Why Martech Stacks Are Getting More and More Complicated

THE MarTech Replacement Survey 2025 revealed an apparent contradiction: Organizations are replacing fewer core platforms than at any time in the past three years, even as their stacks continue to grow.

In the 2025 survey, 59.9% of respondents said they had replaced a marketing technology application in the past year. This is down from the peak of 69.8% reached in 2022, a drop of 10 percentage points over three years. CRM replacements reached their lowest level in the survey’s history. Marketing automation replacements fell from 31.1% in 2024 to 19.4% in 2025. Email platform replacements fell from 24.3% to 13.7%.

These numbers seem to indicate that replacement is slowing, and it is slowing fast.

But the stack data tells a different story. When I isolated respondents who said they had replaced a platform, almost two-thirds said the overall number of applications had increased over the past year.

Specifically, 62.9% of replacements added apps to their stack. About 37.9% added one or two tools. Another 21% added three to five. Four percent added six or more.

Only 22.6% saw their stack decrease. About 14.5% remained stable.

This tension – fewer replacements, more applications – is currently the defining dynamic of martech.

Replacement without reduction

If organizations replace fewer systems, shouldn’t their batteries stabilize? Not if replacement and addition are decoupled – and that is exactly what the data indicates.

The traditional replacement cycle involved an exchange: one platform removed, one platform in. The modern model is more like an overlay. Organizations keep their core systems in place (CRM, marketing automation, email infrastructure) and add specialized tools at the edge. The categories with the most churn – SEO tools, analytics, marketing automation and project management platforms – are also the ones where point solutions proliferate quickly, making it easy to add them without removing them.

This trend makes sense given the market environment. Replacing a marketing automation platform or CRM involves migration costs, retraining, workflow redesign, and integration work. Adding a point solution for SEO analysis or a lightweight project management tool is relatively simple.

The result is a martech ecosystem shaped less by turnover and more by accumulation.

The integration tax

The problem with accumulation is that it doesn’t scale neatly.

Each new application added to the stack creates additional integration points, more data silos, and more surface area for operational complexity. Our survey found that integration capabilities and data centralization were among the top criteria for selecting replacement platforms, cited by 37.1% and 42.7% of respondents, respectively. Organizations clearly understand the burden of integration.

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But understanding it and avoiding it are different things. As 62.9% of replacements continue to add more tools than they remove, the gap between integration intent and stack reality appears to be widening.

This creates a special type of operational risk. The complexity of the stack tends to slowly escalate. Organizations add tools in response to specific needs (better SEO performance, more granular analytics, specific AI functionality) without a corresponding pruning or consolidation effort. Over time, the stack becomes more difficult to manage, integrate, and secure.

The slowdown in replacement could actually amplify this dynamic. When organizations are hesitant to replace their core platforms (due to cost, AI uncertainty, or high switching costs), they are more likely to fill the gaps with additional tools rather than address them with a platform migration.

The rise of composable architectures – headless platforms, API-focused tools, and the move toward Scott Brinker’s “composable canvas,” where everything is “adjacent and adaptable” – has driven this dynamic. In a March 2026 research report with Databricks, Brinker argued that martech architecture is moving away from rigid stacks and toward a model in which applications and AI agents connect to a universal data layer. “This is not a replacement proposal,” he wrote. “It’s an architectural vision over three to five years.”

This helps explain the survey data. Composable architectures make adding tools almost frictionless: install a new analytics platform via an API, connect a headless CMS front-end, plug in an AI agent – ​​without touching the core. But they don’t make replacement any cheaper. If anything, they make the case for it more difficult, since the old logic of “swap the platform for new features” has been replaced by “add what you need to what you have.”

What this means for the next phase

If this trend continues, the next few years in martech will be defined less by platform churn and more by stack management.

Vendors that help organizations consolidate—platforms that absorb adjacent functionality, integration layers that reduce connection complexity, tools that make existing stacks more manageable rather than adding another tile to the tile—may be better positioned than purely point solutions.

For practitioners, the message is more nuanced. Replacement has not become more difficult to implement: it has become more difficult to justify. Cost now dominates selection decisions (cited by 50.8% of replacements). Evaluation cycles have lengthened: nearly two-thirds of replacements spent three months or more under review, and 35.5% lasted more than six months. As the marginal gain from switching platforms declines and switching costs remain high, the calculations tilt increasingly in favor of staying put.

But indefinite accumulation creates its own problems. Each new tool adds integration points, data silos and operational surface area. Organizations that manage this well will treat stack growth as a deliberate choice rather than a default outcome.

The survey data does not suggest that martech is in decline. This suggests that it’s getting more and more complicated: slower to replace, faster to add, and harder to fix. This is not a contradiction. This is the new normal.