The Adobe Experience Cloud stack: what brands run alongside Adobe

Among brands using Adobe Analytics, Adobe Experience Manager or Adobe Target in these interviews, many also use other Adobe products — but two in three report using at least one Salesforce product. A recurring configuration pairs Adobe products for content, analytics or testing with Salesforce for CRM or email; other brands consolidate more capabilities into Adobe or use specialist tools for messaging and customer data. More than two in five name Salesforce Marketing Cloud, against roughly one in seven naming Adobe Campaign or Journey Optimizer. Buyers frequently praise connections inside the Adobe suite, such as Analytics with Target, while others describe Adobe products that do not connect as promised and manual work between Adobe and Salesforce.

What tools do Adobe Experience Cloud brands commonly run together?

In these interviews, Adobe Analytics is the most widely named Adobe product, followed by Adobe Experience Manager and Adobe Target, and some brands add Adobe's customer data platform or journey tools. Alongside Adobe, many run Salesforce for CRM and Salesforce Marketing Cloud for email, plus enterprise tools for data, identity and messaging such as Tableau, LiveRamp, Tealium, Databricks, Movable Ink and Bluecore. The exact combination varies by brand, and buyers report both well-connected Adobe products and substantial integration work.

Why do brands buy more of Adobe?

For the connections, and for the contract. One brand choosing Adobe Experience Manager says “we bought almost the entire Adobe suite, so we were really looking for an ecosystem that works well within itself.” Pricing reinforces it — “Adobe gave us preferential pricing because of our full stack investment with them,” says a brand that chose Journey Optimizer over Braze, adding “AJO consolidated a lot of the problems we're experiencing today in a really high-quality way.” Some products arrive bundled: one buyer chose Target because “it was already part of the package of Adobe Analytics,” and another keeps Analytics because “It's also free because we get it as a part of an enterprise deal.”

The bundle also means paying for more than is used. “Adobe is one where we're clearly not taking advantage of all the tools and capabilities that Adobe has,” one buyer says. And it raises the cost of leaving: “I don't think we're going to get rid of Adobe because we are very locked in.”

Do Adobe's own products work together?

Buyers split, product by product. Adobe Analytics and Target are frequently adopted together: more than four in five Target users in this sample also name Analytics. Separately, several buyers praise the connection — “there's synergy between Adobe Analytics and Target, because it's the same thing,” one says, and another describes the default: “if they already have Adobe Analytics, they go with Adobe Target because there's built-in integration there.” One buyer credits Adobe's shared customer ID: “The integrated ecosystem with a single Adobe ID is really helping to stitch connectivity between all of these different products together.”

Others describe the suite as a set of acquisitions that still need joining. “It doesn't really happen in real life that way, that they're as integrated as they like to be,” one buyer says, “because a lot of these things are their own acquisitions, and they're working to integrate them.” Another is blunter: “The problem with Adobe is, it never talks to each other.” Even the praised pair has critics — “The data discrepancy between the Adobe Target platform and Adobe Analytics is huge,” one says — and an Adobe Experience Manager customer notes “So yes, they're all Adobe tools, but you still have to manually develop integration layers to ensure that this whole thing is robust.”

Why do Adobe customers also use Salesforce Marketing Cloud?

A recurring configuration pairs Adobe products for content, analytics or testing with Salesforce for CRM or email. Salesforce Marketing Cloud is about twice as common at Adobe brands as at other large companies: more than two in five name it, against roughly one in seven naming Adobe Campaign or Journey Optimizer, and some name more than one messaging platform. Buyers who run that split describe it by function: “our CRM systems are very much on Salesforce and Adobe is our main analytics tool for websites and apps,” and “we're mostly Salesforce across the board until you get to the website, which the website's more Adobe.” Sometimes the split comes from the organization: “we have Adobe and Salesforce both coming into the organization through different, say, leadership verticals, and they're causing some confusion there.”

Connecting the two takes effort, buyers say. “Adobe doesn't play very well with Salesforce, even though they say that they do, they don't,” one buyer says; at a bank, Adobe's customer data platform takes data in real time and “then it batches and then sends it all over, in my case, to Marketing Cloud for emails.” Another calls its stack “like a three headed monster between, like, Adobe, Salesforce and LiveRamp.” Not every account is negative — one bank passes the Adobe visitor ID into Salesforce so that “anything in that Adobe ecosystem is now tied to your Salesforce record” — and one buyer still questions running both: “if we have Adobe and we have Salesforce, they do integrate well, but why would you have one and the other?” See Adobe Campaign vs. Salesforce Marketing Cloud and the Salesforce Commerce Cloud stack.

The Adobe stack, layer by layer

How often Adobe brands run Adobe's own product in each layer, which other tools they name in the same layer and how those relate, and how buyers describe the connections. A product being common is separate from how well it connects, which is what the last column reports.

What else sits around an Adobe stack?

An enterprise layer for data, identity, service and messaging. LiveRamp is over three times as common at Adobe brands as at other large companies, and Tealium, Databricks, Sprinklr, ServiceNow, Movable Ink, Bluecore, Epsilon and Airship each appear three to six times as often. Some of these replace or supplement Adobe pieces: one restaurant brand kept Adobe's customer data platform but chose Braze for messaging — “So we really liked Braze's native mobile capabilities and that really drove it” — accepting the risk partly because “Adobe isn't famous for integrating all of their products all that well.” A retailer turned to Dynamic Yield for personalization instead: “I can use Dynamic Yield by itself and personalize 100% of our traffic, known, unknown, anonymous, etc.” And Google Analytics 4 often runs beside Adobe Analytics, “because there are those activation elements that we can't get out of Adobe.”

Data leaving Adobe is a recurring friction. One buyer says of Adobe Analytics, “They make it extremely difficult to get the data out and load it into your data warehouse,” and a healthcare company treats its warehouse as the customer record: “our real CDP is inside our data warehouses.” Running the suite also takes specialists — “it's a very niche skill set too, finding somebody that has Adobe Target experience,” and of Adobe's data platform, “It requires talented Adobe experts and a lot of training to make it work.”

Are brands consolidating onto Adobe or replacing Adobe products?

Both patterns appear in these interviews. Some buyers are consolidating more capabilities into Adobe, replacing other email, testing and analytics tools with Adobe's. Others are replacing individual Adobe products — Adobe Analytics with Google Analytics, AEM with Contentful or Amplience, Adobe Campaign with Salesforce Marketing Cloud. These examples include both completed migrations and planned changes, so they do not establish how many brands have already switched. One brand describes being down to its last product: “Currently, Adobe Experience Manager is the last leg of Adobe that we have.” Another explains why it left: “the incremental year over year increase in price was getting too high for the return, and things kept breaking.” See Adobe Analytics alternatives and the great consolidation.

The stories behind the stack

What this means for your stack

A recurring configuration in these interviews combines Adobe for content, analytics or testing with Salesforce for CRM or email. Several buyers describe the connection between the two suites as taking significant work, while others report it working well — one bank ties Adobe visitor data directly to Salesforce records. Inside Adobe, some pairings are widely praised and others need integration work of their own. Our recommendation, not a practice buyers describe: before adding an Adobe product for its connections, ask for the specific connection you need to be demonstrated on your own data; if Salesforce runs your email or CRM, budget for the Adobe-to-Salesforce handoff rather than assuming a native link; and before consolidating onto either suite, list which tools would have to move with it.

What this page does not show

It shows which tools Adobe brands run, not which ones they should. How often tools appear together says nothing about satisfaction, and a tool appearing beside Adobe does not mean the two are connected. Adobe brands in these interviews are much larger than the comparison group, so part of the difference is company size rather than the choice of Adobe. And experiences of how Adobe products connect vary with which products were bought, when, and how they were implemented, so a gap one buyer describes may not apply to another's setup.

Common questions