Amperity vs Hightouch: Enterprise CDP Comparison

Introduction

If you're comparing Amperity vs Hightouch, you're not alone. The customer data platform market is confusing. Both platforms promise to help marketers activate customer data, and both can get your audiences into the ad platforms, ESPs, and CRMs where campaigns actually run. So what's the difference, and why does it matter for your results?

The confusion stems from overlapping terminology, not overlapping functionality. Both vendors use words like "audiences," "activation," and "CDP," but Amperity does significantly more. And for most marketing organizations, understanding this difference reveals why one approach consistently delivers better outcomes.

What is Amperity? What is Hightouch?

Before diving into the comparison, it helps to understand what each platform actually is and what problem it was built to solve.

What is Amperity?

Amperity is an enterprise customer data platform (CDP) that unifies customer data from disparate sources using AI-powered identity resolution. The platform ingests raw data from across your tech stack (POS systems, ecommerce platforms, loyalty programs, CRMs, and more) then resolves customer identities to create unified profiles tailored to specific use cases such as purpose-built identity graphs for different business needs.

From that unified foundation, Amperity enables marketers to build audiences, orchestrate journeys, and activate data across hundreds of destinations. The key differentiator: Amperity handles both the data foundation (identity resolution, unification, enrichment) and the activation layer, so marketers can self-serve without SQL or data engineering support.

Amperity is used by leading enterprise brands across retail, travel, hospitality, financial services, and QSR, including companies managing tens of millions of customer records.

Learn more about Amperity's Customer Data Platform.

What is Hightouch?

Hightouch is a reverse ETL and data activation platform that syncs data from your cloud data warehouse to downstream marketing and operational tools. The platform connects directly to Snowflake, Databricks, BigQuery, or Redshift and enables users to build audiences and sync them to 250+ destinations.

Hightouch's core value proposition is warehouse-native activation: rather than copying data into a separate system, it reads directly from your existing data infrastructure. This appeals to organizations that have already invested heavily in their data warehouse and want to activate that data without duplication.

The key assumption: Hightouch expects your data warehouse already contains clean, unified, activation-ready customer profiles. While the platform has since added identity resolution (launching Adaptive Identity Resolution in 2023, with probabilistic matching following in 2025), the approach is rule-based and requires your team to define and maintain the matching logic rather than handling it automatically.

Learn more about Hightouch.

At a glance: Amperity vs Hightouch

The Fundamental Difference: CDP vs Reverse ETL

This is the core distinction that shapes everything else:

• Amperity is a complete CDP that handles identity resolution, data unification, and activation in one platform.

• Hightouch is a reverse ETL tool that activates data from your warehouse but requires that data to already be unified and accurate.

If your warehouse contains raw, fragmented customer data (as most do), Hightouch can sync it to destinations, but it can't make that data accurate. Amperity can.

Amperity vs Hightouch: feature comparison

The table below provides a detailed comparison across the capabilities that matter most for enterprise customer data management.

Key takeaway: Hightouch excels at the "last mile" of data activation if your data is already prepared. Amperity handles the entire journey, from raw data to unified profiles to activation, so marketing teams can execute without depending on data engineering for every campaign.

One builds the foundation, one assumes it's already built

The clearest way to understand these platforms is to ask: where does your data journey begin?

Hightouch is a warehouse-native activation platform. It assumes your customer data is already clean, unified, and modeled in a cloud data warehouse like Snowflake, Databricks, or BigQuery. As Hightouch describes it, Customer Studio "enables anyone, regardless of their SQL experience, to activate data directly from their warehouse." The key word is "assumes." Hightouch expects your data team has already done the hard work of preparing customer profiles. If they have, Hightouch can help you use them.

Amperity helps you create accurate, unified customer data from raw, fragmented sources, regardless of where you are on that journey. The platform ingests data from disparate systems, resolves customer identities, and builds unified profiles before activation happens. Amperity's Lakehouse CDP "unifies and enriches customer data" and serves as the foundation for downstream marketing use cases. This isn't just a technical distinction: it's a recognition that most brands don't have activation-ready data sitting in their warehouse. They have fragmented records scattered across POS systems, ecommerce platforms, loyalty programs, and CRMs.

Here's a stat that drives this home: we consistently see that 23% of customers are misidentified before using Amperity, and those misidentified customers account for over 50% of sales. Your best customers have the messiest data.

This distinction shapes everything else about how these platforms perform.

Identity resolution: ML-first vs. rule-based approaches

Amperity's identity resolution uses machine learning as its foundation, not as an add-on. The platform's AI-powered algorithms handle both probabilistic and deterministic matching natively, designed from the ground up to work with messy, incomplete, and conflicting customer data.

Amperity creates a unique identifier you can propagate across all your systems, making it straightforward to validate identities across channels and domains. And with Contextual Identity Graphs, you can deploy multiple purpose-built identity graphs within a single tenant based on your business needs. For example, a probabilistic-biased graph to maximize marketing reach and a deterministic-biased graph to guarantee customer privacy, running simultaneously without data duplication. This is a capability competitors don't offer.

Hightouch's rule-based approach

Hightouch launched identity resolution in July 2023, with "Adaptive IR" (their probabilistic matching layer) following in June 2025. Their approach is warehouse-native, meaning data never leaves your Snowflake, Databricks, or BigQuery environment.

Hightouch offers both deterministic and probabilistic matching, but the system is fundamentally rule-based. Key characteristics of their system include:

What works well:

• Full transparency into matching logic for deterministic matches (though probabilistic matching remains less transparent)

• "Waterfalls" feature that lets you sequence rule sets, applying strict rules first and then more lenient ones

• Golden Record survivorship logic to determine which identifiers "win" when conflicts arise

• Configurable rules through the UI without requiring code

Where it gets complicated:

• You must define and maintain the matching rules yourself, which puts the burden on your team to be identity resolution experts.

• The system won't create a unique identifier that propagates across systems, making cross-channel identity validation more difficult.

• Sequential rule processing can produce inconsistent results at scale.

• Because probabilistic ML is a bolt-on layer rather than native to the core approach, it inherits a "garbage in, garbage out" limitation that ML-first systems are specifically designed to overcome.

Hightouch markets advanced identity resolution features, but customer validation remains limited. Reviews and case studies focus primarily on their core reverse ETL capabilities rather than identity resolution outcomes.

Why this matters for your results

The practical difference comes down to this: Amperity's ML-first approach is built to handle the reality of enterprise customer data, which is messy, incomplete, and inconsistent. Hightouch's rule-based approach depends heavily on the quality of your underlying data and your team's expertise in defining the right matching logic.

For organizations with complex identity scenarios at enterprise scale, this distinction often determines whether identity resolution actually solves the problem or simply moves the complexity from one place to another.

From Segments to Campaigns: the real marketer experience

For marketers focused on campaign execution and ROI, the most relevant question is: what does the day-to-day experience actually look like?

The hidden complexity of hightouch

Hightouch markets itself as a no-code solution, but the reality is more complicated. To build an audience and send it to a destination, someone on your team needs to:

1. Build a "model" by identifying the specific tables in your data warehouse that contain the data you need

2. Map fields from those warehouse tables into Hightouch

3. Write SQL joins if your audience requires data from multiple tables (like combining email opt-in status, purchase history, and loyalty membership)

4. Repeat this process for every sync to every destination

This means Hightouch effectively requires a data engineer: someone who knows SQL, has access to underlying warehouse tables, and can translate marketing requirements into technical queries. The "no-code audience builder" sits on top of work that very much requires code.

Amperity is built differently

With Amperity, once your data is connected, it flows into a unified data model that any marketer can interact with. No SQL required, no need to understand underlying warehouse tables.

Audience building

Both platforms offer visual tools for building audiences, but the underlying architecture creates a very different experience.

Hightouch's Customer Studio provides a visual audience builder where marketers can "combine filters, traits, and event conditions" and then sync audiences to over 250 destinations including Salesforce, Google Ads, Meta, and Iterable. The interface emphasizes flexibility: you can preview audience size, inspect matching users, and refine your logic before activating.

Amperity's visual Segment Editor is built on the unified data foundation, which enables use-case-driven segmentation rather than Hightouch's "visual SQL" approach. Marketers can build audiences, define exclusions and sub-audiences, and configure control and treatment groups for measurement. The platform also includes segment insights with automated analysis, segment comparison tools, and built-in data visualization so you can understand your audiences before you activate them.

And with Amperity's Customer Data Agent, marketers can build segments and journeys using natural language. Just describe the audience you want, or copy and paste from an approved campaign brief, and let AI translate it into the right segment logic.

Journey orchestration

Both platforms support multi-step campaign workflows, though with different approaches.

Hightouch's Journeys feature enables "multi-step, branching customer journeys" that work across connected marketing channels, with triggers based on warehouse data "including offline customer behaviors like in-store purchases."

Amperity now offers its own journey orchestration capabilities, with the flexibility to run campaigns on scheduled workflows or trigger them in real-time using real-time customer profiles. The platform supports treatment and control groups for measuring true campaign impact, plus the ability to send campaign metadata to destinations for downstream coordination.

Destination ecosystem

Hightouch originated as a reverse ETL tool, and they deserve credit for building a broad connector library: 250+ integrations spanning ad platforms, CRMs, ESPs, and operational tools.

Amperity offers connections to "hundreds of systems for seamless customer data activation." However, Amperity's connectors are pre-configured to work with the unified data model. When a marketer wants to send an audience to LinkedIn or Meta, they don't have to map every field manually. They just select the destination and send. The connector handles the field mapping automatically.

The bottom line for marketers: Both platforms can technically get audiences where they need to go. The difference is who can actually do that work and how much hidden complexity sits behind each "send."

Meeting your data where it lives

Marketers increasingly hear that their data warehouse should be the center of their customer data strategy. Both vendors have responded to this market shift, but with very different capabilities.

Hightouch was built warehouse-native from day one. The platform reads directly from your warehouse without copying data: "Because Customer Studio connects directly to your data warehouse, audiences remain current without manual list exports or updates." But there's a caveat: if that data isn't accurate and unified, you'll be activating on bad signals. Warehouse-native only helps if what's in the warehouse is actually ready for marketing.

Amperity Bridge enables bi-directional, zero-copy data sharing with Databricks, Snowflake, and Google BigQuery. Bridge "allows users to point and share data to and from a lakehouse rather than using the slower, less secure method of reverse ETL." Configuration takes minutes, and shared tables are accessible without replication.

Here's why this matters: Amperity gives you the best of both worlds. If your warehouse contains raw data, Amperity can unify and enrich it via Bridge, then make it activation-ready. As your data grows, Amperity makes it easier to unify new sources and fold them into your warehouse. If you already have clean profiles, Bridge lets you share them seamlessly. Hightouch only addresses the second scenario, leaving you on your own for the first.

The gap most marketers don't see until it's too late

Here's a question worth asking your data team: is our customer data actually unified, or does it just exist in the same place?

Most marketers assume their data is "ready" because it lives in a warehouse. But raw transaction logs, CRM exports, and website events aren't the same as unified customer profiles. The work of matching the same person across email addresses, devices, loyalty IDs, and authenticated browsing sessions (creating a true customer 360) is what makes activation accurate. Without it, your audiences are built on fragmented records that inflate sizes, miss key segments, or target the same person multiple times across channels.

This is the complexity Amperity handles so marketers don't have to think about it. The platform's AI-powered identity resolution runs upstream, before audiences are built, so the segments you create reflect actual customers rather than duplicate records. Amperity also provides the insights you need to predict campaign performance before you launch, so you're not guessing whether your targeting will work.

Hightouch doesn't solve this problem. It activates whatever data your warehouse contains: unified, fragmented, incorrect, or messy. That works if your organization has already invested in building and maintaining identity resolution logic in-house. But for most brands, that capability either doesn't exist or is a constant source of data quality issues.

This is also why the distinction between ML-first and rule-based identity resolution matters so much. Rule-based systems require someone on your team to anticipate every matching scenario and define logic to handle it. ML-first approaches learn patterns from your data and handle edge cases that no human could have predicted in advance. When your best customers have the messiest data, the approach you choose determines whether you can actually identify them.

When does Hightouch make sense?

To be fair, there are situations where Hightouch is a reasonable choice:

• Your data warehouse already contains clean, unified customer profiles that are genuinely activation-ready

• You have an army of data engineers who build and maintain identity resolution logic in-house and who are available to support every marketing campaign

• You're confident that investment will scale with your business needs and data growth

• You only need activation capabilities and have no upstream data quality challenges

• Your team has the expertise and bandwidth to define, tune, and maintain identity resolution matching rules over time

• You're comfortable with multiple identity graphs rather than a single unified view

For most organizations, this describes an aspirational state rather than current reality. Building and maintaining identity resolution in-house requires significant ongoing investment, and the accuracy of your marketing depends entirely on how well your team executes that work, every single time.

Pricing and total cost of ownership

Both Amperity and Hightouch have moved away from traditional per-seat or MTU-based pricing toward consumption and usage-based models.

Hightouch pricing

Hightouch uses a modular, usage-based pricing model. You select the product modules you need (Reverse ETL, Customer Studio, Identity Resolution, etc.) and pay based on usage, with no caps on seats, sources, or destinations. Hightouch also offers a free tier for basic Reverse ETL with up to 2 active syncs, making it accessible for teams wanting to test the platform.

Amperity pricing

Amperity uses a consumption-based model measured in "Amps" (compute) and storage. Consumption is driven by data processing activities like running workflows, building audiences, executing campaigns, and identity resolution. This model provides transparency via a real-time dashboard and configurable alerts, so teams can monitor and optimize usage.

The hidden cost: DIY Identity Resolution

When comparing total cost of ownership, the platform licensing cost is only part of the equation. Consider:

• Data engineering time: Hightouch requires ongoing data engineering support to build models, write SQL joins, and maintain identity resolution logic. These costs don't appear on the Hightouch invoice, but they're real.

• Data quality impact: Activating on inaccurate data wastes media spend, damages customer experience, and undermines measurement. If 23% of your customers are misidentified, what's the cost of targeting them incorrectly?

• Opportunity cost: Every campaign that waits for data engineering support is a campaign that isn't running. Marketer self-service has real revenue implications.

For many enterprise organizations, the total cost of a "cheaper" activation tool plus the internal resources required to make it work exceeds the cost of a complete CDP that handles identity resolution out of the box.

Enterprise results: how brands use Amperity

Amperity powers customer data for leading enterprise brands across industries where accurate identity resolution and marketer self-service drive measurable business outcomes.

Retail and ecommerce: Brands with complex loyalty programs, multiple purchase channels, and high transaction volumes use Amperity to unify customer identities across online, in-store, and mobile touchpoints, then activate that unified view for personalized marketing and accurate measurement.

Travel and hospitality: Airlines, hotels, and cruise lines with fragmented guest data across booking systems, loyalty programs, and on-property interactions use Amperity to build a single guest profile that powers personalization at every touchpoint.

Financial services: Banks and financial institutions with strict data governance requirements use Amperity's enterprise-grade security and compliance capabilities to unify customer data while maintaining regulatory standards.

Quick service restaurants: QSR brands with high-frequency transactions and multiple ordering channels use Amperity to identify customers across app orders, in-store purchases, and delivery platforms, driving loyalty and personalization at scale.

Explore Amperity customer stories.

Why Amperity delivers more for most marketing teams

Activation tools are only as good as the data they activate. Amperity is the better choice when you need your customer data platform to actually solve the customer data problem, not just move data around.

• Unified profiles from day one. You don't need to build identity resolution yourself or hope your data team has done it correctly. Amperity's AI-powered algorithms handle the complexity.

• True marketer self-service. Build segments, launch campaigns, and activate audiences without writing SQL or waiting for data engineering support. The unified data model means marketers work with clean, understandable customer data, not raw warehouse tables.

• Activation built on accuracy. Every audience, campaign, and journey starts with a foundation of trusted data. Better inputs mean better results.

• Flexibility via Bridge. Whether your data lives in a lakehouse, warehouse, or legacy systems, Amperity meets you where you are and makes that data activation-ready.

• One platform, complete capability. Data foundation and activation in a single solution means fewer integration points, less finger-pointing between vendors, and faster time to value.

What this all means

Hightouch can sync audiences to your marketing stack, but it can't tell you whether those audiences are accurate. It can't deduplicate your customer records. It can't resolve the identity fragmentation that undermines match rates and inflates your costs. And despite the marketing, it can't truly empower marketers to self-serve without significant data engineering support behind the scenes.

Amperity does all of this. That's why leading brands across retail, travel, hospitality, quick-service restaurants, and financial services trust Amperity to power their marketing: not because activation features differ dramatically, but because the foundation underneath those features determines whether your campaigns actually perform.

If you're evaluating customer data platforms, don't just ask what each tool can do. Ask what each tool assumes you've already done and who on your team will actually be doing the work. For most marketing organizations, the honest answer reveals why Amperity is the right choice.

Next steps

Not sure how ready your customer data actually is? Amperity's Data Diagnostic is a fast, low-lift way to evaluate the true accuracy and cleanliness of your customer data. In just two days, we'll use your actual data to highlight strengths, uncover hidden issues, and show you how to unlock more value with accurate identity resolution.

Ready to see the platform in action? Request a demo to see how Amperity unifies customer data and powers activation for leading enterprise brands.

Frequently Asked Questions: Amperity vs Hightouch

What's the main difference between Amperity and Hightouch?

Amperity is a complete customer data platform that includes AI-powered identity resolution, data unification, and activation. Hightouch is a reverse ETL and data activation tool that syncs data from your warehouse to downstream tools but assumes that data is already clean and unified. Amperity handles the entire journey from raw data to activation; Hightouch focuses only the last mile.

Does Hightouch do Identity Resolution?

Yes, but with a fundamentally different approach than Amperity. Hightouch launched identity resolution in July 2023 and added probabilistic matching ("Adaptive IR") in June 2025. Their system is rule-based, meaning your team must define and maintain the matching logic. It also creates multiple identity graphs rather than a single unified view, and it won't generate a unique identifier you can propagate across systems. Amperity's ML-first approach handles identity resolution natively, creates a single unified identity graph, and is purpose-built to work with messy enterprise data without requiring your team to be identity resolution experts.

Can marketers use Hightouch without SQL knowledge?

Partially. Hightouch's audience builder is visual, but setting it up requires SQL knowledge. Someone on your team needs to build "models" by identifying warehouse tables, mapping fields, and writing SQL joins for audiences that require data from multiple tables. This setup work is required for every sync, which means marketers typically depend on data engineering support.

Which platform is better for enterprise organizations?

Amperity is purpose-built for enterprise scale, with AI-powered identity resolution that handles complex, high-volume customer data across multiple brands, regions, and data sources. The platform includes enterprise-grade security (SOC 2, HIPAA, GDPR), data governance capabilities, and the ability to support marketing teams without constant data engineering involvement. Hightouch can work for enterprise organizations that have already solved identity resolution in-house, but most enterprises find that building and maintaining that capability requires significant ongoing investment.

How do Amperity and Hightouch pricing models compare?

Both platforms use consumption/usage-based pricing rather than traditional per-seat models. Hightouch offers a free tier and modular pricing where you pay for the components you use. Amperity uses a consumption model (called "Amps") based on data processing activities. The key difference in total cost of ownership is the hidden cost of data engineering support: Hightouch's lower licensing cost often comes with higher internal resource requirements.

Can I use both Amperity and Hightouch together?

Technically yes, but it's usually unnecessary. Some organizations use Amperity for identity resolution and data unification, then Hightouch for specific activation use cases. However, since Amperity includes robust activation capabilities and pre-configured connectors to hundreds of destinations, most organizations find they don't need a separate activation tool. Using both adds complexity and cost without clear benefit for most use cases.

Which platform is better for retail and ecommerce?

Amperity has deep expertise in retail and ecommerce, where identity resolution is particularly challenging due to high transaction volumes, multiple purchase channels (online, in-store, mobile), loyalty programs, and frequent guest checkout. Amperity's AI-powered identity resolution is specifically designed to handle these complexities. Hightouch can work for retail brands that have already solved identity resolution, but most retailers find that their customer data is too fragmented to activate accurately without proper unification first.