5 Takeaways from Gartner's 2025 PIM Market Guide

Gartner research shapes how many buyers frame a software market, and the PIM Market Guide is no exception. Vendors listed in it promote that fact on their websites and in sales conversations, which makes it easy to read the guide as a ranking, although Gartner does not rank the vendors in it. This article explains what the 2025 guide is, gives our five takeaways for buyers, and shows how to use it in a PIM selection without letting it stand in for your own requirements.

What the Gartner Market Guide for PIM is

Gartner's abstract of the guide dates it 22 January 2025 and names Helen Grimster and Jason Daigler as the analysts. It is written for data and analytics leaders who want to weigh the options in the PIM market, and it links the demand for better product information work to the growing complexity of digital commerce. The full text is for Gartner clients. For most buyers that means their picture of the guide comes from vendor summaries and press releases, which is worth keeping in mind when you read them.

On its Peer Insights page for the market, Gartner defines PIM as packaged software that lets product, commerce and marketing teams create and maintain an approved, shareable version of rich product content. It lists four ways to run it: hosted cloud-native, SaaS, private cloud and on-premises. That definition is a useful check on your own scope. It centers on approved product content that product, commerce and marketing teams share, so if your main problem is master data for customers or suppliers, you are probably looking at a different market.

Market Guide versus Magic Quadrant

A Magic Quadrant scores vendors on two axes, ability to execute and completeness of vision, and places them in four quadrants. A Market Guide describes a market and what buyers can expect from it, with a list of representative vendors, and does not rate or position them. For PIM, Gartner's current research is the Market Guide. Master data management has a separate Magic Quadrant, so a vendor's place in the MDM quadrant says little about its PIM. When a vendor refers to a Gartner position in a sales conversation, ask which of the two documents it means.

The five takeaways

The five takeaways below are our reading of the guide, with what each one means for a selection and what to ask in a demo. Vendor summaries of the same report, such as Bluestone's, name similar themes. The questions are meant to be copied into your demo script, so every vendor answers them on the same terms.

A Market Guide

• ✓Describes the market and what buyers can expect
• ✓Lists representative vendors
• ✕Rates or positions the vendors

A list, not a ranking

Announced their inclusion, A to Z

• Bluestone PIM
• Contentserv
• inriver
• Syndigo

Our reading: five themes

1. 1PIM, PXM and MDM are growing togetherAsk in the demo: Which capabilities are native, and which come from partners or acquisitions?
2. 2AI is moving into content workAsk in the demo: Show it on our data, in our languages, against our attribute rules.
3. 3Sustainability and compliance dataAsk in the demo: Can it hold material, substance and certificate data per variant, with versions and an audit trail?
4. 4Composable, API-first PIMAsk in the demo: Is every function in the API? Events or webhooks? Rate limits? Who builds the connectors?
5. 5B2B growth and supplier collaborationAsk in the demo: How do suppliers deliver data: a portal, mapped files or a data pool?

1. PIM, PXM and MDM are growing together

PIM systems take on work that used to sit elsewhere: product experience management features such as content optimization and digital shelf analytics on one side, master data matching and governance on the other. MDM vendors in turn add product enrichment, so the lines between the categories are less sharp than their names suggest.

PIM, MDM and DAM: the jobs that are growing together

System	What it owns	Who works in it	The question it answers
PIMProduct information managementPIM guide	Sellable product content: attributes, descriptions, asset links, translations and channel versions.	E-commerce, marketing, category and product content teams.	Is this product complete and ready to sell on this channel?
MDMMaster data managementMDM guide	Golden records across domains: customers, suppliers, locations and products, matched and governed.	Data governance, data stewards and IT.	Which version of this record is the true one, in every system?
DAMDigital asset managementDAM guide	Files and media: images, video, documents, renditions and usage rights.	Brand, creative and marketing teams.	Where is the approved file, and where may we use it?

For a buyer, this means a single platform can cover more jobs, and the label on it says less than it used to. A vendor that calls its product a PXM platform may have a strong product record and modest analytics, while an MDM vendor with a product module may handle enrichment well or only on paper. Decide which job you need done first, for example a reliable product record for your webshop and marketplaces, or one golden record for products, suppliers and locations. Then check how well each candidate does that particular job instead of how many categories it claims. Our MDM guide and PXM guide explain the differences.

Ask in the demo: which of these capabilities are native, and which come from partners or acquisitions?

2. AI is moving into content work

AI now drafts product copy, suggests classifications and attribute values, and translates. More vendors include it in the core product instead of selling it as an add-on, which makes it part of almost every demo.

That is also where the gap between a demo and daily use tends to be widest. A model that writes a convincing description for a prepared demo product can do much less well on your catalog, with your attribute names, your languages and your gaps. AI helps most where volume is high and rules are clear, such as first drafts for standard products, classification and translation, and a person still checks the result before it is published. Look at the pricing as well, because AI features can be charged by usage, which ties the cost to how much of the catalog you run through them. What AI inside a PIM actually does covers where it works and where it breaks.

Ask in the demo: show it on our data, in our languages and against our attribute rules. What happens to a wrong suggestion, and how is AI use priced?

3. Sustainability and compliance data drive adoption

Regulation and buyers' demand for transparency push companies to keep accurate data on materials, substances, origin and packaging. In the EU, the digital product passport under the Ecodesign for Sustainable Products Regulation and the packaging rules of the PPWR make this concrete.

Compliance data then becomes product data, with owners, sources, versions and validity dates. It behaves differently from marketing copy: a certificate expires, a substance declaration changes when a supplier changes a component, and you may need to show which version applied when a product was sold. Not every PIM models that well, especially when the data differs per variant. A manufacturer of electrical products, for example, may need separate declarations per variant, each with its own supplier source and expiry date, and a model that only stores one document per product family will not hold that.

Ask in the demo: can the model hold material, substance and certificate data per variant, with versions and an audit trail, and publish it to the formats your partners need?

4. Composable, API-first PIM

The market moves from monolithic, on-premise suites to cloud-native, modular platforms that connect to the rest of the stack through APIs.

A composable PIM fits teams with a composable commerce stack and the capacity to build or buy integrations, because every connection to the ERP, the shop or a marketplace is something someone has to build, monitor and maintain. A team without that capacity may be better served by a suite with ready connectors, even if that suite is less flexible. Settle before the demos who will own those integrations after go-live, in your own team or at your integrator, because that answer often decides between the two approaches. The trade-offs are in on-premise versus SaaS.

Ask in the demo: is every function available through the API? Are there events or webhooks for changes? What are the rate limits, and who builds and maintains the connectors?

5. PIM for B2B growth and supplier collaboration

PIM is no longer mainly a retail tool. B2B companies with large supplier networks want PIM to harmonize supplier data and to make supplier onboarding faster.

For those companies, the quality of incoming supplier data becomes a selection criterion in its own right. A technical wholesaler that receives files from many manufacturers, each with its own column names and units, spends much of its product data effort on making those files fit before any enrichment starts. A PIM with a supplier portal, mapping tools or support for data pools and standards such as ETIM can take a large part of that work away, while a PIM built mainly for retail content may leave it in spreadsheets. Our guides on PIM for wholesale and PIM for manufacturing go into the B2B side.

Ask in the demo: how do suppliers deliver data (portal, mapped files or a data pool), and how do errors go back to them?

How to use the guide in a PIM selection

The guide is most useful early in a selection, when you are still working out which vendors to look at. The steps below show where it fits and where your own requirements take over.

1. Start from your own requirements

   Write down your catalog, channels, integrations, languages and must-haves before you open any vendor list. Without requirements, a vendor list turns into a beauty contest that the best-known names and the most polished demos win. With them, you can drop a vendor in minutes because it lacks something you need, such as the languages you sell in or a connector to your ERP.

2. Use the vendor list as one input

   The representative vendors are a reasonable starting point for a long list. Gartner Peer Insights reviews are opinions of individual users, which Gartner states do not represent its own views, so treat them as one more input. Reviews from companies of your size and sector tell you more than the overall score.

3. Filter on scale, region and sector

   A vendor built for global enterprises can be a poor fit for a mid-market wholesaler, and the other way round. Implementation partners in your region and support in your language matter as much as features once the project starts. The free PIM Scan filters on these points and returns a ranked shortlist.

4. Add vendors that fit but are not listed

   Regional specialists and vendors for one sector, such as technical wholesale or packaged goods, often fit better than the best-known names. A list of representative vendors cannot include every provider, so the vendor that suits your situation best may simply not be on it. Our vendor directory and best PIM software overview help here.

5. Decide in demos and reference calls

   Give the shortlisted vendors a script and a real slice of your catalog, and call references with a similar scope. A script makes the demos comparable, because every vendor then shows the same tasks on the same data instead of its own favorite features. The PIM RFP guide turns this into a tender.

Related guides

• How to select the right PIM: the full selection method.
• Best PIM software: an independent market overview.
• What AI inside a PIM actually does: takeaway 2 in depth.
• Digital product passport: takeaway 3 in depth.

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