Appcues is online software for creating in-product experiences such as user onboarding, feature announcements, etc. without writing any code. (The vendor believes it's the non-technical people who oftentimes have the best information about a software user's needs and desires.) The goal of using Appcues is to improve product engagement within the user's own customer base.
$299
per month/billed monthly
Braze
Score 8.7 out of 10
N/A
Braze is a customer engagement platform that enables relevant and memorable experiences between consumers and the brands they love. With Braze, global brands can ingest and process customer data in real time, orchestrate and optimize contextually relevant, cross-channel marketing campaigns and continuously evolve their customer engagement strategies.
Every tool has its pros and cons and niche areas for implementation. Braze offers the value of a variety of multi-media channels, which we leverage for in-app messages and email campaigns, for a plethora of campaign opportunities. Appcues and WalkMe only offer in-app messages …
It is well suited for SaaS products or services that have a highly complex user interface. Through Appcues, you can ensure that people discover all the existing and new features and make them understand the value of your product as soon as possible to address the evergreen issue of churn. But if your user interface is really messed up, you should change the product itself instead of using a tool like Appcues to explain everything on the screen.
Braze is a fantastic tool if you're looking to build a large number of CRM journeys using complex canvas structures and maximising use of customer data to segment and personalise. There are numerous tools to ensure each channel is maximising impact and engagement. Braze offers great features for testing, managing message frequency and control groups and using dynamic attributes and liquid code. If you're looking to limit your use to single-send campaigns with no or few automations, I don't think this is the right tool. From my experience, many Braze users also use external tools for analytics rather than Braze's native analytics.
Canvas feature has been really good for creating customer journey paths and long-term messaging campaigns.
They have been addressing feature requests to continue to improve the Canvas feature. One of the simplest but most-handy features is allowing Delay steps wait for a very specific date on a calendar -- so you can plan seasonal campaigns or when you have evergreen-style drip campaigns it allows for avoiding public holidays/etc.
The catalog feature provides a lot of use-cases and flexibility for personalizing comms or customizing comms for whitelabeled versions of our standard comms (for our B2B2C scenarios).
We use the catalog as a repository of our B2B2C brand info, messaging customization - it basically allows us to offer a whitelabeled configurable version of our optimized automated in-life comms in the branding of our b2b customers.
We were extremely surprised that there are not any Appcues used in Appcues. The app is pretty easy to use, once you figure out how to use it. There were not any type of tutorials when we logged in that quickly walked through how to setup a flow.
Appcues has lots of support articles, however they are almost so numerous that it was hard to find simple onboarding documentation that we found useful.
The different tooltips and product actions are great, but being able to customize the different cues a little bit more by changing sizes and aspect ratios could be an improvement.
Enabling GIF/videos to be directly uploaded on to Braze's platform
Easier way of creating canvases; right now it is too complex for someone new who is starting off in the company to understand what things do and where things are
Ability to track duplicate user profiles within the entire audience segment
Automated deduplicating email addresses/phone numbers in each targeting segment; right now it's done manually after extracting csv files
We are on a mission for an omnichannel experience for our customers and are already making good progress with Braze able to fully support and optimise this
It is an easy-to-understand platform, thanks to its design and accessibility. You can, for example, easily find any users and their data, check exact volumes of segments, follow the history of messages sent, and create reports. We can connect Braze with other platforms for analysis or email design (Snowflake, Hightouch, Stripo...).
Very responsive and helpful on simple questions, but not great other than that. They do not have a way for the customer/user to escalate a ticket. You have to contact your rep and in some cases, they don't respond within 24 hours so you have no idea if they have escalated it. There is no phone number for an urgent issue - you have to rely on email
It has a much, much better user interface, better customer care, and of course better pricing. This along with the fact that they were very accommodating for our use case ensured we went ahead with Appcues.
Braze is just the best one when it comes to aesthetics and usability, which matter when you're working every day, making complex or even simple changes to highly contextual campaigns for multiple stakeholders. Even without following tutorials, you just get it instantly and start crafting journeys very quickly. And they continue to keep adding new features at a rapid pace, so credit where it's due.
