Go beyond a basic composable Customer Data Platform. 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 | Hightouch | ||
|---|---|---|---|
| Connect to any data | Native Salesforce Connectors | Yes | No |
| Zero Copy Bi-directional | Yes | No | |
| 250+ connectors (structured & unstructured) | Yes | No | |
| Unstructured data ingestion (Sharepoint, Zendesk, Google Drive, email, PDF, video & audio files)Intelligent Document Processing | Yes | No | |
| Intelligent Document Processing | Yes | No | |
| Batch Ingestion | Yes | No | |
| Streaming Ingestion | Yes | Limited | |
| Real-time ingestion | Yes | Limited | |
| Data Sharing (DW/DL, business apps & ad platforms) | Yes | Yes | |
| Harmonize profiles | Identity resolution | Yes | Yes |
| Real-time Customer profile updates | Yes | No | |
| Real-Time Segmentation | Yes | No | |
| Unified & Standardized Data Model | Yes | No | |
| Data Prep & Transformations | Yes | No | |
| 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 | Limited | |
| Private Connect | Yes | Yes | |
| 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 | No | |
| Agentforce / Agent customization | Yes | No | |
| Prompt Builder | Yes | No | |
| Out of the box Agents | Yes | No | |
| Retrieval Augmented Generation / Atlas Reasoning Engine | Yes | No |
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Salesforce Data Cloud breaks down silos and lays the foundation for rich customer experiences by harmonizing and operationalizing data from a variety of data sources, including zero copy integrations with data warehouses and data lakes. Data Cloud offers a full view of the customer beyond and activates across sales, service, marketing and commerce for full customer engagement. Salesforce with Agentforce offers out-of-the-box and customizable agent experiences (with agent builder, prompt builder, support for unstructured & structured data, RAG, semantic search, BYOM, BYOLLM) in the flow of work.
Hightouch relies on a data warehouse or lake having all relevant customer data to get a comprehensive customer view. Hightouch also has limited data security & governance capabilities and relies on the external data platform for data governance. Hightouch offers limited ‘marketing-focused activations’ to marketing automation tools like Salesforce Marketing Cloud. Hightouch offers limited predictive AI capabilities with AI decisioning, which has significant dependencies on the data infrastructure and data flow within the data warehouse/lake to be effective.
The deep unification of Data Cloud within the Salesforce Platform offers the significant benefit of seamless data activation across all applications and workflows. This tight integration eliminates data silos, fostering a unified customer view that empowers real-time insights and actions. By streamlining workflows and enhancing AI capabilities across the platform, businesses can leverage a holistic understanding of their customers to deliver more personalized and effective experiences.
Salesforce Data Cloud does not have any integrations with Hightouch. However, Hightouch does work with other Salesforce products. For example, Hightouch can rely on Salesforce Marketing Cloud as the marketing automation platform for activating segments & audiences. Hightouch can also use data from Salesforce Sales & Service cloud to inform the customer profiles for its marketing activities.
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.
Data Cloud does not replace the data lake or data warehouse you have already invested in. Data Cloud offers zero copy integrations with most data lakes or data warehouses including Snowflake, Databricks, AWS RedShift and Google BigQuery. Data Cloud overcomes the challenge of activating siloed enterprise data by using Zero Copy integrations. This eliminates duplication and delays, enabling real-time customer profiles, automated actions, personalized experiences, and smarter decisions at scale.
Hightouch has some flexibility within its business tier and is able to offer some of its capabilities (like reverse-ETL, ID resolution etc.) a la carte. Salesforce Data Cloud has a consumption based pricing model and also offers flexibility and optionality in terms of its credit consumption - for example, identity resolution can be optional within the Data Cloud credit consumption model.
Cost comparisons for Data Cloud and Hightouch are dependent on numerous factors and it is important to account for hidden costs & complexity when it comes to Hightouch’s composable architecture.
Hightouch is dependent on a data warehouse/lake for all its storage resources and compute resources leading to consumption costs on these data platforms. Additional costs for maintenance are required for updates to the individual components, integrations & version management, compatibility. Not to mention the dependence on technically skilled data engineering teams.
In contrast, with Data Cloud, you only pay for what you use.
Data Cloud’s Zero Copy 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 Data Cloud instantly, breaking down silos while maintaining full control of your data.
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. Data Cloud transforms this unstructured datainto 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, unstructured, and third-party data across your enterprise.
No. You are not required to duplicate data to ingest to Salesforce Data Cloud. Using Data Cloud’s Zero Copy integration 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.
Hightouch can only use and ingest data from a handful of data sources, which are primarily data platforms (like databases, data warehouses or data lakes) or spreadsheets (Google Sheets or Excel files) or cloud storage. For any other data sources, Hightouch relies on an existing data warehouse or data lake as the primary source of data. And it is expected that data ingestion via ETL has been implemented from various data sources into the data warehouse/lake.
Hightouch only offers role-based access controls and row-level controls. Beyond these basic controls, Hightouch relies on the data warehouse/lake for broader data governance. Salesforce Data Cloud offers data governance via dynamic data masking, attribute-based access control, AI-based tagging and classification, row/column/field level security.
Hightouch AI Decisioning uses predictive AI to automate and optimize segmentation and A/B testing. AI Decisioning relies on established data pipelines. If the relevant data pipelines are not configured, AI decisioning functionality is limited. Hightouch has only recently introduced their first and only generative AI experience with a Campaign Intelligence Copilot.
Hightouch has only one campaign intelligence agent out-of-the-box. Hightouch does not offer any other generative AI capabilities, no AI customization, no agentic experiences and no BYOM/BYOLLM capabilities.
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.
