel back the marketing veneer, the sophistication just isn’t there compared to the likes of Braze, Iterable, Cordial, or MoEngage. If email is your anchor channel (and it probably is), Emarsys feels more legacy than Leader.

Finally, we have Insider and Optimove, both of whom Gartner placed in the Visionary quadrant. I’m not convinced. Both are good platforms with loyal customers, but calling them “Visionaries” feels like a stretch. Visionary status should be reserved for players who are fundamentally reshaping the industry. Insider and Optimove may be growing, but they’re not redefining the space. At best, they’re solid Niche Players right now.

Platforms Rated Too Low

On the flip side, Gartner underrates Cordial and MoEngage. These two offer extremely advanced technology with true native multichannel capabilities. Unlike the Franken-stack approach of the legacy giants, they were architected from day one to handle orchestration across channels.

Take Cordial: it marries powerful data capabilities with marketer-friendly orchestration, making it far easier for teams to move fast without heavy IT dependency. Or look at MoEngage: a platform that not only delivers across email, push, SMS, and in-app, but also layers in predictive intelligence natively. These aren’t niche features — they’re what modern marketing looks like.

While it’s true that Cordial and MoEngage aren’t yet at the scale of Adobe or Salesforce, they absolutely belong in the Visionary category alongside Bloomreach. They’re innovating, they’re winning enterprise accounts, and they’re the kinds of platforms that ambitious brands should be shortlisting.

Where Gartner Got It Right

Credit where credit is due: Braze and Iterable are properly placed. Braze sits comfortably in the Leader quadrant for good reason — it’s a best-in-class platform that consistently delivers. Iterable as a Challenger also feels right; it’s an excellent platform, maybe just a notch below Braze in terms of global reach and maturity, but no less worthy of being on any enterprise RFP shortlist.

And then there’s Airship. Honestly, I’m not sure why they’re even in this MQ, but since they are, Niche Player feels about right. No harm done there.

The Big Misses

The glaring omission this year is Zeta Global. Leaving Zeta out of the Magic Quadrant is an unforced error. Whatever your view of Zeta, it is undeniably a leading platform in this category. They’ve invested heavily in AI, built a strong data foundation, and — most importantly — are taking meaningful business away from the so-called Leaders.

To leave Zeta out while keeping Salesforce and Emarsys propped up feels like classic Gartner: rewarding incumbency over innovation. For practitioners who actually run RFPs and migrations, this exclusion says more about Gartner’s process than about Zeta’s capabilities. If the MQ is supposed to be a map of the market, then this is a major blind spot.

I also feel strongly that MessageGears’ uniqueness and strategic importance outweigh the “business/financial performance” criteria. If Gartner truly wants to map the market, then MessageGears belongs in the quadrant — even if only as a Niche or Visionary — rather than being erased.  Its “zero-copy” model is unlike anything else in the MQ and has strong appeal to data-savvy enterprises.

Final Takeaway

So, what’s the bottom line? Gartner’s Magic Quadrant is still worth reading — but it’s not gospel. It reflects Gartner’s methodology, Gartner’s client base, and yes, Gartner’s own commercial interests. But for actual buyers, the quadrant should be a starting point, not the final word.

Salesforce and Adobe might look comfortable in the Leader box, but anyone who has wrestled with their platforms knows the pain. Cordial and MoEngage might look small on the chart, but they represent the kind of nimble, forward-looking technology that brands increasingly want. And Zeta’s absence? That’s just indefensible.

At the end of the day, the Magic Quadrant is a snapshot. If you’re a brand making a multimillion-dollar platform decision, don’t just stare at the boxes. Get into sandboxes. Run RFPs. Talk to references. See which vendors can actually deliver what you need.

Because no matter what the chart says, the only Magic Quadrant that really matters is the one you draw for yourself — the one that maps your requirements against the vendors who can actually meet them.

Photo by Nathan Dumlao on Unsplash