From Technical Activation to Business Autonomy: Why Choose imagino over Hightouch?

Today, the goal of marketers is no longer just to centralise customer data in a data warehouse (like Snowflake), but to increase the transformation of this raw data into revenue.

Two visions are then opposed. On the one hand, “Warehouse-native” solutions such as Hightouch, born from reverse ETL, which focus on the technical activation of data to channels. On the other hand, the customer engagement platform (CEP) imagino, natively designed to offer immediate business agility and manage the entire customer lifecycle thanks to Artificial Intelligence.

Arthur Lacroix, Product Marketing Manager at imagino, deciphers for us the fundamental differences between a technical activation layer and a true sovereign engagement platform.

Marketer vs Data Engineer: Who Holds the Reins?

Therein lies the great philosophical difference. Hightouch is primarily aimed at technical profiles (Data Engineers, Growth Engineers). It’s a solution where creating complex audiences often requires mastering SQL. This inevitably creates what we can call a marketing tax: for every new initiative, marketing has to open an IT ticket and wait.

On the other hand, imagino has been designed for the total autonomy of the marketer. Thanks to our Business Catalog, technical data is translated into intelligible business concepts. Marketing teams can use flexible data summaries.(e.g. “total spend over the last 30 days”) and modify their segments via an intuitive interface, without ever requiring IT or writing a line of code.

 
“Marketing agility is impossible without direct data access. The moment marketing depends on a data engineer to execute a campaign on a daily basis, you lose your sales velocity.”
 

Beyond Activation: The Engagement Loop

Hightouch works very well for one-shots: taking data and sending it to a destination (like Meta or Google). But modern customer engagement doesn’t stop at exporting a list. With imagino, we manage the entire engagement loop: discovery, design, activation, amplification, and governance. Above all, we do this thanks to a natively integrated Artificial Intelligence, it has not been added as an afterthought.

And it is thanks to it that we can support the business and create an AI-Powered Marketer, capable of making better decisions thanks to an AI that continuously recommends, explains and optimises. Our Imogen AI has been designed to be the layer of intelligence that orchestrates the entire imagino platform, and greatly facilitates decision-making.

For example, through the implementation of the Model Context Protocol (MCP), a marketer can interact with the imagino platform in natural language. You no longer need to manually set up a complex workflow: you provide a brief, and our Imogen AI automatically creates the customer journey (email, SMS, push) directly on the canvas.

Sovereignty and governance: the European strategic choice in the face of the American model

Digital sovereignty has become a major driver of transformation, particularly in France and Europe. CIOs are now investing in trusted infrastructures and looking for software solutions that can be added to them without compromising security.

Hightouch is an American player, very focused on US Ad-Tech (and currently in the running to buy LiveRamp’s identity activities, which may raise questions of neutrality towards your stack).

imagino is a French publisher, with French R&D, natively compatible with sovereign clouds (such as OVHcloud). Like Hightouch, our Zero-Copy approach ensures that your data stays in your environment, but our technology agnosticism also gives you the freedom to connect the AI model of your choice (such as the French Mistral). Finally, we natively integrate the requirements of the CNIL and the GDPR at the heart of your campaigns, where other solutions only offer basic governance.

 
“True sovereignty lies in technological freedom. With imagino, you avoid any lock-in: you choose your cloud, your data and your AI model to manage your customer engagement independently.”
 

From data to value: calculating ROI

The cost of a software license is a sometimes misleading indicator: what counts for a marketing department is the time-to-value and the actual cost of operation.

With Hightouch’s approach, the initial investment is only the tip of the iceberg. Because the solution requires manual construction of each audience definition and model via SQL queries, the deployment time can stretch several months. The launch of campaigns remains blocked by the completion of the technical infrastructure.

On the other hand, imagino is designed for agility and business velocity. By leveraging pre-built engagement models and workflows that natively adapt to the business reality, time to market is measured in days, not months. The platform delivers measurable business results in less than 30 days, eliminating hidden internal development costs and generating revenue much faster.

The Summary: imagino vs Hightouch