Martech consolidation: When and how to streamline your stack

Martech consolidation means reducing the number of marketing tools in your stack by replacing overlapping point solutions with fewer, integrated platforms.

Brands are outgrowing those point solutions, budgets are under pressure, and AI now depends on data that a fragmented stack keeps apart. That raises the value of a leaner, unified stack.

This guide covers what consolidation is, how to spot when you need it, and a framework for deciding whether each tool stays, consolidates, or gets replaced.

TL;DR

• Martech consolidation reduces the number of marketing tools in your stack by replacing overlapping point solutions with fewer, integrated platforms. It lowers cost and complexity, unifies customer data, and helps teams move faster.
• It matters now because most teams use less than half the tools they own, budgets are tighter, and AI depends on unified data that a fragmented stack keeps apart.
• The warning signs are familiar. Overlapping tools, siloed data, low adoption, heavy engineering time on integrations, slow campaign execution, and rising cost without matching value.
• Vendor rationalization and deciding what to do follows a five-step framework. Audit every tool, map the overlaps, score value against cost, weigh build vs. buy, then keep, consolidate, or replace each one.
• A customer engagement platform is a common endpoint, bringing channels, a unified customer profile, and decisioning into one system so teams can orchestrate cross-channel journeys from one profile.

What is martech consolidation?

Martech consolidation is the process of reducing the number of tools in a marketing technology stack by replacing overlapping point solutions with fewer, more integrated platforms. It has three goals, to unify data, speed up teams, and cut spend and complexity.

A consolidated tech stack is far more efficient than a sprawling stack, where teams are dealing with many single-purpose tools, scattered data and silos of information. Piecing everything together takes a lot of work and leaves more room for error. A sprawling tech stack also continues to get more expensive over time.

Why martech consolidation matters now

Martech consolidation matters now because brands have outgrown their point solutions. Tools that were quick to bolt on have piled into a stack that costs more, moves slower, and hides the customer.

Tool sprawl

If you’re experiencing tool sprawl it means you have a stack with more tools than anyone uses. Marketers actively use just 49% of their martech capabilities, according to the 2025 Gartner Marketing Technology Survey. Every unused tool is still a subscription, an integration, and a login someone has to manage.

Rising total cost of ownership

Total cost of ownership adds up across license fees, integration overhead, the engineering hours to keep integrations alive, admin, training, and the drag of slow launches. A tool that isn’t fully utilized is a waste of budget.

Data silos that block a single customer view

When separate systems each track the same person, stitching those versions into one profile becomes its own project. According to the 2025 Global Customer Engagement Review, 39% of brands that missed their revenue goals were running disconnected point solutions. Whether that data sits in a customer data platform or across separate tools, you can’t act effectively or achieve true 1:1 personalization if you don’t have a unified understanding of each customer.

Budget pressure and the push to reduce martech sprawl

Tighter budgets mean every tool has to justify itself. Martech still eats around 22% of the marketing budget, so finance wants proof that each one is worth the cost.

AI needs unified data

Marketing teams are pouring budget into AI, and it only performs as well as the data beneath it. A fragmented stack will feed AI-driven personalization and decisioning partial information, so the output for your messaging across channels and within search, is inconsistent and less relevant for the customer on the other end.

Signs it’s time to replace or consolidate marketing tools

You can usually feel martech sprawl before any audit confirms it. See how many of these signs sound like your setup.

• Overlapping tools. More than one tool covers the same function, or functions that need to connect, like email, analytics, or segmentation. Tools bought separately rarely link up cleanly, so the data conflicts and no one agrees on the source of truth. It can also be really difficult to then measure things like retention and customer engagement.
• Siloed data. Customer data sits in separate systems that don't sync. Building a single view of a customer means exporting and reconciling records by hand.
• Low adoption. You're paying for tools almost no one uses. When a couple of power users are the only active accounts and everyone else has been inactive for months, the renewal is hard to justify.
• Heavy engineering time on integrations. Campaigns depend on developer time. Your tools connect only through custom integrations, so a change in one breaks something downstream. Integration complexity with existing systems is a challenge for 26% of marketers.
• Slow campaign execution. Launching a campaign is slow. You coordinate across several tools and wait for data to sync before anything ships.
• Rising cost without matching value. Cost keeps rising while results stay flat. You're paying for features and seats you never use.

What's behind each one, and what it costs.

How to decide when to replace or consolidate tools in your martech stack

A structured audit tells you which tools to keep, consolidate, or replace. Work through the five steps below on every tool in your stack.

1. Run a martech stack audit

Start by listing every tool in your martech stack. For each one, note what it does, the use case it supports, who uses it and how often, what it costs, what it connects to, and when it renews. Don't be tempted to guess.

2. Map the overlaps and gaps

Group the tools by the job they do. Where two or more sit in the same group, you have overlap. Where a job has no clear owner, you have a gap.

3. Score each tool on value, cost, and fit

Rate every tool on the value it delivers against its real cost, and how well it fits where the business is going. Then ask, would removing it stop you running a core use case? If not, it's a candidate to cut.

4. Weigh build vs. buy martech

For whatever the stack still needs, decide whether to build it in-house or buy a platform. Building gives you control over features, data, and roadmap, and can set you apart if marketing technology is core to your product. But it spends your research and development budget on something vendors already provide, commits you to ongoing maintenance, security patches, and upgrades, and slows time to market. Unless customer engagement is your product, buying an integrated platform usually wins. It gets you to value faster, the vendor handles upkeep, and your engineers stay on the work only they can do. When you shortlist a platform, hold it against clear evaluation criteria rather than a feature list, and count the full total cost of ownership.

5. Decide keep, consolidate, or replace

Keep the tools that are well-used, fairly priced, and central to where you're headed. Consolidate the overlapping ones into a single platform. Replace the underused, siloed, or overpriced ones.

You should now have a shortlist that everyone can trust.

How to run a martech stack consolidation

Tackle the biggest, most expensive overlaps first in a martech consolidation, and work in stages, moving through one area at a time, keeping the data intact as you go.

Stage 1: Prioritize the highest-overlap, highest-cost areas first

Start where your audit found the most overlap and the highest cost. Those areas give the biggest return for the least disruption, so they go first. Consolidating your busiest channels usually clears the most integration overhead in a single move.

Stage 2: Plan the data migration and integrations

Before anything moves, map where customer data lives today, how it will land in the new platform, and how identity gets matched so the same person doesn't arrive as two records. A clean data migration protects the unified customer profile you're consolidating to build. Get the new platform connected to the tools it needs to talk to, so nothing stops working the day you switch over.

Stage 3: Sequence the rollout to avoid disruption

Roll it out in stages. Move one team or channel, confirm it works, then move the next. Staging keeps live campaigns running and catches problems while they're small. Keep the old tool running until the new one is proven, then retire it.

Stage 4: Enable teams on the consolidated platform

Budget real time for training, documentation, and hands-on support as teams move off the old tools. Bring them in early to shape how the platform gets set up, so it fits the way they actually work.

Stage 5: Measure success

Decide up front what good looks like, then track it. Four areas you should absolutely include in your tracking are:

• Cost saved from retired tools and integrations.
• Engineering time reclaimed from maintenance and manual work.
• Time to launch, or how much faster a single campaign gets from idea to live once the tools are in one place.
• Time to value, the bigger measure of how long it takes the consolidated platform to start paying back what you put into it, from migration through to results.

How a customer engagement platform consolidates the marketing tech stack

A customer engagement platform, like Braze, consolidates your channels (email, push, SMS, in-app, and web), a unified customer profile, data layer, and decisioning system into one, replacing several point tools and their integrations.

With fewer integrations and silos, you can meet customers where they are with cross-channel orchestration, built from one trusted source of information. BrazeAI Decisioning Studio™ makes 1:1 decisions that optimize any business KPI from that same profile, for faster, more efficient teams and workflows.