Martech Replacement Rates Decline in 2025 Survey

Martech Replacement Slows in 2025

The 2025 MarTech Replacement Survey indicates a significant drop in replacement rates for key martech categories, with marketing automation falling from 31.1% in 2024 to 19.4% in 2025, CRM decreasing from 22.1% to 9.7%, and email platforms declining from 24.3% to 13.7%, according to MarTech. This broad-based pullback reflects a shift from routine platform switching to a more cautious approach, even as categories like analytics and business intelligence continue to grow.

Historical Patterns of Replacement

Over the past five years, martech replacement rates showed stability from 2021 through 2023, with marketing automation hovering around 24%, while CRM and email platforms followed similar steady patterns. In 2024, replacement activity spiked, particularly for marketing automation, which reached 31%, but by 2025, rates dropped sharply across nearly every major category, marking a pattern of stability, spike, and pullback. Widely known in the SaaS industry, this evolution highlights how mature markets can transition from high churn to stabilization, as teams adjust strategies amid economic pressures.

Shifts in Decision-Making Priorities

From 2021 through 2023, "better features" was the dominant driver of replacement decisions, with cost, integration, and data capabilities playing secondary roles, and 31% of replaced systems having been in place for two years or less. In 2024, cost emerged as the leading factor, cited by 61% of respondents, yet replacement rates remained elevated, with marketing automation still the most-replaced category for the fifth year. By 2025, while 37.1% of respondents cited AI capabilities as important and 33.9% expressed a desire for them, this interest did not lead to increased replacements, instead contributing to hesitation in switching platforms.

Reasons Behind the Pullback

Several structural changes explain this transition, including the SaaS market's maturation, where 96% of 2024 replacements involved commercial applications in commercial-to-commercial swaps, indicating evolution within an established base rather than new adoptions. Core categories like CRM, marketing automation, and email platforms are being replaced less frequently, suggesting they have reached functional maturity for many organizations, and decision-making is shifting toward a stronger focus on cost, ROI, and integration over feature differentiation. According to MarTech, this is not a collapse in activity, as a majority of organizations still engage with their stacks annually, but a move from wholesale replacement to incremental changes, with AI reinforcing a wait-and-see posture.