Over the past five years interest in "Marketing Clouds" — platforms that nominally support a broad range of marketing use cases — has shot up tremendously. Amid a crowded MarTech space with thousands of niche vendors, these platforms strive to become anchors for the rest of your MarTech stack. Yet it turns out they're quite different from each other.

In terms of market share / mindshare, the four leading marketing platform vendors are Adobe, IBM, Oracle, and Salesforce.

Figure 1: The blue line represents the volume of Google searches in the US for the term "marketing cloud" and shows an upward trajectory since 2012. The other lines represent search terms for different marketing clouds. (Click for larger rendition.)

At RSG we've just released an advisory paper "Contrasting the Major Marketing Clouds" for our MarTech research subscribers. In this brief, you'll find:

• Pros and cons of the different platforms
• Top similarities and differences among them
• Major acquisitions of each vendor
• Ratings for key marketing use cases
• Ratings for strategic technology considerations
• And more..

Figure 2: RSG Advisory Briefing - Contrasting the Major Marketing Clouds

This brief is an excellent way for marketing / technology executives to quickly gain a comparative understanding of the leading marketing clouds.

In addition to these platforms, there are several other marketing suites that may also suit your requirements. Consult our Campaign and Lead Management Technology Evaluations research for in-depth reviews.;

The briefing is available for immediate download to our Campaign and Lead Management Technology research subscribers.

If you are not yet a subscriber, check out a complementary sample evaluation and get in touch with us.