Braze vs. Salesforce.com

Braze is the go-to solution for businesses that offer its services and products through apps. It is a comprehensive tool that will provide you with an easy and quick way to orchestrate conversion and engagement communications and tests. Both product and marketing teams will be able to deliver amazing InApps and Notifications without any help or supervision from tech teams and developers (tech help is needed for implementation and tool evolution only). Braze can also deliver messages to websites and through web push, however, if you do not own an app, I may suggest you pursue other CRM tools.

Ability to create dashboards. The project progress can be easily tracked. Tickets can be fed with all the right data and the same can be exported. You can customize the fields as per your usage. Can be used for multiple projects. The reports generated are accurate in nature and can be used for making important decisions and improvements.

• Is constantly improving all its features.
• Cares a lot for the final user and its usability, in my case I'm constantly getting asked about feedback to improve several features.
• Is really easy to use, and the documentation and LAB are really helpful if you are starting with Braze.
• Has a strong community, where anyone can ask everything and other peers can contribute.

• Salesforce.com is extremely customizable. I would not consider it an out-of-the-box solution, although its standard fields allow for fundamental CRM activities and reporting.
• Salesforce.com is able to integrate with 100s of third-party softwares—often times creating efficiencies in processes.
• Reports within Salesforce.com have the ability to be simple as a standard Account report, or you can get very granular with your report filtering to segment a very specific result, eg. Accounts in California who are active clients and fall within the pharmaceutical industry and have a specified market capitalization.

• Braze could offer more tier based cost effective solutions for users who only integrate minimally.
• I think the the ability to understand how users patterns can be utilized is powerful but could be made more robust yet usable.
• Reporting without exporting to a CSV perhaps a more cloud-based reporting option.

• Would like easier integration of Einstein data in Salesforce Dashboards so we do not have to navigate to the Analytics Studio.
• Quicker adoption of custom objects into new offerings like the Pipeline Navigator.
• Continued expansion of Salesforce Surveys for more features and flexibility.

While it's not perfect and can be overly complicated at times, there is not another solution out there that can do what it does. To get the same functionality you would need numerous disparate tools to match the amount of functionality Salesforce has. Having it all aggregated on one platform makes the complicated parts far more bearable

Compared to the Salesforce Classic layout, the Lightning Experience is very user-friendly. Customize your top navigation bar to include quick links to your most frequently used records, objects, or reports. There are free online courses from Salesforce called "Trail Heads" to help new users get acquainted with the CRM. As a whole, it's a well-designed and user-friendly website. All is well, and there have been no problems so far.

Salesforce is always available securely from any internet-capable device anywhere in the world, UNLESS you choose to set security measures so that ONLY trusted IP ranges may access the system at certain times of the day. It's all about choice and flexibility with Salesforce products.

Salesforce performance in general is excellent. "The cloud infrastructure beneath Force.com has been fine-tuned over the past 10 years. It powers nearly 100,000+ businesses running more than 185,000 applications that 3 million users count on every day."
Points per Salesforce -
1) Multitenant kernel - With a multitenant platform, each business that uses the app doesn’t have its own copy. Instead, all businesses share a single copy and then customize it for their specific needs.
2) ISO 27001 certified security - You can’t compromise when it comes to enterprise-level security. Force.com is road-tested and trusted by nearly 100,000+ companies, including many of the world’s most security-conscious organizations, such as banks and health care providers.
3) Proven reliability - All Force.com apps run on world-class data centers with backup, failover, and disaster-recovery facilities. Force.com has had a proven 99.9 percent uptime record for years.
4) Proven, real-time scalability - Force.com is used by many of the world's largest enterprises, including Cisco, Japan Post Network, and Symantec. Applications can automatically scale from a few users to millions of page views, as needed.
5) Real-time query optimizer - You need fast access to your data. The Force.com query optimizer delivers under 300ms response time, at a massive scale.
6) Real-time transparent system status - You can always see real-time system performance, availability, and security information at trust.salesforce.com.
7) Real-time upgrades - Unlike traditional software platforms, our upgrades never break your customizations, code, or integrations. We upgrade the platform for you 3 to 4 times each year. As a result, you’re always on the latest version, with access to the latest features, performance, and security enhancements.
8) Real-time sandbox environments - With a single click, you can create copies of your applications, configuration, and data in separate environments for development, testing, and training.
9) Three global production data centers and disaster recovery - Force.com runs on three geographically dispersed, mirrored data centers with built-in replication, disaster recovery, a redundant network backbone, and no single points of failure

We have direct support from our account manager and success manager practically around the clock when things come up that are urgent. They're even helping me post open roles for my team on internal job boards within the Braze team.

Account managers are awesome for the most part but change every year. So just as they are getting to know your business they usually switch accounts. We have premier success now which gives us 24/7 access to support, which has been helpful as we deal with integration issues with APIs and across Salesforce products.

I attended two training sessions. I would rate them a 4 as an advanced user. It was very basic – great for someone new – would give 8+ for new person.

I had 3 years of experience at the time. I skipped basic and went onto advanced and still not helpful. A lot of it was best practices that didn’t feel relevant for our business

I have gone through multiple. The content that’s delivered is quite basic – I wish they had more advanced training.

We are grandfathered into premium support plus training. We get unlimited access to instructor led and online training for free. We have taken advantage of this

Just from an organizational standpoint - we standardized our data prior to moving to Salesforce. But we essentially standardized it wrong. That's created a big disgusting mess for us know that I'll have to deal with as the Admin. Be sure you think through use cases prior to doing something like that - seek outside opinions on how the data will work best, especially depending on what else you're going to integrate with Salesforce.

Braze is a MUCH simpler interface than the Adobe Campaign. However, it is hard to argue that they both have the same functionality. Adobe Campaign is for a MUCH more technical team whereas Braze has a much easier user interface. I would definitely recommend Braze for small to medium-sized customers.

When evaluating a CRM solution for our company we had a fairly simple decision process. We had to decide to buy vs build an internal solution - which we found for the cost Salesforce would save from development / IT perspective and provide a more robust solution. The closest out of the box competitor we looked at was the Microsoft Dynamics CRM product -and again, we found Salesforce to be a more robust / cost effective solution.

The contract process was arduous. Some of that was because of the purchasing issues with our university, but as mentioned previously, we got a quote for a package and then they also recommended add-on fees. These were things we did not end up going with because we had budgeted based on the originally quoted amount. This has slowed down our implementation phase and meant we were paying for two CRM software for longer than I would have liked.

I've worked with Salesforce since 2001 in companies ranging from 4 to hundreds of sales people and the system has been able to scale and perhaps more importantly expand (functionally) to the needs of larger organizations. In fact in my previous company, as a provider of a solution that integrated with Salesforce, we had customers that had thousands of sales people using Salesforce.

Using Salesforce.com has made my daily routines more efficient and simplified the manual tasks I had to perform independently. I can now access data from any device, online or offline, and provide better guidance to my team about the forecasts provided by the built-in artificial intelligence (AI). A chat with a Salesforce support specialist would be great. The knowledge base has a community forum where Salesforce users can ask questions and learn more about the product.

• Positive: A growth hacking experiment was proven successful in nudging users who abandoned their cart after checking out with a product/service and leaving their chart or 24 hours.
• Positive: A growth hacking experiment was proven successful in nudging users whose credit card failed when trying to upgrade to a paid account.
• Negative: With the plethora of teams (disciplines / business units / markets) with access to braze, it's easy to accidentally over-nurture users.

• Companies that either hire consulting expertise or have in-house experts will benefit the most. It can be a powerful tool. Manage it correctly and there will be great benefits.
• Conversely, if companies don't implement Salesforce.com with a plan, there will be frustration and small if any ROI realized.