Martech Landscape 2025: Growing, shrinking and reshaping all at once

Martech is in an unprecedented state of flux. Tools, AI adoption and stack architecture are all changing, reorganizing, not with chaos, but with design. If you’re not maintaining, you’re already behind. Here are the need-to-know insights concerning the changes.

15,384 martech tools 

In 2025, the marketing technology landscape is balancing boom and bust. The 2025 martech story just isn’t one in all chaos or calm, but of convergence. Boom, bust and balance usually are not competing narratives — they’re coexisting realities. Martech is evolving available in the market and in your stack.

The 2025 Martech Landscape signals a deceptively calm return to “normal” — a gentle 9% growth — but beneath that may be a market undergoing seismic shifts. It’s not a single story, but three unfolding at once.

There are 2,489 latest tools from greater than 11,000 candidates, continuing the expansion that followed the genAI shockwave of 2024. Content AI categories like video and content marketing are thriving, with additions far outpacing removals — signaling real demand, not only hype.

At the identical time, many martech tools went bust. The 1,211 tools removed are essentially the most in three years. For essentially the most part, they were long-standing tools that ran out of runway. More than 84% simply shut down; most were founded before 2020 and beloved by users (52% had G2 scores above 4.5). Quality alone couldn’t save them from financial realities or market irrelevance. 

And yet, there’s also “balance.” Amid the extremes, one category quietly surged: Product Management. Without flashy growth or mass exits, it nearly doubled its stack presence (23% to 42%) and improved its G2 rating by 3.2% — the best increase across of all the tools we measured. Tools like Jira and Aha! underpin a brand new norm: brands constructing martech in-house with low-code platforms. 

Product Management is the backbone of a growing shift where brands don’t just buy martech — they construct it. Fueled by low-code platforms and in-house experimentation, firms are assembling bespoke internal tools.

Dig deeper: 10 insights for marketing and MOps leaders from the State of Martech 2025 report

AI adoption

AI is rapidly redefining and replacing the stack architecture. The evolution follows a five-stage curve, reflecting distinct levels of AI integration and sophistication.

The Martech Stack AI Adoption Curve below shows how AI went from a helpful assistant to an integrated operator. Each iteration builds on the last, toward a future where AI just isn’t an add-on, however the architecture itself.

Curve 1 – AI Assistants (87.5% adoption)

Tools like ChatGPT dominate as external aids for ideation, writing and summarization. They’re powerful yet peripheral — democratizing AI across teams but living outside core martech systems.

Curve 2 – Co-Pilots (54.2%)

AI shifts inward. Embedded directly in CRMs and analytics platforms, Co-Pilots offer suggestions inside tools marketers already use, signaling the early stages of inside-out AI integration.

Curve 3 – AI Workflows (69.8%)

Automation kicks in. AI now orchestrates complex, multi-step processes across platforms using tools like Zapier and n8n. AI goes from a productivity layer right into a process engine.

Curve 4 – AI Agents (44.8%)

This is the boldest leap. Agents act with autonomy, optimizing campaigns or routing leads in real time. Adoption is lower attributable to complexity and risk, but this marks the emergence of AI as an operational layer throughout the stack.

Curve 5 – Model Context Protocols (MCPs)

Still nascent, MCPs enable persistent memory and coordination between tools and agents. They promise a future where AI not only acts but remembers, collaborates and evolves with context.

Dig deeper: Should creative operations report back to creative or MOps?

Two major shifts in martech composability

Martech stack design is undergoing two significant composability shifts — one in B2B and one other in B2C/B2B2C — each redefining what sits at the middle of MOps.

We previously found that martech stacks operate like solar systems: Center platforms anchor the stack, with orchestration and activation tools orbiting them. 

In 2025, that center is shifting. Whether CRM, marketing automation platforms (MAPs) or cloud data warehouses (CDWs), marketers are reorganizing their systems for agility, integration and long-term adaptability. Composability is now the gravitational principle of Martech Stack Architectures. It lets brands group and align stacks around the shopper experiences to drive profits.

Shift 1: B2B stacks turn out to be more composable

CRM stays the gravitational core, growing barely to 42% because the central platform. While CRM holds firm, MAPs are receding, falling from 30.7% to 26%. Most notably, custom-built or “other” platforms jumped from 2% to 10%, signaling a surge in modular, composable architectures tailored to business needs. These setups often retain CRM at the middle while wrapping it with bespoke orchestration layers that integrate automation, content and data workflows.

Shift 2: B2C and B2B2C stacks rebalance their center

Customer data platforms (CDPs) lost their lead, dropping from 26.9% to 17.4%. MAPs surged to 26.1% and CDWs rose to 23.9%. We are moving away from monolithic CDPs toward composable ones, moving to cloud-native tools like Fivetran, DBT and Hightouch. MAPs are evolving into orchestration engines, while CDWs turn out to be the AI-ready data foundation, often owned by IT but accessed by marketing.

Dig deeper: 8 challenges for marketing teams navigating the MAP market

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