Adobe Experience Cloud competitors: 8 Alternatives for marketing teams
Updated on 14 Nov 2024
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Adobe has been one of the most recognizable tech companies for decades, mostly thanks to its Creative Cloud products like Photoshop, Illustrator, and Premier Pro.
In recent years, they’ve invested in expanding their offering for marketing and eCommerce teams with the Adobe Experience Cloud — a suite of solutions that includes product like.
- Adobe Target for A/B testing and personalization.
- Adobe Analytics for customer journey analytics
- Adobe’s Real-Time CDP for data unification.
- Marketo Engage for marketing automation.
- Adobe Experience Manager for digital asset management.
Put simply, Adobe now offers a plethora of tools for creating personalized customer experiences across channels.
However, despite this versatility, many teams decide to look for an alternative to Adobe’s Experience Cloud due to issues like price, real-time data loading very slowly, and setup complexity. Plus, a development team is often required to get the most out of Adobe’s products, making them infeasible for small businesses and other resource-limited organizations.
That’s why in this guide, we’ve gathered the eight best Adobe Experience Cloud competitors and alternatives — from traditional marketing clouds to more modern omnichannel and digital experience platforms. Here are all the options we’ll discuss below:
- Insider
- Salesforce Marketing Cloud
- Oracle Customer Experience and Marketing Cloud
- HubSpot Marketing Hub
- Bloomreach
- MoEngage
- Emarsys
- Braze
We’ll start the list with Insider — our AI-native omnichannel experience platform — and explore three key benefits it offers to marketing teams who want to maximize their spending and efforts.
For a deeper dive into how Insider works, visit our website or try the platform yourself.
1.Insider
Insider is our AI-native omnichannel experience and customer engagement platform. It helps over 1200+ high-growth and enterprise brands like Adidas, Phillips, and Samsung:
- Connect their customer data from different sources and create 360-degree customer views.
- Deliver personalized experiences across their websites, mobile apps, email, push notifications SMS, WhatsApp, and other channels.
- Reach customers where they are by building seamless omnichannel customer journeys across 12+ channels.
- And much more.
Our platform also offers the fastest return on investment (ROI) and is a leader across product categories like customer data platforms (CDPs), personalization engines, omnichannel marketing platforms, and more.
For a direct comparison, you can click here to see how Insider stacks up to the Adobe Experience Cloud or individual products like Marketo Engage across characteristics like ease of use, ease of setup, support quality, and more.
Below, you’ll learn how Insider can help your business maximize its marketing spend, deliver exceptional customer experiences, and improve key metrics like conversions, revenue, average order value (AOV), and lifetime value (LTV).
Benefit #1: Fast deployment, time-to-value, and ROI
One of the biggest challenges for companies working with Adobe’s products is the time and effort required for the setup and during the management. This makes it harder to see a meaningful ROI in a reasonable time frame.
For many teams, proper use of the Adobe Experience Cloud also requires a dedicated technical team, which further adds to the complexity and resource-intensive nature of many processes.
That’s why we’ve invested so much into ensuring Insider customers can get started and see value from our platform quickly.
First, this is possible thanks to our experienced global support teams. We don’t work with third-party system integrators or agencies. Instead, every Insider customer is guided by in-house teams that:
- Help you deploy the platform with no extra setup charges. This includes assistance with various processes, such as bringing together your customer data, integrating with other solutions, ensuring all relevant stakeholders are involved, and more.
- Resolve issues quickly. We’re an enterprise global company with 26 offices on six continents, which enables us to provide fast, high-quality customer service regardless of where you’re located.
- Migrate automated flows to our customer journey builder. If you’ve built any automations in another tool (including one of Adobe’s products), our team will migrate them to Insider, so you don’t have to build them from scratch.
- Ensure you see a return on your investment (ROI) quickly. Our growth experts will analyze your website and user behavior data to provide strategies that can yield results as fast as possible. They’ll also show you how each relevant product works, depending on your needs.
Another reason for Insider’s fast time-to-value is our extensive template library. You can find pre-built templates for all sorts of channels and use cases, including:
- Adding personalized product recommendations to your site.
- Recovering abandoned carts with strategic email and SMS messages.
- Cross-selling relevant products by showing customers complementary items to increase average order value (AOV).
- And much more.
That’s why we’ve invested so much into ensuring Insider customers can get started and see value from our platform quickly.
First, this is possible thanks to our experienced global support teams. We don’t work with third-party system integrators or agencies. Instead, every Insider customer is guided by in-house teams that:
- Help you deploy the platform with no extra setup charges. This includes assistance with various processes, such as bringing together your customer data, integrating with other solutions, ensuring all relevant stakeholders are involved, and more.
- Resolve issues quickly. We’re an enterprise global company with 26 offices on six continents, which enables us to provide fast, high-quality customer service regardless of where you’re located.
- Migrate automated flows to our customer journey builder. If you’ve built any automations in another tool (including one of Adobe’s products), our team will migrate them to Insider, so you don’t have to build them from scratch.
- Ensure you see a return on your investment (ROI) quickly. Our growth experts will analyze your website and user behavior data to provide strategies that can yield results as fast as possible. They’ll also show you how each relevant product works, depending on your needs.
Another reason for Insider’s fast time-to-value is our extensive template library. You can find pre-built templates for all sorts of channels and use cases, including:
- Adding personalized product recommendations to your site.
- Recovering abandoned carts with strategic email and SMS messages.
- Cross-selling relevant products by showing customers complementary items to increase average order value (AOV).
- And much more.
You can easily customize these templates without any coding to fit your brand tone, colors, and use cases. This means you can launch engaging, personalized messages or entire campaigns as soon as you set up Insider.
For example, you can use an intuitive drag-and-drop editor to add tailored product recommendations across your website. As you can see, the editor lets you customize the title, subtitle, individual products, and properties like spacing, size, padding, and much more, with no need for technical assistance.
This focus on simplicity and convenience is why customers rank Insider as the best solution in terms of ease of use, ease of setup, time-to-value, and ROI among all major solutions (not just Adobe).
Benefit #2: Modern, easy-to-use tools for omnichannel personalization and automation
Insider brings together 12+ channels under one umbrella. This means you can use our platform to easily send personalized messages on one channel or scale your efforts into a true omnichannel approach across your website, mobile app, email, SMS, WhatsApp, and more.
Insider lets you build tailored emails and entire campaigns by adding customers’ names, milestones, browsed items, and even product recommendations with a simple drag-and-drop editor.
These personalization capabilities make your emails as relevant as possible to each recipient, ensuring high open rates, more conversions, and a better ROI on your email marketing spend.
For example, Chow Sang Sang used Insider to implement crowd-sourced recommendations in their email marketing strategy. Our platform enabled them to source recommendations based on the interests displayed by customers and promote these products in their email campaigns with just one click.
This led to a conversion rate uplift of more than 23.5% and a 59% increase in average session duration.
As an advanced enterprise email marketing solution, Insider also supports AMP for email.
AMP helps you turn email into a revenue generator by allowing recipients to browse products, answer surveys, and complete bookings without leaving your emails. This can result in much higher submission and conversion rates.
Learn more: 12 Best email marketing platforms for different use cases.
Messaging channels
Besides email, Insider lets you scale campaigns across all sorts of messaging channels — including SMS, WhatsApp, LINE, Facebook Messenger, and chatbots.
You can easily build messages across these channels for all sorts of use cases, including:
- Price drops.
- New arrivals.
- Cart and browser abandonment.
- Order confirmations and shipping updates.
- And more.
For example, Picniq is one of the companies that used our platform to expand their reach across WhatsApp. They built various automated WhatsApp journeys aimed at recovering lost revenue from browser abandoners and generating more return customers, which led to a 5x ROI.
You can also use our Generative and Conversational AI capabilities to have two-way conversations with customers to market, sell, and support users across messaging channels.
Additionally, Insider is a Meta-verified Business Solution Provider (BSP). This means you can use our platform to unlock WhatsApp’s full potential as a marketing channel by enabling WhatsApp Commerce, i.e., the ability to let customers browse products, add items to their cart, and complete purchases without leaving the app.
Learn more: The 9 best WhatsApp marketing tools.
Push notifications
Insider lets you create all sorts of web and mobile app push notifications, including simple bulk notifications, carousels, sliders, and more targeted cart abandonment and geofence pushes.
Like all other messages, you can do this with a simple drag-and-drop editor and add customers’ names, browsed items, and other personalization elements.
For example, Marks & Spencer used targeted web push notifications to tackle one of the main challenges in their sector — high cart abandonment rates. Thanks to Insider’s personalization capabilities, their digital marketing team achieved a 15.1% cart recovery rate, which is 353x higher than the industry average.
Learn more: 11 Top tools for web and mobile app push notifications.
Social media and search ads
Insider offers native integrations with Google, Facebook, and TikTok. This means you can build customer segments in our platform — like users who visited or abandoned a specific product, users located in a specific region, or users with a high likelihood of purchasing — and easily target them with highly personalized online ads.
Pierre Cardin used this technique to target their audiences based on lifecycle status (e.g. high churn risk), likelihood to purchase, discount affinity, and more. This helped them achieve a 445% uplift in conversions from their online ads and reduce their cost per acquisition (CPA) by 67.95%.
Website and mobile app personalization
Insider comes with one of the most advanced personalization engines on the market. This makes it ideal for teams looking to maximize their marketing spend by tailoring the websites and mobile apps to each customer’s preferences to ensure high conversion rates.
For example, you can use our platform to deliver personalized:
- Product recommendations: Insider’s product recommendation engine lets you tap into various recommendation strategies — from location-based bestsellers to trending items, frequently purchased together, and user-based recommendations. Avon used our AI-driven product recommendations to achieve a 23% increase in conversions.
- Categories: Our Category Optimizer can change how categories are organized to make navigation easier, reduce bounce rates, and shorten the buying journey. Adidas used this strategy on the mobile site to increase mobile conversion rates by 50.3%.
Site search results: Eureka is a site search and merchandising tool that ensures users find what they’re looking for in the shortest time possible. It delivers personalized search results to every shopper and helps you improve the overall user experience with advanced faceting filters, typo tolerance, product reviews, and more.
Mobile stories: InStory lets you add Instagram-like stories to your site or app that users can click to browse relevant products. This is a great way to speed up product discovery, repurpose your assets, and generate more revenue. Dover Saddlery used this tool to generate $1.7 million in incremental revenue.
Learn more: The ultimate guide to website personalization.
Omnichannel campaign orchestration and A/B testing
As a true omnichannel platform, Insider enables you to orchestrate campaigns across 12+ channels using our customer journey builder — Architect.
Architect makes it easy to build omnichannel campaigns with a simple drag-and-drop editor (and 70+ templates) that lets you choose channels, conditions, wait times, and much more without any technical assistance.
This means you can launch data-driven campaigns quickly, analyze their results, and optimize when necessary. Plus, AI-powered features like Next-Best Channel Selection and Send-Time Optimization ensure your messages are always sent on the right touchpoint and at the right time.
Insider also offers A/B testing capabilities, so you can experiment with headlines, body copy, channels, and entire journey flows. For example, you can test your best-performing channels against each other to see which one brings in the best results for your entire audience (or specific segments).
Plus, with A/B Test Winner Auto-Selection, you don’t need to manually review and adjust each test depending on its results.
Our AI-powered algorithms will automatically do that for you based on a test duration and winning metric (e.g., open rates, conversion rates, or revenue) that you set. This is a great way to save time and effort when running multiple tests.NA-KD is one of the companies that used these omnichannel automation and personalization capabilities to transform their marketing.
To do that, they first needed to organize their customer data, so they could tap into its full potential. Insider’s eCommerce CDP made that possible by stitching together every interaction and transaction across all channels and touchpoints.
From here, they could start launching personalized marketing campaigns across channels. For example, they launched their first hyper-targeted SMS campaign, while also expanding their channel breadth across web push, app push, and email.
Using our customer journey builder, NA-KD’s team started creating campaigns across five channels without relying on IT support. These campaigns were based on NA-KD’s unified data, which made them extremely relevant to customers’ needs, interests, and preferences.
Thanks to this new approach, NA-KD achieved a 25% increase in LTV and 72x ROI in 12 months.
Benefit #3: Unified data and accurate insights across the entire customer journey
The foundation behind Insider’s ability to deliver highly personalized content, messages, and product recommendations is our enterprise CDP.
The CDP can aggregate customer data from any online or offline source, including customer relationship management systems (CRMs), content management systems (CMSs), APIs, analytics platforms, point-of-sale devices, customer service tools, other CDPs, and more.
The CDP uses this unified data to create 360-degree customer views full of insights like:
- Customers’ previous purchases and browsing histories.
- Their reachability and interactions across different channels like email, SMS, or push notifications.
- AI-powered predictive marketing characteristics, such as likelihood to purchase, likelihood to engage on a channel, discount affinity, and much more.
In short, Insider gives you all the data you need to build effective personalized campaigns in one place.
You can also easily connect the CDP to other tools in your martech stack with the 100+ connectors in our Integrations Hub.
That way, crucial data is constantly shared between your platforms to ensure you’re always basing your marketing efforts on up-to-date information. For example, you can integrate Insider with:
- Ad networks, like Google, Facebook, and TikTok.
- Marketing automation platforms, like Marketo, Drip, and Eloqua.
- Analytics platforms, like Google Analytics, Amplitude, and Mixpanel.
- Data warehouses and other raw data solutions, like BigQuery, S3, and Snowflake.
- And many others.
You also have access to advanced customer journey analytics tools, allowing you to analyze the impact of your marketing efforts.
For example, you can get a high-level overview of all campaign results in the dedicated analytics dashboard. From here, you can drill down into specific campaigns and create custom reports for marketing, sales, product, and executive teams with relevant metrics (e.g., conversions, revenue, retention, AOV, and so on).
Insider also offers specialized analytics for different tools and channels. For example, if you’re using our Smart Recommender to show personalized product recommendations, you can easily see:
- Add-to-cart and conversion rates.
- The click rate for each recommendation.
- Direct and assisted revenue, as well as the number of total orders for each recommended product.
Lastly, you also have plenty of behavioral analytics tools to dive deeper into other aspects of your audiences. Some of these include:
- Funnels for monitoring how users navigate key goals like purchases and uncovering where drop-offs occur.
- Flow Analytics for finding the different paths your users take to reach your goals, fixing the inefficient ones, and enhancing the ones that work well even more.
- Retention Cohorts for discovering the long-term value of various segment groups and learning how to keep them engaged over time.
- And more.
For more details on how Insider can help your business, visit our website or book a demo with our team.
II. Salesforce Marketing Cloud
Salesforce Marketing Cloud is an enterprise-grade platform comprising different marketing tools for customer data integration, marketing analytics, B2B marketing automation, mobile marketing, personalization, loyalty marketing, and more. It’s one of the most versatile platforms for marketers that can also be integrated with other tools in the Salesforce ecosystem, including their CRM.
Similar to Adobe, Salesforce can also be quite pricey and difficult to set up and utilize correctly.
Learn more: 5 Best Salesforce Marketing Cloud competitors and alternatives.
III. Oracle Customer Experience and Marketing Cloud
Oracle offers two sets of products that can serve as replacements for Adobe’s Experience Cloud — Oracle Customer Experience (CX) and Oracle Marketing Cloud. Oracle CX is a more comprehensive solution that includes tools for marketing, sales, and customer service teams. The Marketing Cloud is more specialized with four main products for data unification (i.e., a CDP), marketing automation, cross-channel campaign management and personalization, and loyalty management.
IV. HubSpot Marketing Hub
HubSpot Marketing Hub is a collection of tools for use cases like marketing automation, lead generation, form creation, social media management, email and SMS marketing, and analytics. It’s similar to other marketing clouds, although it’s geared towards much smaller businesses compared to Adobe, Salesforce, or Oracle as it offers a free plan and paid plans starting as low as $20/month per user seat. It’s also designed mainly for B2B companies and can be easily integrated with HubSpot’s well-known CRM.
V. Bloomreach
Bloomreach is an AI-powered eCommerce personalization platform. It offers tools and products for:
- Marketing teams, including web personalization, ad optimization, email and SMS marketing, and more.
- Merchandising teams, including eCommerce site search, product recommendations, SEO functionalities, and a headless CMS.
Overall, Bloomreach is a versatile platform that’s mostly focused on eCommerce brands but also works with companies in industries like fintech, food and beverage, and travel and hospitality.
Learn more: 11 Top Bloomreach competitors & alternatives (by category).
VI. MoEngage
MoEngage is a customer engagement platform for cross-channel communications and real-time insights. It offers many capabilities spread across four broad categories:
- Cross-channel marketing, which includes 10+ channels like email, SMS, and app notifications.
- Customer insights, which includes 360-degree customer views, reporting dashboards, and AI-powered insights.
- Web and app personalization, which help teams tailor the on-site and in-app experiences to their customers’ needs and interests.
- Real-time transactional alerts, which includes one API for customer alerts, updates, and notifications across email, push notifications, SMS, and WhatsApp.
While versatile, MoEngage’s pricing can be hard to predict ahead of time and its customer support quality can vary depending on the region.
Learn more: 7 MoEngage alternatives for marketing teams.
VII. Emarsys
Emarsys is an omnichannel customer engagement platform owned by SAP. It supports many of the channels that other platforms on this list offer, like email, SMS, digital ads, web and mobile apps, WhatsApp, and others. Emarsys also offers more niche capabilities for direct mail, contact centers, and mobile wallet experiences. Learn more: 9 Best Emarsys competitors and alternatives (detailed review).
VIII. Braze
Braze is a customer engagement platform for email, SMS, WhatsApp, LINE, mobile app messaging, and web messaging. It offers very strong mobile marketing capabilities that enable teams to build and automate workflows across a variety of channels in real-time. It also has some website engagement and personalization features, although they are limited compared to some of the other solutions on the list.
Learn more: 11 Braze alternatives for cross-channel marketing.
Deliver personalized experiences across all channels with Insider
Insider is a modern, user-friendly platform that gives you access to 12+ channels, advanced personalization, and an AI-powered customer journey builder for creating personalized customer experiences.
It’s an ideal alternative to Adobe Experience Cloud for midsize and enterprise teams looking for predictable pricing, best-in-class customer support, ease of use, and fast time-to-value.
In a nutshell, our enterprise marketing platform can help you:
- Work with experienced in-house support teams that ensure a hassle-free deployment, easy management, and fast ROI.
- Make the most out of your marketing efforts and budget by maximizing conversion rates via strategic personalization and automation.
- Improve key metrics like conversions, revenue, retention, and acquisition costs by delivering relevant content, messaging, and product recommendations to the right audiences, on the right channels, at the right times.
- Build, automate, and analyze campaigns across all channels — including on-site, email, SMS, WhatsApp, push notifications, and more — from one easy-to-use platform with hundreds of proven templates.
- Tap into the full power of AI to predict customer behaviors, work more efficiently, deliver personalized product recommendations, have unstructured two-way conversations with customers, and more.
Click here to book a demo with our team and learn how Insider can help you reach your business goals.
