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.
N/A
Customer.io
Score 8.7 out of 10
Small Businesses (1-50 employees)
Customer.io is a customer engagement platform that enables marketers to build sophisticated automated messaging campaigns. With access to real-time behavioral data, users can create personalized and relevant messages to engage and retain customers. This includes sending emails, push notifications, SMS, in-app messages, and more through a visual building experience. Built for scale, Customer.io boasts users among over 5,300 companies, sending over 17 billion messages per year.
$100
per month
Pricing
Braze
Customer.io
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Braze
Customer.io
Free Trial
Yes
Yes
Free/Freemium Version
No
No
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
No
Yes
Entry-level Setup Fee
Optional
Optional
Additional Details
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Essentials: For startups and small teams engaging customers on their mobile and web apps.
- Up to 5,000 profiles*, Send Emails, Push, In-App, and SMS, Visual Workflow Builder, Segmentation, Two Workspaces, Email Support, Customer Community
Premium: For high-growth companies looking for greater control over their messaging outcomes.
- Everything in Essentials, Custom Data + Message Volume, Premium Product Features, Additional Workspaces, 90-day Onboarding Program, Premium Email & Chat Support, Managed Deliverability, Dedicated IPs, Parcel Pro Licenses, HIPAA Compliance
Enterprise: For at-scale companies looking to create world-class customer experiences.
- Everything in Premium, Managed Infrastructure*, Customer Success Manager, Quarterly Success Reviews, Technical Account Manager*, Audit Logging & Data Governance*, Parcel Business Licenses, Migration Support*, *Available by consultation.
Utilizing Braze for user onboarding activation is ideal, for example when a new user signs up but hasn’t completed identity verification or added a payment method, Braze can send a series of nudges via email, SMS, and in-app messaging. Braze is not ideal for highly regulated financial communications. hese require stringent compliance and audit trails, which may be better handled through core banking systems or platforms built for financial record-keeping
This tool is well-suited for companies looking to run email marketing campaigns or send out newsletters regularly to their users/customers. The workflow setup is especially useful for companies who want to send specific emails based on user behavior - i.e. they've not logged in recently, have bought a specific product, haven't opened any emails, etc. This could also be useful for freelancers like me since you can create different workspaces within Customer.io. I have configured it this way to handle email marketing for a few of my clients, and the software keeps everything organized and separate. This might not be the best tool for small businesses, considering the price. It may be better to start out with a cheaper email marketing tool, and then if/when necessary, scale-up with a tool like Customer.io.
Action based entry methods - helps ensure certain messages only go out once a key action has happened (in our case loading an offer to a guest account).
Liquid - this gives the ability to send truly dynamic emails depending on the attributes present on a guest level. Making our messages extremely personalized.
Support - the Braze team is very supportive and bought into the partnership. From the dedicated support team, our CSM team, the engineering team, escalations team, and everyone else; they make it clear that they succeed if we succeed and their actions show it.
Managing users, attributes and events. You are easily able to modify any user, based on their ID, and add or remove attributes, assign events to them. That makes it very easy to segment later and to assign them to several campaigns based on behavior. Just a warning: this integration isn't so easy (at least it wasn't for us).
Creating workflows of campaigns is very easy. You can quickly create behavioral campaigns based on attributes, segments and add elements to the workflow. You can send an email, then wait, then send another, then exit the campaign if they converted, etc. The workflow is easy to configure and very powerful for automation.
We don't use many email templates (we make them in MJML) but it's very easy to add senders, to change templates and in general to test designs.
Deliverability works very well, at least for us. It sends emails pretty fast and without issues.
Exporting is very quick and easy. Importing wasn't a feature until recently, but it works well too.
Seeing activity it's also useful. In general, logs are awesome (be it of a customer, of activity on the site, email sends, etc.).
We don't use environments, but it might be very useful for a bigger company.
Reporting on specific links. It's hard to see how a single CTA performed vs overall engagement.
The view of live Canvases can be hard to digest with such long sections for each message step. I also need to click through a few times to see the actual creative, making it harder at a glance to remember which path was which.
Frequency capping rules. We assumed these could be more complex, such as having a hierarchy of delivery based on a tag, vs just a max volume per tag.
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's easy to use and understand. However, it's not perfect (the last set of UI/UX updates definitely improved this), and for Braze to be really 10 out of 10, an easier process to integrate Braze with data/website/apps would be needed -> right now, marketing is limited by what was set up initially, and moving this beyond MVP is extremely hard.
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
Braze is a much stronger deployment platform than Optimove (i.e., Optimail, Optimobile, Optitext). While Klaviyo may be deemed the "preferred" integration with Shopify, we feel confident that Braze will work perfectly well and will continue to enhance its integration with Shopify. It'd never be worth the pain of an ESP migration to move away from Braze for maybe only a few better features with Klaviyo.
Customer.io was really the first pure, full-featured drip email program on the market and as far as I know, it's still the simplest and best overall for that specific function. SendGrid has also added drip campaign features, but I would seriously evaluate Customer.io against any other drip email provider because they really have all the key elements you need to make it work.
Our customer experience is much more cohesive- it allows multiple departments to run numerous campaigns at the same time without them conflicting with one another which is great- saves contributors a lot of unnecessary back and forth
Better tracking- we are able to pivot away from campaign styles faster using Braze tracking as it is faster and more reliable
Reduced execution time- our team has gotten back dozens of hours of time because of the streamlined execution process and user-friendly interface. This has provided us with more time to think creatively and focus on the bigger picture
We are able to run more complex campaigns in order to target customers across more stages of the shopping and browsing experience