What is Composable CDP?
A Customer Data Platform architecture that runs on your existing data warehouse instead of copying data into a separate system.
Definition
A composable CDP (Customer Data Platform) lets you build CDP functionality on top of your existing data warehouse (Snowflake, BigQuery, Databricks) instead of ingesting data into a standalone CDP platform. Tools like Census and Hightouch act as the activation layer, syncing audience segments and customer profiles from your warehouse directly to marketing and sales tools. The 'composable' part means you pick best-of-breed components (warehouse for storage, reverse ETL for activation, identity resolution from another vendor) instead of buying a monolithic CDP.
Why It Matters
Traditional CDPs (Segment, mParticle, Treasure Data) require you to copy all your customer data into their platform. This creates data duplication, sync issues, and vendor lock-in. Composable CDPs flip this by treating your warehouse as the single source of truth. Your data stays in one place. You avoid paying a CDP vendor to store data you already have. And your data team maintains control over data models and transformations.
Example
Instead of sending all your customer events to Segment ($120K+/year), you land them in Snowflake, build audience segments with dbt, and use Hightouch to sync those segments to HubSpot, Facebook Ads, and Intercom. The warehouse already has the data. Hightouch activates it. Total cost: Snowflake + Hightouch, often 50-70% less than a traditional CDP.