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.
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Sensor Tower
Score 7.5 out of 10
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Sensor Tower is a source of mobile app, digital advertising, retail media, and audience insights for the largest brands and app publishers across the globe.
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 that App Annie will be handy for the companies that provide service in multiple countries - so they have to deal with local competitors research and track the performance of the app (by the position and by the reviews) in different stores. I think that for a one-country app, many of the features will be less relevant. At the same time, App Annie offers custom plans, so I see how the user experience can be different.
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
App Annie is extremely limited if you are on the free plan. While you can garner some golden nuggets from the free plan, it's extremely difficult to make needle moving decisions based on the free data. It would be great if App Annie would disclose pricing on their website, plus have a non-free/enterprise plan were you could pick and choose features they offer.
After nearly considering a paid plan with App Annie, I decided not to purchase because of the broken trust that stemmed from their sales team. I often got cold-calls from their reps - even when I never contacted them for a sales member to call me. I was bombarded for about 2 weeks straight with phone calls and hard-core sales emails with just asking to talk, no questions or personalization. This cold, unwanted and unwelcome outreach solidified my decision not to purchase.
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
Well the fact that the freemium features are all that I need right now, I will most definitely continue to use it on a daily basis. I might upgrade to the pro version in the future if I need more data than what I am getting now. But for now it works great for what I need.
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...).
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
I have not had to contact support a lot of times. The few times I did, I got correct and lengthy responses, but they took some time to answer. Their product is very complete, so unless you have a specific question, you will probably not need to contact support at any time.
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.
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.
We use Google 360 and are able to do a much deeper dive into the activity we see on our apps. I think App Annie is a great starting point product, but for more in depth analytics, something like a Google 360 or Adobe might be better.
App Annie has had neither a positive nor negative impact on our ROI or business objectives. Our team currently uses their free, very limited plan for data discrepancy with our main ASO tool. Otherwise, we have connected our apps and let the data flow in. We go in the account about once every 2-3 months.
With App Annie's data we have solidified that our other paid ASO tool we use has accurate data and that we will continue to pay for that tool. So in that regards, App Annie's provided us with a confirmation in our competitor ASO tool purchase decision.
