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.
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OneSignal
Score 8.0 out of 10
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OneSignal’s omnichannel customer engagement platform offers push notifications, email, in-app messages, and SMS. OneSignal’s automated customer Journeys and one-off campaigns allow users to create messaging strategies that convert, inform, and retain audiences, with little to no coding required for setup.
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.
I think One Signal is very well suited for mobile app owners who want to be in touch with their user base more easily by sending push notifications and in-app messages. I'm not sure how well that works for SMS messaging as I haven't yet tried it. I wouldn't necessarily recommend it if your in-apps are very rare.
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.
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
Is still in development: we know OneSignal is still in development and sometimes it takes longer to create or fulfill certain features.
Payment: payment menu is not at the glance, [and] is just difficult sometimes to find -it is a minor issue.
Send to certain custom segments through specific OneSignal IDs; you can do it though API doing a GET call with tools like Postman. If this can be done from OneSignal it would be great.
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...).
I give an 8 in this question mainly for 2 reasons: the products even if they look like complete and are highly customizable and usable, they are still missing some logical features. For example, send messages to a list of users - now days you can do it with postman and get calls. A second example is App messaging that is still in development and has many opportunities.
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
Their customer support has been top-notch. They are able to assist you in getting through any problems that you may have and respond in a very timely manner. I've dealt with them on 4-5 instances over the years and my issues were always resolved within a matter of a few business days.
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.
In my opinion, OneSignal documentation / API is more friendly [than] Firebase. Maybe because Firebase is already "too big," but OneSignal is focused on one solution that giving our notification through to our customer. In that case, OneSignal is chosen by our company. Several years after that, Firebase announced it supported [the] iOs platform too but our company already using OneSignal to our notification provider.
