Braze is a customer engagement platform that enables relevant and memorable experiences between consumers and brands. With Braze, global brands can ingest and process customer data in real time, orchestrate and optimize contextually relevant, cross-channel marketing campaigns.
N/A
Customer.io
Score 9.0 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
HubSpot Marketing Hub
Score 8.5 out of 10
N/A
HubSpot's Marketing Hub is an all-in-one inbound marketing engine that includes tools for email marketing, landing page creation, social media marketing, content management, reporting & analytics, search engine optimization (SEO), and more.
$15
per month per seat
Pricing
Braze
Customer.io
HubSpot Marketing Hub
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
No answers on this topic
Marketing Hub Starter
$15
per month per seat
Marketing Hub Professional
$890
per month Includes 3 Core Seats (Additional Core Seats start at $50)
Marketing Hub Enterprise
Starts at $3,600
per month Includes 5 Core Seats (Additional Core Seats start at $75)
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Braze
Customer.io
HubSpot Marketing Hub
Free Trial
Yes
Yes
Yes
Free/Freemium Version
No
No
Yes
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
No
Yes
Yes
Entry-level Setup Fee
Optional
Optional
Required
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.
Braze is a cross-channel and data-driven tool. It is much more intuitive and easier to use. It supports a high volume of sending. Braze team provides excellent follow-up and support, and we are part of a large community of clients who share knowledge and help.
Easier than the big ones and more robust and than the small ones. Braze seems to be a great fit for teams that need to move fast, cannot spend a lot of time in certifications and training and are able to adapt to innovation. As for pricing, Braze has different pricing depending …
Braze is easy to use and offers excellent modern functionalities, making it ideal for contemporary marketing. The training support and implementation support provided by Braze are also good. In terms of mobile-friendly email creation and personalisation, Braze has stood out. …
Braze wins it all. They are the easiest to use. The best interface from a building and reporting perspective. Their teams are incredible to work with. They're extremely affordable for large scale email tactics.
Every business is different, but in my experience, Braze has filled the need for the clients that are using it and they have done a masterful job of creating and continuing to update a platform that is excellent!
There are so many ways to seamlessly connect all your tech together so the data stays consistent. I like their pricing model of charging per user vs data stored, like Iterable and Braze do. I also think their marketing is so good and the content they put out are actually …
Klaviyo doesn't have all the integrated options that Customer.io has. Braze has all the same features, but have a different pricing model (pay only for users that logged in and not for everything in the account), so depending on the company's needs it might be more suitable.
I have tried multiple email marketing software, including MailChimp, ConvertKit, CustomerIO, and HubSpot, but I really liked how CustomerIO solved our problem. They were all somehow solving our problem, but lacked a few things here and there. For instance, ConvertKit’s forte is …
Pardot has a clunky, outdated interface and capabilities, making it highly challenging to work with. On the other hand, Customer.io has been the opposite and it's one of the easiest tools to work on in our entire tech stack.
We do still use HubSpot, but their email automation is very native and fixed within HubSpot. We needed something that was going to collect our events and integrate 2-ways with Segment in order to effectively send the campaigns we desired. There are so many events in our app …
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.
Talking from the perspective of a marketer at a SaaS with average. 50K email subscribers, Customer IO has been an excellent tool for us. Our requirements include sending users newsletters, marketing emails, and transactional emails, running lead-nurturing campaigns, and more. For a comprehensive use case like ours, CustomerIO is great. While it also has a learning curve, when you have such requirements, it’s worth it. I don’t think CustomerIO is the best fit if you have basic requirements like only weekly newsletter emails.
As I said previously, I was not a fan at the beginning because, like everyone, I don't take change so well. Once I started following leads through HubSpot Marketing Hub, I integrated it with my email and created templates for what I needed, I started to see the positives immediately. My time working was better spent as I eliminated time put in routine tasks. I was able to track all communication in HubSpot Marketing Hub, we created systems in the office assigning tasks to one another and, through HubSpot Marketing Hub, our leads were able to book meetings in my calendar automatically. To be honest, if you are in sales and marketing, I cannot think of scenarios where HubSpot Marketing Hub cannot help. All I would like to say is, when using templates, pay attention to where you send them - you may need some personalization. I would encourage the management of HubSpot Marketing Hub to create short tutorials for beginners like me who need to configure and start using various features: setting up deals, templates, and dashboards.
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.
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.
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
While Hubspot has added some collaborative tools, I think this could improve. I'd like to see more options to comment on emails and ways of being able to share out changes as well as approval channels.
The ability to update ads via the calendar is pretty cumbersome. There's no good way to bulk edit or update. You have go into each one individually.
Real time edits would be nice. If you have multiple people working on the same thing, you'll get kicked out and your changes might not be saved.
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
Our business relies on the HubSpot platform to manage our marketing, sales and CRM processes. HubSpot marketing automation helps us define our activities and streamlines them in a cohesive and efficient way. Without HubSpot, we will have to revert to the 'old way' of doing everything with a variety of disparate systems.
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...).
Super intuitive and easy interface to start off with. There are not a lot of guides and the documentation is helpful but not super extensive, but even if you're a little technical, you can easily figure most of the things out by yourself. Everything is super easy to start with and the platform does not overwhelm you with a lot of options, or data.
While there are some frustrating things that pop up unexpectedly ("wait... I can't do X?"), I have found HubSpot to be easy to use and extremely helpful to my daily work. The documentation is really good, and when it's not helpful, the support staff have been amazing.
They have had issues with system availability over the course of days. Sometimes the system is unusable, other times updates simply take a long time to show up. It's better now but, from a reliaibility standpoint, HubSpot is not Salesforce.com yet. Still great software though.
With all the new features in HubSpot, the system can get a tad slow sometimes... That said, most of the time it is lightning fast and I have no problems. Because most of the integrations are API, they silently work in the background. I have not had trouble with lag due to HubSpot integration
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
My experience with their support team has always been great. Very quick to respond, have an online chat, and are very helpful. They helped me resolve any issues I've had every time in a professional and knowledgeable manner. We've now switched to another tool, and I can't even compare the service level we get there to customer.io
During the few times I've needed it, HS support has been accessible, helpful and efficient. Often rolling up their sleeves to make changes for you as opposed to leaving you with a list of instructions to decipher on your own.
I did the 2-day classroom at HubSpot's corporate office in Cambridge. First off, it was amazing to see their corporate office in general. They have such a cool office environment. But it was also great to have the ability to learn in a workshop format with other HubSpot users and meet my Account Manager/ Inbound Marketing Consultant in person.
It's really well explained, there are lots of documentation about all topics. When we want to perform in a specific area, there are always a dedicated path. For each new feature, there is always some videos explaining the purpose and the new functionalities. Also I used to do the certification which allows me to show my achievements in my business environment.
I went through Inbound Marketing University in 2006. Great training and helped my transition from traditional (outbound) marketing to inbound marketing that I've been able to apply to a number of businesses from wastewater and water reuse, to professional services and SaaS. Share information of value to build awareness and trust. Answer customers' questions in a transparent way to generate more qualified leads. Understand the difference between a marketing qualified lead and a sales qualified lead and put together a lead nurturing program. Your sales and marketing efforts will see significant ROI.
My biggest piece of advice for those who are implementing Hubspot is that you need to devote the time up front and learn how to use the product. Once you learn how to use Hubspot, it will be much more effective as well as much easier to use in the long run
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.
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.
Other competing software such as Zoho and Boomtown may have more bells and whistles, but it is too cumbersome and has many parts that only advanced users can operate. With HubSpot, each function is within reach of the average agent. It doesn't overpromise and then makes you feel incompetent when you can't use it all...
HubSpot is addressing this more and more. Currently you can assign tasks to designated sales teams, which grow as you grow. They've added free baseline products for those just getting started. These and more contribute to the scalability of HubSpot - so I gave it an 8 and am hoping for more in the future!
Positive impact on the sales side. I'm not sure about the specific ROI (you have to include the designer and the time it takes to set up) but you certainly get back the investment in a few months, once you are able to scale your email marketing.
Customer experience is way better by having more segmented, contextual and accurate messages sent to them.
Integration is costly and it will take several days or weeks to be fully achieved. Expect to invest some money on this.
