Earlier this year, Forrester published the Q1 2026 edition of its Forrester Wave™ for Email Marketing Service Providers. Salesforce Marketing Cloud scored a 2.00 on Current Offering — the lowest of all 12 evaluated vendors — and landed at the bottom of the Contenders category. Four years earlier, in the Q1 2022 edition of the same report, Salesforce was already a Contender, but with a Current Offering score of 2.95 and a somewhat better relative position. The trajectory is unmistakable: down, and accelerating.
If you read my earlier piece on whether Salesforce is losing focus on Marketing Cloud Engagement, none of this is surprising. SFMC’s release notes over the past five years tell the story of incremental improvement, not bold reinvention. Competitors like Braze, Cordial, and Bloomreach have poured investment into AI-powered content generation, real-time personalisation, and marketer-friendly UX — the exact criteria Forrester weights heavily.
But here’s where it gets interesting. Just months before Forrester’s Q1 2026 report dropped, Gartner published its September 2025 Magic Quadrant for Multichannel Marketing Hubs. In that evaluation, Salesforce sits squarely in the Leaders quadrant, right alongside Adobe. Same product family. Same vendor. Same year. Radically different conclusion.
So which analyst is right?
I’d argue they both are — and that the divergence tells us more about where the industry is heading than either report does alone.
What Forrester measures (and why it matters less than it used to)
The Forrester Wave for Email Marketing Service Providers evaluates, as the name suggests, email marketing. The criteria include message composition, dynamic messaging, deliverability, in-email innovation, content management, querying and segmentation, measurement, and skills improvement. It is a thorough assessment of how well a vendor helps you build, send, and optimise emails.
In the 2026 edition, Forrester has added criteria like accessibility, responsible AI, and regulatory compliance — all relevant. But the fundamental lens remains channel-centric. The Wave asks: how good is your email marketing tool at doing email marketing?
And on that question, Salesforce doesn’t compete well. The native template editor is clunky — one customer in Forrester’s evaluation reportedly uses a third-party tool for template creation because Salesforce’s own tools are too technical. Message composition, in-email innovation, and content management all score at the bottom of the pack. These are fair criticisms. If you are evaluating ESPs as standalone email execution engines, Salesforce Marketing Cloud Engagement in 2026 might not be the best product in the market.
But here is the fundamental challenge with this framing: fewer and fewer organisations are buying an email execution engine.
What Gartner measures (and why it correlates with business value)
Gartner’s Magic Quadrant evaluates Multichannel Marketing Hubs — a category defined by the ability to orchestrate personalised campaigns and event-driven customer journeys across channels. The criteria span data integration and management, campaign and journey management, analytics and reporting, consent and preference management, prescriptive AI, two-way conversational messaging, advertising activations, and digital commerce integration.
This is a fundamentally different question. Gartner asks: how well does your platform help marketers orchestrate personalised experiences across the full customer lifecycle?
In this lens, Salesforce’s strengths become evident. Its Agent Builder helps marketers construct AI agents for audience creation and personalised recommendations. Data Cloud enables real-time audience resolution and activation across channels — including connecting affinity audiences from third-party advertisers. The Salesforce ecosystem advantage — Sales, Service, Marketing, and Commerce under one platform umbrella — creates a unified customer profile that no standalone ESP can match.
Gartner isn’t blind to Salesforce’s challenges — they flag Data Cloud’s consumption-based pricing complexity, the still-limited availability of marketing-specific agents in Agentforce, and the disruptive transition from Journey Builder to Flow Orchestrator (which I personally find a really bold as well as a right move- and I will explain why in this article). But Gartner recognises that the value of a marketing platform in 2025–2026 is measured in orchestration breadth, not email depth.
The real shift: from channel execution to business orchestration
I’ve been making a version of this argument for a while now — most explicitly at Salesforce Partner Summit earlier this year, where Miranda Young and I explored the convergence of marketing and service use cases on the Salesforce platform. The phrase I keep coming back to is business orchestration: the idea that the marketing function is no longer about running campaigns on channels, but about orchestrating customer experiences across the entire business.
This is not a Salesforce pitch. It’s a market reality. When a customer receives a proactive service alert via Marketing Cloud, replies to a WhatsApp message that routes to an agent with full context, and then gets a follow-up offer personalised by Data Cloud — that’s not “email marketing.” That’s a business process that happens to use marketing technology as its execution layer. The value isn’t in how beautifully the email renders. The value is in the data model, the orchestration logic, the integration architecture, and the real-time decisioning that makes the entire flow possible.
In the work I’m doing with Jonas Lamberty on our “Concepts First, Platform Second” framework, we argue that the practitioners who thrive in this landscape are the ones who understand the problem domain — identity, consent, personalisation, integration — deeply enough to solve it with whatever platform capabilities are available. The channel is the medium. The concept is the message. And the concept that matters most right now is orchestration.
So what should you make of Salesforce’s Forrester score?
If your organisation is looking for the best standalone email execution tool — the most intuitive drag-and-drop editor, the most advanced in-email interactivity, the slickest campaign creation interface — then the Forrester score is relevant and accurate. You should look seriously at Braze, Cordial, Iterable, or Bloomreach. These vendors are building excellent email products that genuinely outperform Salesforce on channel-specific craft.
But if your organisation’s marketing challenges look more like “how do we unify customer data across sales, service, and marketing to deliver personalised experiences across channels in real time” — then the Forrester email Wave is answering the wrong question. The Gartner Magic Quadrant, for all its limitations, is closer to the evaluation framework that matches how modern marketing organisations actually create value.
The deeper question isn’t “is Salesforce a good email platform?” It’s “is email the right unit of analysis for evaluating a marketing platform?” And increasingly, the answer is no.
Where this leaves partners, and why it matters to us at NoA Ignite
This is also where I think the partner conversation becomes critical. The shift from channel execution to business orchestration doesn’t simplify technology decisions — it complicates them. You’re no longer just implementing an ESP. You’re designing integration architectures that connect Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, Data Cloud, and Marketing Cloud into a coherent customer experience. You’re navigating Data Cloud’s consumption pricing model. You’re helping clients decide when to build on SFMC’s ExactTarget engine versus when to start building on core with Marketing Cloud Growth and Advanced. You’re making bets about which capabilities will mature fast enough to justify migration.
At NoA Ignite, this is exactly where we operate. Our Salesforce practice isn’t built around any single cloud — it’s built around understanding how the clouds compose together to solve real business problems. When we scope a multi-cloud implementation, we start with the business orchestration layer: what does the customer experience need to look like, and how do data, decisions, and channels need to connect to deliver it? The platform choices follow from there.
That approach means we don’t shy away from conversations about SFMC’s weaknesses. The native editor is clunky. Data integration does require more manual effort than it should. The pricing model is complex. Acknowledging these things honestly is what lets us help clients navigate the real trade-offs — and design architectures that use each part of the Salesforce ecosystem where it genuinely adds value.
The trajectory
Looking at the five-year arc across both analyst reports, the story is clear: Salesforce has moved its investment from the email execution layer (where ExactTarget was a genuine pioneer) to the data and orchestration layer (where Data Cloud and Agentforce now sit). This trade-off shows up as a declining Forrester score and a stable Gartner position.
Whether that trade-off works for your organisation depends entirely on what you’re trying to do. If the answer is “send better emails,” there might be better options. If the answer is “orchestrate personalised customer experiences across the business” — the trajectory is coherent, even if the execution is still catching up to the vision.
For me, the more interesting question isn’t about Salesforce’s position in any analyst report. It’s about whether we, as marketing practitioners and architects, are ready to stop evaluating our platforms through a channel-centric lens and start evaluating them through a business-outcome lens. That’s the shift that matters.
Lukas Lunow is Lead Salesforce Consultant at NoA Ignite Denmark and a Salesforce Marketing Champion. He writes about marketing technology at digitalmarketingoncloud.com. The views expressed are his own.