Braze vs. Customer.io

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

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• Push notifications are very rudimentary. Everything has to be done by hand unless you're sending an extremely simple message.
• A bit too email centric.
• Lacks an ability to schedule messages on a daily, weekly, etc. basis.

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

It's user friendly and easy enough to use, but there are more polished tools available on the market

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

• 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

Incentivized

• Fast testing for new products to specific groups. It saves a lot of time and money.
• Removed workload from marketing = more time to make it better.
• Better contact with specific groups, seeing a increase in sales because of this.

Incentivized