Braze is well known as the serious enterprise messaging tool for large consumer brands, but as they say, the reality does not always match the reputation. Six-figure contracts with soaring costs for diminishing returns and a lengthy implementation process are some of the most common complaints from their users. As a result, an increasing number of marketing teams are searching for Braze Alternatives, seeking comparable capabilities with less hassle.
Before jumping into the tool comparison, consider some of the reasons that are actually driving teams away. Each problem has a different appropriate solution.
For some teams, the goal is large cost savings. Others want a better engineering-to-marketing team ratio to get campaigns live, and a growing number want on-site personalization or customer loyalty programs, which Braze does not offer out of the box. Knowing which of these is true for your team will get you out of the vendor presentation hell in short order.
What’s Causing Teams to Search for Other Solutions?
Braze is a strong platform, but one with an expensive target market, requiring potential customers to have a strong budget and an in-house engineering team that can handle a lengthy implementation. Because of that, the product starts to show its flaws when the potential customer does not have such characteristics.
- Unpredictable pricing: Braze does not have a pricing structure, and almost all annual contracts span the range of sixty to well over a hundred thousand with no flexibility.
- Long Onboarding: Once a Customer signs the Braze contract, most teams will take weeks to months to learn to use the canvas journey builder, and most estimate the return on investment will not start to happen until year two.
- Feature gaps that force workarounds: Missing features that create a need for more products to be added. Brands need an integrated loyalty feature, personalization, and deeper integration with Salesforce and end up adding additional products to Braze.
- Reporting that feels thin for the price: Even the most loyal users agree with the inflexibility of the analytic tools, forcing teams to focus on less important work and export to other analytics tools.
- Heavy reliance on developers: A larger engineering team is required. Custom integrations and complex segmentation are difficult to do without support from an engineering team.
Braze is a strong platform, but its target customer is larger than most of its competitors, and many potential customers are not as large as the customer base that they currently serve.
The Real Risks of Switching Platforms
Switching your enterprise platform is a major decision with potential risks. Data migration failures can result in the loss of customer records, engagement history, or custom events, so always review a vendor’s migration process. Offering cheaper alternatives could open new challenges stemming from the new problems that functional gaps will cause. Additionally, we need to choose system platforms that match the skill level of our people. Different platforms could have riskier and overly complex configurations. Finally, avoid migrating during peak business periods. Careful planning and scheduling during quieter times help ensure smoother data migration, testing, and system integration.
Better Alternatives Worth Comparing
The market offers diverse platforms to meet your business needs.
- All-in-one platforms such as Maestra combine several tools and cover many needs for e-commerce brands.
- Developer-friendly automation tools like Iterable offer flexible and developer-centric tools to in-house data teams.
- Mobile-first platforms such as CleverTap and MoEngage take a mobile-first approach and cater towards businesses driven by app usage and rely heavily on push notifications and in-app analytics.
- E-commerce-focused tools like Klaviyo are easier to use, as a more straightforward tool, and are therefore preferable for smaller and more mid-sized teams, compared to others, which can add unnecessary complexity for teams who only need email and SMS solutions.
- More affordable and developer-friendly tools like Customer.io and OneSignal have solid options for behavioral messaging and are designed for smaller teams, compared to others, which can add unnecessary complexity and cost.
- CRM-integrated suites are a better fit for businesses already using Salesforce, as they can justify the complexity and investment required for Salesforce Marketing Cloud.
All of these examples focus on different things, so the ideal solution lies in the right combination for the various channels that you need, the size of your teams that are using it, and the budget that you have, instead of the first name that appears in a search.
Questions to Ask Before You Decide
Instead of rushing your decision to adopt new software, take the time to answer the following concerns:
- Which of these three concerns is the biggest issue with Braze? Its high level of complexity or its cost? Or is it missing some features?
- Does your team have the engineering resources to support the new platform, or will you need a more no-code solution?
- What will the real migration timeline look like, and will the vendor expect to take any responsibility for this?
- Will you begin with adopting the platform for limited use, or have you fully committed to platforming your users?
Answering the above questions will help your team avoid the high costs associated with making the same mistake repeatedly for a poor software choice.
Conclusion
Braze may have the least number of direct competitors, but there are alternatives. For developer-centric teams, Customer.io or OneSignal may be better options. CleverTap or MoEngage may be preferable for mobile-centric teams. For rapidly growing e-commerce companies, if messaging and loyalty, on-site personalization, and responsive support are needed, there are probably challenges easier to address with Maestra, which is a full-funnel tool, than with Braze.
Changing technology is an operational change and should be viewed in the same light. While it should be relatively easy to switch out marketing tools if they are not making growth easier, it is probably a good sign to stick with them moving forward.
