The most useful difference between these two is not a feature. It is that Salesforce publishes what Data 360 costs and Adobe does not. Salesforce puts rate cards, per-meter credit costs, and two worked examples on a public page. Adobe publishes the licensing metric and the contractual guardrails in detail, but every price routes to a contact form. If you need to model spend before you can get a meeting approved, that asymmetry decides your evaluation order on its own.
Everything below is taken from the vendors’ own current material: Salesforce’s Data 360 pricing guide and Limits and Guidelines documentation, and Adobe’s Real-Time CDP product description effective 4 June 2026. Where the two measure different things, we say so instead of forcing a row to line up.
| Salesforce Data 360 | Adobe Real-Time CDP | |
|---|---|---|
| Published price? | Yes. $500 per 100,000 Flex Credits, or $240/$420 per 1,000 profiles/year | No. Contact form on every edition |
| Licensing metric | Your choice: consumption credits, or flat per-profile | Per 1,000 Person Profiles only |
| Editions | One product. Two pricing models | Three editions (B2C, B2B, B2P), each Prime or Ultimate |
| Ingestion cost | Free, including batch and zero-copy | No separate charge, but capped by profile richness |
| Free entry point | $0 provisioning, 250K credits, 1 TB | Implementation-period licence only |
| Overage behaviour | Credits run down; buy more | Daily overage rate, after a 7-day grace period |
What Data 360 actually costs
Two models, and you pick one. Flex Credits are $500 per 100,000, so $0.005 a credit, spent per action against a published meter. Profile pricing is flat: $240 per 1,000 profiles a year, or $420 for the Enterprise tier. Bringing data in is free on both, including zero-copy federation. You pay when you do something with it.
The meter rates are where the real design guidance is, because they are not remotely uniform:
| Meter | Unit | Credits |
|---|---|---|
| Ingestion (batch, zero-copy) | n/a | Free |
| Data 360 Queries | per 1M rows | 3 |
| Data 360 Prep | per 1M rows | 40 |
| Data 360 Segmentation | per 1M rows | 50 |
| Data 360 Activation | per 1M rows | 60 |
| Zero-Copy Sharing Out | per 1M rows | 60 |
| Unstructured Processing | per 1MB | 150 |
| Intelligent Processing | per 1MB | 600 |
| Streaming Pipeline | per 1M rows | 3,500 |
| Data 360 Unification | per 1M rows | 75,000 |
| Real-Time Pipeline | per 1M rows | 250,000 |
Read that table again before you design anything. Unification costs 75,000 credits per million rows against Prep’s 40. That is roughly 1,875 times more expensive for the same volume, and it is the single reason Data 360 forecasts come out wrong. Salesforce’s own worked example resolves identity only on the 3% of profiles that changed each day rather than the full 10 million. Do the same, or your unification line will dwarf everything else on the invoice.
Flex Credits also discount automatically as you burn them. On the Prep meter, the rate drops from 40 credits to 32 after 300,000 credits, to 16 after 1.5 million, and to 8 after 12.5 million. The multipliers reset at the start of every month and apply per meter, so steady heavy use is rewarded and spiky use is not. That detail matters if you were planning to batch a quarter of processing into one week.
Salesforce publishes two entry points: provisioning at $0, which includes 250,000 Flex Credits a year on EE/UE/PE and 1 TB of storage, and a Starter tier at $60,000 a year with 10 million credits and 5 TB. Its own published examples are worth knowing as anchors: a retail Agentforce use case at roughly 22 million credits, about $110,000 a year at list, and a bank with 2 million unified profiles at $480,000 a year on flat profile pricing.
One catch on profile pricing that is easy to miss. The flat fee covers unification, prep, segmentation and activation. Queries, streaming pipelines, real-time pipelines, zero-copy sharing and unstructured processing still cost Flex Credits on top. The tiers include an allowance of 1 credit per profile per year at $240, or 2 at $420, and that is your whole buffer. If you are buying flat pricing for predictability and then running Agentforce queries against those profiles, you have a variable line item after all.
What Adobe Real-Time CDP actually costs
We cannot tell you, and neither can Adobe’s website. Every edition ends at a form. What Adobe does document, in far more contractual detail than Salesforce, is the shape of the deal: you licence per 1,000 Person Profiles, in one of three editions, each available as Prime or Ultimate.
The edition split is a genuine purchasing decision rather than packaging. B2C Edition has no account data at all — no account or opportunity profiles, no account identity graph, no lead-to-account matching, no predictive lead and account scoring. Those arrive with B2B, and B2P exists for organisations that need the same person treated consistently across both. If you are a B2B business being quoted B2C, that is not a discount, it is a different product.
Prime versus Ultimate is mostly about what you can send data to. Ultimate adds the Advanced Enterprise Destination and Source Connectors and the Destination SDK for building your own. On Prime you cannot build a custom destination. Ultimate also raises look-alike audiences from 5 to 20 per sandbox, computed attributes from 25 to 50, and the annual export allowance from 500 KB to 700 KB per profile.
On overage, Adobe is more explicit than most vendors and it is worth reading as a feature rather than a threat: exceed your contracted Person Profiles and you pay a daily overage rate, but you get a 7-day grace period from the first day you go over to bring usage back down. A seasonal retailer should model that carefully. A steady-state business will rarely notice it.
The limits that actually bite
Both vendors publish long limit tables and almost nobody reads them before signing. These are the ones we have seen change an architecture:
| Constraint | Data 360 | Adobe Real-Time CDP |
|---|---|---|
| Batch segmentation cadence | 2 scheduled publishes per segment per day, across up to 9,950 active segments | 1 batch job per day per sandbox; 50 flexible evaluations a year in production |
| Real-time segmentation | 35 real-time segments. Exclusion logic is not available in them | Streaming segmentation at 1,500 events/sec; edge evaluation within 350 ms |
| Profile size ceiling | Source records over 15 KB are skipped by identity rulesets | Average profile richness must stay at or under 75 KB |
| Identity ceiling | 50,000 source profiles into one unified profile; 75 identifiers | Identity graph spans between 2 and 50 identities |
| Merge and ruleset limits | 5 rulesets per primary object per data space; 10 match rules each | 3 concurrent profile merge policies |
| Event lookback | 24 months for standard segments, 7 days for rapid segments | Streaming segmentation evaluates the last 24 hours of events |
| Activation latency | Standard publishes every 12 to 24 hours; rapid segments 1 to 4 hours | Edge personalisation destinations evaluate in-session |
| Not supported | Professional Edition orgs and Government Cloud | Data Science Workspace and Journey Optimizer unless licensed separately |
Two of those surprise people. Adobe’s batch segmentation is tighter than its real-time reputation suggests — one batch job per day per sandbox, and flexible audience evaluations are a metered annual allowance of 50 in production. Adobe is genuinely stronger at streaming and edge; it is not built for someone who wants to rebuild forty audiences on demand all afternoon.
And on the Salesforce side, real-time segments do not support exclusion logic. “Everyone who abandoned a cart, except those who bought in the last hour” is a standard requirement and it is not a real-time segment on Data 360. Find that out in design, not in UAT.
The identity rows are not apples to apples, deliberately. Adobe caps an identity graph at 2 to 50 identities. Salesforce allows up to 50,000 source profiles to merge into one unified profile and 75 identifiers on it. Those count different objects, so the numbers cannot be compared directly — but the design philosophies they imply genuinely differ, and Salesforce itself warns that very large unified profiles usually mean match rules that are too broad rather than a customer with 50,000 identities.
Which one you should actually buy
We are a Salesforce consultancy, so read the next paragraph with that in mind. It is also why we are being specific about when Adobe is the better buy: a comparison that always lands on the author’s product is worth nothing to you.
Pick Adobe if you already run Adobe Experience Platform, Analytics, Target or Journey Optimizer. The profile should live where the activation lives, and Adobe Real-Time CDP is built on the same platform those tools already sit on. Pick Adobe too if edge personalisation on a high-traffic site is the actual use case; sub-second edge evaluation is a real strength, and Salesforce’s equivalent carries the real-time pipeline meter at 250,000 credits per million rows.
Pick Data 360 if your customer data already sits in Salesforce CRM, because ingesting it costs nothing; if Agentforce is anywhere in the plan, because Flex Credits are fungible across both; or if you simply need to model and defend a number before you are allowed to take a vendor call.
Buy neither if you have under a million profiles and one activation channel. At that size, reverse ETL from the warehouse you already own will do the job for a fraction of either licence, and we would tell you so rather than take the implementation. A CDP earns its cost when marketing cannot act without engineering, not when the data merely exists in more than one place.
Before you model anything
- →Check which credit type your contract uses. Orgs purchasing or renewing after 24 February 2026 can be on Data Services credits or Flex Credits, and the rate cards differ.
- →Count deduplicated profiles, not records. Both vendors price on resolved profiles, and the gap between the two numbers is usually large.
- →Decide your identity refresh strategy first. On Data 360 it is the dominant cost line, not a detail.
- →For Adobe, confirm the edition before the price. B2C has no account data, and discovering that after signing is expensive.
- →Get both quotes in writing against the same profile count. Adobe will not publish one, but it will give you one.
Pricing and packaging on both sides change more often than the products do. Everything here was checked against vendor material in August 2026 — Salesforce’s published pricing guide and limits documentation, and Adobe’s product description effective 4 June 2026. Verify current figures with each vendor before you commit budget, and treat any third-party article quoting a firm Adobe price, including a future version of this one, with suspicion.
Model both quotes against your real profile count
Send us your deduplicated profile count and your activation channels. We will model Data 360 both ways — Flex Credits and flat profile pricing — and tell you honestly if reverse ETL off your warehouse is the cheaper answer.
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Frequently asked questions
How much does Salesforce Data 360 cost?
Salesforce publishes two models. Flex Credits are $500 per 100,000 credits, which works out at $0.005 per credit, and you spend them per action against a published meter. Profile pricing is a flat $240 per 1,000 profiles per year, or $420 per 1,000 for the Enterprise tier. Ingestion is free on both. Salesforce also publishes worked examples: its own retail agent scenario lands at roughly 22 million credits, about $110,000 a year at list, and its 2-million-profile bank example at $480,000 a year on flat profile pricing. Verified against Salesforce pricing material dated July 2026.
How much does Adobe Real-Time CDP cost?
Adobe does not publish a price. Its pricing page routes every edition to a contact form. What Adobe does publish is the metric: you are licensed per 1,000 Person Profiles, in one of three editions (B2C, B2B, B2P), each in a Prime or Ultimate package. Exceed your contracted Person Profiles and you incur a daily overage rate, though Adobe gives a 7-day grace period from the first day you go over. That is from Adobe's own product description, effective 4 June 2026.
Which is better, Data 360 or Adobe Real-Time CDP?
Neither is better in the abstract, and the deciding factor is usually where your activation already happens rather than the feature list. If your customer data and your downstream channels are already Salesforce, Data 360 wins on economics because ingesting Salesforce CRM data costs nothing and Flex Credits are fungible with Agentforce. If you already run Adobe Experience Platform, Analytics, Target or Journey Optimizer, Adobe wins for the same reason in reverse. Buying the CDP that does not match your activation stack means paying twice: once for the licence and again for the integration work.
What is the most expensive part of Data 360?
Identity resolution, by a wide margin. On the published Flex Credit rate card, Data 360 Prep costs 40 credits per million rows and Data 360 Unification costs 75,000 credits per million rows — roughly 1,875 times more for the same volume. Real-Time Pipeline is 250,000 per million rows. Ingestion and batch queries are cheap or free. If your credit forecast looks wrong, it is almost always because unification is running against more source profiles than it needs to, so resolve identity only on changed records.
Is Salesforce Data 360 the same as Data Cloud?
Yes. Salesforce renamed Data Cloud to Data 360 at Dreamforce on 14 October 2025, when it moved under the Agentforce 360 umbrella. Licences, data model and integrations did not change with the rename. Note that billing did change separately: orgs purchasing or renewing after 24 February 2026 can be on either Data Services credits or the newer Flex Credits, and the rate cards differ, so check which one your contract actually uses before modelling anything.