Marketing cloud giants Adobe, Marketo, Oracle and Salesforce are leading the way in providing digital marketing hubs, new research from Gartner has found.

The report on Digital Marketing Hubs ranked the four companies in the leader component of its Magic Quadrant for 2016 after each successfully covered key areas of capability.

Each vendor was judged on its specific strengths and weaknesses, growing capabilities and the scope of their marketing technology platforms.

In its findings, Gartner said that leaders have fully embraced the integration of marketing tech, ad tech and analytics, and deployed many hub solutions at scale. However, it was also noted that vendors still mostly rely on integrated portfolio solutions from acquisitions and partnerships.

For example, Adobe’s major marketing cloud platform received praise for its vision and software delivery along with its financial strength and commitment to marketing solutions innovation. However the report also found weaknesses in its ongoing integration and high price points.

Similarly, Marketo was lauded for its multi-channel journey mapping and partner ecosytem, and audience manangement. However some customer dissatisfaction around pricing and shortfalls around ad tech integration were highlighted as cautions.

Oracle ranked highly for its wide range of capabilities through acquisitions, product integration and workflow. However weaknesses were cited in a reliance on acquisition for development and feature gaps.

Salesforce’s Marketing cloud received high marks for its intuitive user experience and strong email marketing capabilities. However inconsistent hub adoption and some customer concerns around the quality of support and pricing were listed as weaknesses.

However the marketing cloud heavyweights weren’t the only ones mentioned in the report.  Epsilon, Experian Marketing Services and IBM were all listed as challengers with similar abilities to the top four.

Krux, MediaMath and RocketFuel were also recognised as vendors with similar visions to the digital marketing leaders, but lacked the same ability to execute.

Vendors were required to meet extensive criteria, which included; market understanding, marketing strategy, sales strategy, offering (product) strategy, business model, innovation and geographic strategy.