The Composable Dilemma: Choosing Between CDPs, SaaS Platforms, and Data Warehouses

9/25/2025 Jake Hall

Your data foundation matters more than ever. In an increasingly complex marketing environment, having a solid data foundation to analyze, make decisions, and execute programs is critical to competitive success. The challenge for most CMOs, CTOs, and CIOs, however, is how to best organize and leverage the most relevant information so that it is accessible and actionable for the marketing team.

While there are many ways to approach this challenge, we’ll explore three primary approaches we see today: the Enterprise Data Warehouse (EDW), traditional Customer Data Platforms (SaaS CDPs), and Composable Customer Data Platforms (Composable CDPs). We’ll review some of the common pros and cons of each approach, along with tips to help determine the best strategy for your organization. 

1. Enterprise data warehouse — power and pitfalls

For many organizations, an Enterprise Data Warehouse is a common starting point. An EDW can vary greatly in complexity. It often starts with simple data consolidation for operations, finance, and accounting. As enterprises grow, multiple disparate systems emerge for sales, inventory management, and other functions. As implied by the name, an EDW provides an important strategic foundation for the enterprise, but is not necessarily oriented to marketing purposes and carries with it the additional overhead induced by its broad and often undefined scope. 

An EDW provides many advantages. Acting as a single source of truth (SSOT), it reduces data silos by consolidating customer, sales, campaign, and product data from multiple platforms (including CRM, web analytics, POS, social, and more). This enables better customer insights and analytics through purpose-built data marts and a nearly limitless array of tools that can be integrated with the right investment. A well-designed and maintained EDW can help align and strengthen collaboration and credibility across an organization. 

Unfortunately, many of the strengths of an EDW also contribute to its downsides. Integrating all of the systems within an enterprise can result in a massive and sprawling project requiring significant internal investment, expertise, and commitment. Centralizing data raises concerns about customer privacy (GDPR, CCPA) and requires strict access controls and governance. Marketing may still need IT support for data ingestion, schema changes, or advanced queries. Bottlenecks arise when priorities misalign or business users lack autonomy.

An enterprise data warehouse is a powerful enabler for customer-centric, data-driven marketing. But it’s a big investment that requires cultural adoption, ongoing governance, and close collaboration with IT. If the organization isn’t ready to commit, there’s a risk of spending heavily on a tool that doesn’t deliver its full potential.

2. SaaS CDP — marketing’s fast track to personalization

On the other end of the spectrum is the traditional Customer Data Platform. A traditional CDP follows the Software as a Service (SaaS) model, offering a ready-built environment for customer marketing. It integrates online and offline data sources into a single profile, enabling true omnichannel personalization. SaaS CDPs are created with the marketer’s needs in mind. They often provide no-code interfaces for building audiences, segments, and triggers directly, and come pre-configured with modeling, analytics, and reporting tools. Being SaaS, deployment is faster compared to building an enterprise data warehouse (weeks or months instead of years) and often includes pre-built connectors for popular marketing tools (such as HubSpot, Salesforce, Meta Ads, and Google Ads).

While SaaS CDPs can quickly provide a great marketing-focused toolset, there are some pitfalls to consider. Ongoing SaaS fees (based on data volume or Monthly Active Users, or MAUs) can become costly, and ROI depends on whether marketing fully utilizes the available features. Organizations risk data fragmentation because CDPs often focus on customer data, excluding financial, product, or operational information. Without alignment to enterprise systems, this can create two sources of truth. SaaS CDPs also vary widely in the toolsets they provide. Some may excel in areas like dashboarding but fall short in others, such as identity resolution. With a monolithic approach and the risks of vendor lock-in, selecting the right CDP can be a very high-risk decision. 

With this in mind, a SaaS CDP is designed to empower marketing directly ? enabling real-time personalization, unified profiles, and agile campaign execution without IT bottlenecks. However, its value hinges on adoption, integration with the broader data ecosystem, and managing costs and compliance.

3. Composable CDP — flexibility built on your data stack

Sitting somewhere in the middle, a composable CDP is a newer approach that’s different from a packaged or SaaS CDP but more focused than an EDW. A composable CDP doesn’t rely on one vendor for ingestion, identity resolution, storage, and activation. It leverages your existing data warehouse (like Snowflake, BigQuery, Redshift, etc.) plus best-in-class tools to create a flexible, choose-your-own-adventure approach to customer data.

The composable CDP offers several advantages over a standalone EDW or off-the-shelf SaaS CDP. Leveraging existing EDW integrations and infrastructure minimizes data silos and allows marketing to work with the same “truth” as sales, finance, and product teams. Additionally, it empowers the team to select tools best suited to their unique needs — without being locked into a single vendor’s ecosystem or product development cycles. There are also increased opportunities for efficiency and organizational alignment by eliminating data duplication and promoting consistent application of governance and privacy. 

The composable approach is not without its challenges, however. As a wise person once said, with great choice comes great responsibility. A composable CDP brings greater initial complexity and internal ownership. Teams must evaluate, select, and integrate multiple vendor solutions to match their unique needs and capabilities. When IT resources are stretched thin, developing and maintaining integrations adds an extra burden. Governance risks can create bottlenecks and strain the organization.

A composable CDP is ideal if your company already has a strong modern data stack and values flexibility, control, and cross-department collaboration. It’s more about building a future-proof, scalable customer data foundation than just quick wins. 

How to choose the right path for your organization

There is clearly no one-size-fits-all answer to this question, and even the definitions of what constitutes a CDP or EDW are subject to interpretation from one vendor to the next. 

At Iridio^℠ by RRD, we work to identify each client’s key challenges and strengths to recommend and implement the right solutions for their situation. Often, we find clients have strong internal integrations and data practices, allowing us to enhance their efforts with our deep creative and strategic bench. Other times, we come to the table with robust consumer identity and data management capabilities. This helps us create that foundational SSOT, establishing a truly composable approach to CRM overall. 

Jake Hall is a Senior Director of Integrated Strategy at Iridio^℠ by RRD, where he brings 30 years of experience in CRM and data-driven marketing to help clients achieve measurable success in driving customer engagement.