Why Performance Marketers Must Consider an Alternative for Hightouch. One is the marketer-friendliness, and two is the affordability, as it was created keeping enterprises in mind. This makes it difficult for the SMB brands to afford tools to manage their customer data.
The best Hightouch alternative would be a platform that provides its features along with affordability. A robust, marketer-friendly, flexible, and privacy-first alternative capable of meeting complex demands.
Let’s dive deep into why Hightouch is not a marketer’s cup of tea.
What is Hightouch?
Hightouch is a reverse ETL platform designed to sync data from your data warehouse into operational systems such as CRMs, marketing automation platforms, and ad networks.
In simple terms, it is a tool that takes data from your main storage (data warehouse) and sends it to other systems you use every day, like CRMs, marketing tools, and ad platforms.
Limitations of Hightouch:
- Limited Privacy and Consent Enforcement: Hightouch does not offer built-in consent management or privacy controls. This means if you’re operating in GDPR, CCPA, or HIPAA-regulated environments, you’re forced to build expensive manual workflows or risk non-compliance.
For performance marketers handling sensitive customer data, this is a red flag. Without native consent enforcement, you’re opening your business to legal liability and potential damage to customer trust.
- Rigid Data Transformation Capabilities: While Hightouch allows basic data transformations, it lacks advanced data enrichment and dynamic manipulation capabilities that marketers need to tailor data perfectly for each campaign and platform.
When syncing customer data to platforms like Facebook Ads or Google Ads, granular control over every data attribute is crucial. Hightouch’s limited transformation flexibility forces marketers into compromises or heavy engineering overhead.
- Scalability and Pricing Issues: Hightouch’s pricing model becomes prohibitively expensive as your data volume and number of sync destinations grow. For fast-scaling performance marketing teams, this can create bottlenecks in budget allocation, forcing tough decisions between performance and compliance.
- Data Control Limitations: Hightouch doesn’t allow the kind of fine-grained control required for modern privacy-first marketing. You can’t easily set up conditional syncs, advanced filters, or real-time enrichment pipelines without jumping through complex technical hoops.
- Lack of Server-Side Tracking Support: Hightouch mainly relies on client-side data flows, which are increasingly blocked by ad blockers and browser privacy settings. This results in inaccurate attribution and data loss, a nightmare for marketers running ROI-sensitive campaigns.
Hightouch’s ease of use and initial appeal mask a set of significant limitations that performance marketers cannot afford to ignore.
Who Needs a Hightouch Alternative? The Case for Performance Marketers
- Privacy-Focused Marketers: If you’re working with customer data in regulated industries or geographies, native consent enforcement is not a luxury; it’s a must. Hightouch’s lack of built-in privacy compliance tools forces you to build expensive workarounds.
- Marketing Teams Scaling Fast: As your campaigns grow, you need a data platform that scales without breaking your budget. Hightouch’s pricing escalates quickly, and the limited control it offers slows down your agility.
- Data-Savvy Marketers: If you want more than just basic syncing, say, real-time enrichment, complex segmentation, or server-side tracking to dodge ad blockers, Hightouch’s feature set falls short.
- Teams Needing Deep Integrations: The more marketing and analytics tools you rely on, the more you need a platform that can flexibly and accurately sync data into all of them. Hightouch has gaps in many integrations critical to performance marketers.
If you fit any of these descriptions, you’re not just looking for a “nice-to-have” alternative. You need a mandatory upgrade to a platform designed to solve these pain points from the ground up.
The best HighTouch Alternative: CustomerLabs
CustomerLabs 1PD Ops (First party data Ops) are designed specifically for performance marketers who need privacy-first solutions. It seamlessly syncs your customer data from warehouses to marketing tools with built-in consent management and server-side tracking.
Unlike other tools, CustomerLabs offers flexible data transformations and easy setup, helping you stay compliant while maximizing campaign performance. It’s the smart, reliable choice to unlock the full value of your data without the usual privacy headaches.
The Technical Breakdown of CustomerLabs
CustomerLabs was built with performance marketers in mind, a data platform that tackles exactly the shortcomings Hightouch leaves exposed. Here’s why CustomerLabs is in a league of its own:
1. Built-In Privacy and Consent Enforcement
CustomerLabs natively supports global privacy frameworks like GDPR, CCPA, and HIPAA. Consent management is baked into every data pipeline, automatically enforcing user preferences across all syncs without manual workarounds.
This is critical. Unlike Hightouch, you don’t have to build complex logic to avoid syncing data from users who haven’t consented. CustomerLabs gives you peace of mind and protects your business from regulatory fines and reputational damage.
2. Server-Side Tracking & Data Syncing
CustomerLabs uses server-side tracking combined with reverse ETL. This dual approach ensures your data is accurate and unaffected by ad blockers or browser restrictions.
Performance marketers running multi-channel campaigns rely on precision attribution. CustomerLabs eliminates data loss by using server-side tracking, unlike Hightouch’s client-side-dependent system, resulting in better ROAS and smarter optimizations.
3. Flexible and Powerful Data Transformation
CustomerLabs offers robust, flexible data transformation pipelines. You can customize, enrich, and filter data with no technical limits. Whether you want to sync enhanced customer segments to Facebook, Google, or any other tool, CustomerLabs makes it easy.
Hightouch’s limited transformation capabilities force marketers to do heavy lifting elsewhere, costing time, money, and accuracy.
4. Wide and Deep Integrations
CustomerLabs connects to every major ad platform, CRM, and marketing tool out of the box, with pre-built integrations that handle complex data mapping effortlessly.
This means less manual work, fewer errors, and a faster time-to-value. Hightouch’s integrations are not this capable but don’t cover as many marketing use cases and often require more manual setup.
5. Cost-Efficient & Scalable Pricing
CustomerLabs’ pricing is designed for performance marketers. It scales smoothly with your data volume and number of destinations without sudden jumps or hidden fees.
This contrasts sharply with Hightouch, where costs can balloon unpredictably as your campaigns grow.
6. Real-Time Syncing with Granular Control
Need to sync data as soon as it changes? CustomerLabs supports real-time data flows with filters and triggers at a granular level. Hightouch’s syncs are typically run in batches, which causes delays and outdated data.
For marketers optimizing real-time bidding and personalization, this speed and control are a game-changer.
CustomerLabs In Action: Real-World Solutions for Performance Marketers
CustomerLabs equips performance marketers with a robust, integrated platform that balances compliance with campaign agility through eight key features:
Sources Integration – Collect data from both online and offline touchpoints, websites, CRMs, events, and more into a single, unified stack, streamlining your data foundation.
Identity Resolution – Translate disparate identifiers into a unified customer profile. By matching behavioral data across devices and channels, you get a seamless 360° customer view.
Audience Builder – Design dynamic, real-time segments using behavioral triggers, demographic data, or lifecycle stage, empowering more precise targeting.
Audience Activation – Instantly push these tailored segments into your marketing tools, email platforms, ad networks, and CRMs without manual intervention, ensuring your messaging is always relevant.
Google Offline Conversions – Accurately capture in-store or offline conversions and sync them back to Google Ads to keep your attribution accurate and performance insights complete.
Server-Side Tracking & Conversions API (CAPI) – Maintain campaign visibility and measurement even with server-side tracking via Advanced CAPI for Facebook, Google, and others.
Destination Syncs – Deliver clean, enriched customer data to multiple destinations (marketing tools) from CRMs and ad platforms to automation suites, ensuring your entire stack is in sync.
Privacy-First Compliance – Bake privacy into your workflows with native consent management, regulatory adherence (GDPR, CCPA, etc.), and secure server-side processing without sacrificing targeting performance.
These use cases demonstrate why CustomerLabs is built for marketers who demand precision, privacy, and performance.
Hightouch vs. CustomerLabs: Head-to-Head Comparison
Still on the fence? This table should make it crystal clear.
| Feature | Hightouch | CustomerLabs |
| Requires Data Warehouse | Yes | No |
| Built-in Consent Management | No | Yes |
| Event Tracking Included | No | Yes |
| Marketer-Friendly UI | Mostly built for data teams | 100% built for marketers |
| Setup Time | Weeks (with data engineering help) | Minutes (plug & play) |
| HIPAA/GDPR/CCPA Support | Manual setup required | Built-in compliance engine |
| Support for Non-Technical Users | Limited | Full control without code |
| Pricing details | More expensive | Affordable at just $99 |
Switch to CustomerLabs Without Losing Momentum
Switching platforms sounds daunting, but CustomerLabs makes migration straightforward:
- Map Your Existing Pipelines: Export your current Hightouch setups and identify equivalent flows in CustomerLabs.
- Leverage Pre-Built Integrations: CustomerLabs supports most Hightouch destinations out-of-the-box, simplifying setup.
- Test Gradually: Start with small segments or campaigns to validate data flows and accuracy.
- Utilize Dedicated Support: CustomerLabs offers expert onboarding to smooth the transition and avoid downtime.
- Retire Hightouch Gradually: Once confident, switch off Hightouch workflows and consolidate monitoring in CustomerLabs.
With CustomerLabs’ powerful UI and expert support, you won’t just replace Hightouch, you’ll upgrade your entire marketing data stack. – Get a free consultation from our team of experts today.
Conclusion
When it comes to data syncing, privacy, and performance marketing, settling for Hightouch means accepting costly compromises and risks. The lack of native consent management, limited data control, and server-side tracking gaps make it unsuitable for serious marketers who need precision and compliance.
CustomerLabs is uniquely designed to fix these pain points with built-in privacy, real-time server-side tracking, flexible transformations, deep integrations, and scalable pricing. It’s not just another tool; it’s the only real alternative that performance marketers must adopt to stay competitive and compliant.
If you’re serious about growing your marketing ROI while respecting customer privacy and maintaining data accuracy, CustomerLabs isn’t optional; it’s mandatory.
