Braze vs. Twilio Segment

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.

Incentivized

Best suited: - Merging emails coming from: Facebook leads forms, Unbounce or landing pages forms, Google forms, any other kind of lead generation tool and bundling all that information together for a single user "profile". - Passing events generated in multiple applications by the same user (product selected in web, product discarded in cart, etc) and delivering those events into other applications (like a CRM) Less appropriate: - Reading/updating data directly from segment from a frontend application

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• Multi-platform. Segment has easy integrations in many different web, backend, and app platforms/frameworks. We use the Segment SDK in Android and iOS as well as our node.js backend.
• Segment is fairly affordable for early-stage companies that are trying out different analytics software. The "developer" plan is free and is suitable for most companies with products that have a small user base.
• The UI is great! It is extremely intuitive and easy-to-learn, and this made it take very little time to integrate this software into our analytics and marketing workflows.

Incentivized

• 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

Incentivized

• More and richer sources. For example, MailChimp is a source but the data you get from MailChimp is quite limited. I ended up writing my own scripts to take better advantage of MailChimp's API because Segment's integration was lacking.
• Better examples on how to set up event tracking. Pageview tracking is easy enough, but it would be nice if they had a sample app and corresponding code for it and showed you, via Git commits, how to add various kinds of events.

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 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...).

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

Over the period it took us to set up, we kept going back to their enablement team to help us with the setup, and they were always ready and were very helpful in the entire process. Even with their documentation, they took the time out to help us work through the process. We've never had a message/email unanswered for more than an hour on working days.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

We chose Twilio Segment for the good API integration and node resources, I would use Ontraport again, particularly if I didn't have the requirements for API and development/platform integration. Certainly the set up and management is easy and seamless with both the API and the user interface to use depending on circumstances and requirements.

Incentivized

• We are currently trying to reduce churn of our members, numbers are stable but not as good as they could be.
• We have achieved well in the upselling of our products, and expect to see a good proportion of revenue from this at the end of the year.
• Higher engagement in our app work, performing much better than email. Keeping things interactive really helps.

Incentivized

• Segment has enabled us to get a full view of our front end activity, join it to our back-end activity, and get full visibility into our funnels and user activity.
• Segment lets us send events to ad tools with a full audit trail so all the numbers line up.
• Segment also brings data from other sources into our data warehouse, saving our data engineering time from building commodity connectors.