11 Best Adobe Target competitors and alternatives in 2024

While it’s a powerful tool, Adobe Target has some downsides that force many teams to look for an alternative. Specifically:

• Its integration is complex and highly dependent on technical teams. This, coupled with Adobe Target’s learning curve and customer support issues, often results in a lengthy setup process and slow time-to-value.
• There are no built-in messaging channels like SMS, WhatsApp, or Facebook Messenger. If you want to reach users on these touchpoints, you’ll have to buy, deploy, and manage other solutions.
• It relies on integrations with other tools like Adobe Analytics, Audience Manager, and Adobe Campaign. This is especially true for teams with complex omnichannel use cases that span across different customer lifecycle stages.

To help you find the right alternative for your needs, this guide contains the 11 best Adobe Target competitors, including: 

• Insider
• Salesforce Marketing Cloud
• Oracle Marketing
• Dynamic Yield
• Monetate
• Optimizely
• Kameleoon
• SiteSpect
• AB Tasty
• VWO
• Webtrends Optimize

All of these solutions offer most of Adobe Target’s key functionality in the A/B testing, personalization, and automation categories. However, some — like Insider, Salesforce, and Oracle — let you access more channels and serve more advanced marketing use cases.

Insider can help you connect data across channels, predict future behavior with AI, and automate cross-channel journeys from a single platform with an incredibly fast time to value. Try our platform or book a free demo with our team.

#1 Insider

Insider brings together the most extensive set of personalization capabilities for websites and mobile apps, as well as for channels like email, SMS, web push, and WhatsApp.

Over 1200 mid-market and enterprise brands like Adidas, GAP, Coca-Cola, Philips, and CNN, use Insider’s toolkit to:

• Personalize every customer touchpoint to improve conversions, revenue, and acquisition costs. 
• Work with an experienced global support team that can help them make the most out of their marketing efforts and resources.
• Leverage the full potential of AI to build, manage, and optimize personalization campaigns, omnichannel journeys, and A/B tests in real-time.
• Make data-driven decisions, work more efficiently, and reduce martech bloat by consolidating their marketing stack and customer data into a single platform (instead of a bunch of point solutions).
• And much more.

As an advanced personalization solution, Insider has been ranked as the best personalization software by G2. Users also rank Insider as a top solution in terms of ease of setup and use, as it enables marketers to build, launch, automate, and personalize omnichannel campaigns with zero IT dependency.

However, Insider is much more than a personalization platform. As an enterprise-grade solution provider, Insider also ranks at the top of other key categories, including:

• Customer data platforms by G2.
• Omnichannel marketing platforms by IDC.
• Cross-channel campaign management by Forrester.

Thanks to Insider’s versatility, you can achieve the same level of functionality that would usually require 5+ solutions from the Adobe Experience Cloud.

In the next sections, you’ll learn how Insider enables you to speed up your time to value, work more efficiently, and improve ROI.

Fast implementation and time-to-value

As we said, many Adobe Target users go through a long and difficult implementation process. This, alongside the unreliable customer support and steep learning curve, can drastically slow down the time-to-value and ROI.

We know this is one of the biggest challenges organizations face with personalization and omnichannel marketing platforms. That’s why we’ve invested lots of resources into building different ways to help our clients avoid this problem.

As a result, Insider constantly ranks as the best solution when it comes to ease of setup, ease of use, and support quality. 

Note: Click here to see how users rate Adobe Target and Insider in these (and other) categories.

One of the biggest reasons for Insider’s success here is our experienced support team.

Unlike many enterprise marketing platforms, we don’t outsource our support to agencies or system integrators. Our experts are all trained in-house, so they can help you get started with the platform, resolve any issues you may have, and generate results as quickly as possible. Specifically, our team will:

• Help you implement Insider at no extra setup cost. We also offer flexible implementation options, as you can use Insider’s website tag to crawl through your site and automatically create a product catalog, upload catalogs as CSV and XML files, or feed the necessary data through an API.
• Migrate automated flows and customer journeys from other platforms (e.g., email and SMS marketing software) into Insider for you.
• Analyze your analytics data to give you suggestions for improving your marketing and personalization strategies.

Once you start using Insider, you can speed up your campaign launches with our versatile template store and no-code solutions. 

We’ve built templates for all channels and various use cases, like website gamification for faster lead generation, price drop alerts on messaging channels (e.g., SMS or WhatsApp) for generating conversions, and more.

There’s no need to do any coding (including editing HTML), as each template can be easily customized using a drag-and-drop editor. 

You also have a WYSIWYG editor that lets you easily adjust personalization campaigns and preview how they will look on your site. Again, this doesn’t require any coding knowledge, so marketers can launch campaigns via a simple user interface without needing constant assistance from technical teams.

This simplicity drastically reduces the dependency on technical teams and speeds up campaign launches even more.

Data aggregation and in-depth segmentation

The personalization process is dependent on accurate, easily accessible customer data. Because that data is usually scattered across various disconnected systems, Insider can integrate and share data with hundreds of popular tools used by marketers and technical teams.

For example, our Integration Hub has ready-made integrations for various solutions, including:

• Customer relationship management (CRM) systems, like Salesforce, Pipedrive, and HubSpot.
• Email marketing tools, like Mailchimp, ActiveCampaign, and Constant Contact.
• Mobile and web analytics platforms, like Mixpanel, Amplitude, and Google Analytics.
• Customer data platforms (CDPs), like Segment, mParticle, and Tealium.
• Marketing automation tools, like Pardot, Keap, and Marketo.
• eCommerce platforms, like Shopify and BigCommerce.
• And many other SaaS solutions.

You can even use Insider to aggregate all your customer data into a single convenient database via our enterprise CDP. This helps you overcome data silos and gives you all the necessary data for your personalization campaigns in one place.

Our CDP comes at no extra cost when using Insider’s personalization capabilities, so there are no additional fees for consolidating your customer data.

Plus, the CDP can aggregate information from any online or offline source — including CRMs, APIs, analytics tools, data warehouses, and other solution providers. It also creates 360-degree profiles of all customers, like the one shown below.

These profiles contain crucial information about each customer, including their names, emails, demographic info, phone numbers, interactions with your brand on specific channels, on-site and in-app behaviors, and predictive characteristics, like their likelihood to purchase.

If you’re interested, we explore this topic in more detail in our article on the 11 main CDP use cases for marketing teams.

Lastly, when using Insider, you always have access to powerful and versatile audience segmentation capabilities. 

For example, you can start targeting customers quickly and accurately with predefined audiences (e.g., leads and cart abandoners) and standard characteristics (e.g., locations and devices). 

Then, you can make your segments even more precise with AI-powered predictive segmentation that lets you target customers based on their likelihood to purchase or engage on a channel, projected spending, discount affinity, and more.

Versatile channel access and advanced personalization from a single platform

Unlike many A/B testing, personalization, and optimization solutions, Insider isn’t limited to just two or three channels. Our platform brings together 12+ plus channels under one umbrella, including:

• Web and mobile apps.
• Push notifications.
• Email and SMS.
• Site search.
• WhatsApp.
• Social media and search ads.

This broad channel access lets you reach customers where they’re at. Plus, Insider’s personalization capabilities enable you to tailor the user experience across every touchpoint.

For example, you can use Insider to:

• Personalize all elements of your website or mobile app, including content, messaging, product recommendations, site search results, and even Instagram-like stories. For example, Dover Saddlery used our web personalization suite to generate $2 million in incremental revenue and a 29x ROI.

• Send highly-targeted emails. You can scale your AI-powered product recommendations across email and even use advanced capabilities like AMP to deliver interactive, web-like experiences right inside your emails. For example, Remix used Insider’s email and marketing automation features to increase first purchases by 104%. 

• Reach users on messaging channels like SMS, WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, and LINE. Again, your messages can be personalized based on each customer’s needs, interests, and preferences. You can use these channels in conjunction with traditional ones (like on-site and email) to engage every customer on their preferred touchpoint. NA-KD used Insider to send personalized emails, SMS messages, and push notifications, resulting in a 25% uplift in CLTV and 72x ROI in 12 months.

The ability to consolidate so many channels provides a few essential benefits, especially for large organizations:

• Simplicity. Using a bunch of point solutions can get incredibly complex and time-consuming, as each one comes with separate credentials, UIs, and learning curves. Consolidating your stack removes this complexity and drastically streamlines operations.
• Spend optimization. Oftentimes, martech bloat leads to spending way too much on different tools and subscriptions. Using one solution to build, manage, optimize, and analyze campaigns can reduce your total cost of ownership (TCO) in addition to simplifying operations.
• Maximization of efforts and budget. The more consolidated your stack, the more time, money, and energy you’ll have to focus on what really matters: finding ways to engage the right audiences, with the right messaging, on the right channels, at the right times.

Automate and personalize cross-channel journeys

Insider empowers you to create consistent journeys across all touchpoints with Architect — our customer journey builder and marketing automation tool.

Architect is extremely versatile and user-friendly. You can use it to create simple automated flows and complex campaigns for all sorts of use cases like:

• Cross-selling items across email, SMS, and WhatsApp.
• Bringing customers back to your site with personalized web push notifications.
• Maximizing average order value (AOV) and customer lifetime value (LTV) with individualized lifecycle marketing tactics.

All of this is controlled via a simple drag-and-drop editor. As you can see below, the editor lets you choose channels, wait times, conditions, and much more.

And while you can fine-tune every element of your journeys manually, our platform can also take most of the heavy lifting off your plate.

Insider comes with lots of AI-powered capabilities that automate various time-consuming tasks around segmentation, campaign creation, A/B testing, personalization, and more. Some of these include:

• Send-Time Optimization (STO), which analyzes customers’ behavioral patterns and automatically sends messages at the times they’re most likely to engage with them.

• Next-Best Channel Predictions, which predicts which channels users are most likely to engage on. It’s very useful when you don’t know how to continue a journey or campaign beyond a certain point.

• A/B Test Winner-Autoselection, which automatically guides users to the winning variant in an A/B test, based on a metric you select (open rates, conversions, revenue, etc.) You can use it regardless of whether you’re comparing simple elements like email copy and images or entire journey flows against each other.

• Generative segment creation (powered by Sirius AI™), which uses your text prompts to automatically create targeted segments for your campaigns. All you have to do is describe your use case or goal, like driving first purchases, increasing retention, and so on.

• Content generation (powered by Sirius AI™), which also uses text prompts to generate copy and images for your campaigns. Again, this can save you tons of time and help you scale your campaigns much faster.

We explore this topic in more detail in our guides to:

• The best AI personalization tools.
• Omnichannel marketing automation.
• The best marketing automation platforms

For more details on how Insider can help you maximize your marketing spend, personalize all customer touchpoints, and automate cross-channel campaigns, book a live demo with our team.

#2 Salesforce Marketing Cloud

Salesforce Marketing Cloud is a combination of tools for enterprise marketing teams. There are lots of solutions under the Marketing Cloud umbrella that serve different use cases, like:

• Personalization across websites, email, mobile apps, and more.
• Data unification and marketing analytics.
• Marketing automation.

Out of all these solutions, the Marketing Cloud Personalization product is the most direct competitor to Adobe Target as it’s also focused on tailoring the experience of individual customers using machine learning and AI.

Learn more: 5 Best Salesforce Marketing Cloud competitors and alternatives

#3 Oracle Marketing

Oracle Marketing is also an enterprise-grade marketing and user engagement platform for different use cases, including personalization, automation, data aggregation, and content management. Similar to the other marketing clouds, Oracle acquired many of the solutions that make up the current Oracle Marketing offering, like Eloqua in 2012, Infinity in 2017, and CrowTwist in 2019. 

#4 Dynamic Yield

Dynamic Yield is a personalization platform owned by Mastercard. It has powerful website personalization capabilities, alongside versatile product recommendation algorithms and A/B testing features. While useful for website personalization, Dynamic Yield is limited in terms of channels, as it doesn’t support messaging channels like SMS, WhatsApp, or push notifications.

Learn more: 9 Best Dynamic Yield competitors and alternatives (by use case)

#5 Monetate

Monetate is a personalization platform offering solutions for three distinct use cases:

• Personalization with features like automated personalization, segmentation and targeting, and audience discovery.
• Experimentation with features like A/B testing, dynamic testing, and feature experimentation.
• Discovery with features like product recommendations, personalized search, and social proof.

#6 Optimizely

Optimizely is a digital experience platform. While it’s widely known for its A/B testing features, Optimizely actually offers three distinct products:

• Experiment, which includes tools for feature and web testing, personalization, and experiment collaboration.
• Monetize, which helps deliver relevant shopping experiences via product recommendations and product information management.
• Orchestrate, which includes a CMS for building websites and landing pages and a content marketing platform for teams that want to collaborate on digital assets and campaigns.

#7 Kameleoon

Kameleoon is an experimentation and personalization platform for digital marketing and product teams. It can be used for both web and feature experimentation with features like A/B and multivariate testing, a graphic editor, segmentation, no-code feature experiments, and more. Its AI-powered personalization capabilities also help tailor website experiences, emails, and online ads.

#8 SiteSpect

SiteSpect is an A/B testing and experimentation platform that also offers various tools like:

• Personalization, which uses machine learning to build and target the right audience segments.
• Recommendations, which lets marketers add product recommendations anywhere on a site without coding.
• Rollous, which helps product teams manage features and releases, including toggling between different environments, testing new releases and platforms, and more.

#9 AB Tasty

AB Tasty is an experience optimization platform, with a main focus on testing, experimentation, and conversion rate optimization. Besides its A/B testing tool and feature experimentation capabilities, AB Tasty also offers solutions for advanced personalization, AI-powered product recommendations, and tailored site search results. Personalization campaigns can be built with a user-friendly drag-and-drop editor while utilizing a variety of granular campaign triggers.

#10 VWO

VWO is a versatile platform that offers a variety of tools for web and mobile app testing, data aggregation, customer behavior analytics (including heatmaps and session recordings), and program management. In terms of replacing Adobe Target, the most relevant of these products are:

• Testing, which enables teams to run web, mobile, and server-side tests and track their results.
• Personalization, which analyzes various data points to create tailored experiences across the entire user journey.

#11 Webtrends Optimize

Webtrends Optimize is an experimentation platform that comprises different website optimization tools. These tools help teams run A/B split, multivariate, and server-side tests, personalize customer experiences, add social proof to their sites, and more. The company also offers different models, including managed, tailor-made, and self-service options for teams with different needs.

Personalize all customer touchpoints with Insider

Insider is the ideal Adobe Target alternative for midsize and enterprise companies. It offers everything that Adobe Target does — including robust A/B testing, omnichannel personalization, and AI-powered automation — while also allowing teams to:

• Improve key metrics like conversions, revenue, acquisition costs, and ROI.
• Build, automate, and analyze campaigns across all channels from a single place.
• Partner with an experienced global customer support team that can help maximize their marketing efforts and drastically shorten their time-to-value.
• Reach customers and personalize their experience on a plethora of channels, including on-site, email, SMS, WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, push notifications, and more.
• Access a vast library of proven templates for any channel or use case — from generating email, SMS, or WhatsApp subscribers with the help of gamification to automating cross-channel cart abandonment journeys or cross-sell campaigns.
• Use the full marketing potential of machine learning and AI to reveal customers’ preferences, work more efficiently, and ensure every message is always sent to the right audiences, on the right channels, at the right times.

Click here to book a demo with our team and learn how Insider can help you reach your business goals.