Braze vs Adobe: Key tools, use cases, limitations & alternative

Braze and Adobe Experience Cloud tools are often compared for use cases like omnichannel marketing, customer targeting, personalization, and journey orchestration. They offer many similar capabilities in these areas but they also have big differences.

For example, Adobe offers over 50+ tools as part of its Experience Cloud, many of which serve use cases that Braze doesn’t, like data unification, content management, and learning management. That’s why Braze can be used both as a substitute or an addition to Adobe’s suite.

In this guide, we’ll explore Braze and Adobe’s offerings in detail, with a focus on their tools for marketing teams. We’ll discuss each platform’s key differentiators, benefits, and downsides, so you can understand if it’s the right option for you.

Here’s a quick breakdown of the most important points:

• If you’re looking for a simple but powerful mobile marketing solution, Braze is the better option. It supports channels like SMS, WhatsApp, and push notifications while also offering solid tools for targeting, personalization, and automation. For many use cases, Braze is also more cost-effective than Adobe’s products.
• In terms of downsides, Braze’s UX is not up to modern standards, making the platform difficult to navigate. Braze also doesn’t have a true customer data platform (CDP) which forces teams to use a separate solution for data management and unification.
• If you need a more comprehensive set of tools for use cases like omnichannel marketing, data unification, and content management, Adobe is the way to go. It offers all of Braze’s key capabilities as well as tons of other tools and platforms, which makes it an all-in-one platform for larger businesses.
• However, Adobe’s versatility comes at the expense of a steep learning curve, complexity, and reliance on technical teams. Plus, as an enterprise-grade solution provider, Adobe is often more expensive than other omnichannel marketing platforms.

Below, we’ll explore these and other aspects of Braze and Adobe Experience Cloud. 

We’ll also show you how Insider — our AI-native customer engagement platform — compares to Braze and Adobe across categories like customer support, personalization functionalities, and more. 

Braze vs Adobe: Overview, strengths, and limitations

We’ll start by going through each platform’s strengths and weaknesses. Since Adobe offers a ton of products, we’ll be focusing on the differences between Braze and Adobe’s tools that are its most direct competitors, including:

• Adobe Target, which is an A/B testing, personalization, and automation solution.
• Adobe Marketo Engage, which is an AI-powered marketing automation platform for omnichannel engagement and campaign orchestration.
• Adobe Campaign, which pulls together customer data and lets teams build personalized campaigns based on that data (with a particular focus on email marketing). 

Braze benefits: Powerful mobile marketing, automation, and targeting capabilities

Braze was founded in 2011 under the name Appboy. It initially focused on mobile marketing channels such as SMS, push notifications, and in-app messaging. 

Seven years later, the company rebranded to Braze, expanding its services to include a broader range of capabilities. In 2021, Braze went public, marking another milestone in its growth.

Today, Braze is a prominent player in the customer engagement field, particularly when it comes to automating and optimizing journeys across mobile channels like SMS and WhatsApp. With its deep roots in mobile marketing, it also excels in crafting highly personalized experiences within mobile apps.

This makes Braze a great option for teams interested in engaging customers on mobile channels using real-time data and strong targeting features. 

Additionally, Braze tends to be more affordable than Adobe, although its pricing may be higher compared to other omnichannel marketing tools. It’s also easier to set up and use due to Adobe’s plethora of tools and capabilities that usually require lots of expertise and technical assistance. 

As a result, Braze is the more marketer-friendly alternative, especially if you’re looking to get started and generate results as fast as possible.

Braze downsides: Unintuitive UI and lack of a true CDP

One of the main criticisms of Braze is its outdated user interface. Although the platform is easier to set up and manage than some of Adobe’s products, the UI can feel cumbersome and harder to navigate when compared to more modern enterprise marketing tools.

Another drawback of Braze is its lack of a true built-in CDP.

CDPs are essential for consolidating customer data from various sources — such as CRMs, email platforms, and analytics tools — into one centralized database hub. This provides a more complete view of customer journeys and sets a foundation of reliable data for running personalized campaigns.

While Adobe offers a real-time CDP, Braze relies heavily on integrations with third-party CDPs (including Adobe’s). As a result, many teams need to prepare and organize their data before transferring it to Braze for activation, adding complexity to the setup and management of their martech ecosystem. 

Lastly, Braze’s support infrastructure is primarily concentrated in the US and the EU, where the company has dedicated local teams. As a result, companies located outside these regions may face slower response times and lower-quality customer service.

Learn more: 11 Braze alternatives for cross-channel marketing.

Adobe Experience Cloud benefits: Complete platform with tools for data unification personalization, automation, content management, and more

Adobe was founded back in 1982 and remains one of the most popular tech companies today. Its most recognized products — like Photoshop, Illustrator, and Premier Pro — are focused on creative professionals like web designers, video editors, and photographers. 

However, over the last 10 years, Adobe has invested heavily in acquiring marketing and commerce companies (like Magento). Many of these acquisitions, alongside Adobe’s in-house developments, form the basis of today’s Experience Cloud.

As a result Adobe now offers a massive variety of products for different marketing use cases, such as:

• Personalization.
• Data unification.
• Marketing analytics.
• Content management.
• Omnichannel orchestration and automation.

Put simply, most marketing and commerce teams can find a tool for their use cases here. Plus, some of Adobe’s individual solutions are leaders in their respective categories like Marketo Engage and Adobe Analytics.

Adobe’s tools are also highly customizable and scalable for large workloads and complex omnichannel use cases. They can also be integrated with each other, as well as with many other solutions. 

That’s why Adobe Experience Cloud is usually better than Braze for enterprise teams that want to consolidate their stack under one platform and connect to other solutions they’re using like data warehouses or eCommerce platforms.

Adobe Experience Cloud cons: Expensive, complex, slow time-to-value, and reliance on technical teams

Complexity is usually the biggest challenge when it comes to utilizing Adobe Experience Cloud. Adobe’s tools, while versatile, can be very hard to set up and use correctly, often requiring the help of technical teams. Customers voice these concerns about many products from the Experience Cloud, including Marketo Engage, Target, and Campaign.

For many teams, using Adobe for more complex use cases requires the assistance of third-party agencies and consultants. This further increases the cost and complexity of operations, which is why Braze outperforms most Adobe products in categories like ease of setup, ease of use, and ease of admin.

Finally, Adobe’s products can be expensive compared to Braze and other popular omnichannel marketing platforms. The pricing structure of the Experience Cloud can also be convoluted, making it difficult to predict exactly how much the platform will cost in advance.

Learn more: 8 Adobe Experience Cloud alternatives for marketing teams.

Insider: The omnichannel customer engagement platform with the fastest ROI

Insider is our AI-led omnichannel experience and customer engagement platform. Over 1200+ leading brands use it to unify customer data, predict future behaviors with AI, personalize all customer touchpoints, and automate marketing campaigns. 

As an alternative to Braze, Adobe, and other omnichannel solutions, Insider offers the most extensive set of personalization capabilities for websites and mobile apps, as well as for channels like email, SMS, WhatsApp, push notifications, and more. 

Our platform is also a leader in time-to-value, ease of setup, and ease of use, compared to Adobe, Braze, and other popular solutions.

In the next sections, we’ll explore why Insider can be an ideal alternative to Braze and Adobe for teams looking to speed up their time-to-value and maximize their ROI

Benefit #1: True CDP for data unification and identity resolution

Unlike Braze, which relies on integrations with other CDPs, Insider comes with a built-in enterprise CDP. You can use it to:

• Unify customer data from any online and offline source. This includes CRMs like Salesforce and HubSpot, analytics software like Amplitude or Mixpanel, conversational platforms like Drift and Intercom, PoS devices, APIs, and many others.
• Get 360-degree views of each customer. These customer profiles contain everything required to build personalized marketing campaigns, including customers’ names, locations, contact information, channel reachability, likelihood to purchase or engage on a channel, and much more.

Our CDP even creates profiles for anonymous website visitors. You can leverage these profiles to create personalized on-site experiences in real-time, e.g., by changing the product recommendations visitors see or sending relevant web push notifications. Learn more: How to get started with anonymous visitor personalization.

Similarly to Braze and Adobe, Insider is very flexible when it comes to integrating with your broader tech stack. For example, our Integration Hub offers 100+ pre-built connectors to popular solutions, including:

• CRMs like Salesforce, Pipedrive, HubSpot, and Microsoft Dynamics CRM.
• Traditional data and analytics CDPs like Segment, mParticle, and Tealium.
• Marketing automation software like Pardot, Keap, and Marketo.
• Ad networks like Google, Facebook, and TikTok.
• And many others.

Plus, we offer a versatile API for connecting to other systems (e.g., DMPs or legacy software), so you can seamlessly plug Insider into your existing infrastructure and workflows. This ensures crucial data is shared across your tech stack and organization in real-time.

Benefit #2: Unparalleled channel breadth

Insider brings together 12+ channels under one platform. These include web and mobile apps, messaging touchpoints like SMS, WhatsApp, and Facebook Messenger, social media and search ads, and even eCommerce site search.

Combined with our CDP, this unparalleled channel breadth lets teams:

• Unify their customer data and marketing channels under one platform.
• Reduce context switching and martech bloat by controlling their marketing operations from one place.
• Simplify and reduce their martech costs, instead of managing different solutions with various pricing plans and renewal periods.

Besides giving you access to these channels, Insider lets you build coordinated campaigns and orchestrate journeys across all of them with Architect — our AI-powered customer journey builder. 

You can use this tool to create, automate, manage, and optimize campaigns across any channel, as well as run all sorts of A/B tests. This is all controlled via a simple drag-and-drop editor. Plus, you have access to tons of proven templates for different channels and use cases that you can leverage without any coding.

For more details on this topic, check out:

• Our guides to eCommerce marketing automation and omnichannel marketing automation.
• Our case study with NA-KD. This fashion brand used Architect to achieve a 25% increase in customer lifetime value (CLTV) and a 72x ROI in 12 months.

Benefit #3: Powerful personalization tools and versatile templates

The ability to reach customers across a plethora of touchpoints isn’t particularly useful if you can’t do so with relevant content, messaging, and product recommendations. 

That’s why our platform’s leading personalization engine lets you tailor everything to customers’ needs, interests, and preferences. For example, here are some tools and strategies you can use to create completely personalized customer experiences:

• AI-powered product recommendations: Our platform supports many recommendation strategies, like top sellers, frequently viewed items, products often purchased together, and many more. It can also automatically deliver tailored recommendations to every customer. Phillips used these strategies to achieve a 40% conversion rate increase and drive over €20,000 in incremental revenue.

• Category personalization: Our Category Optimizer automatically changes how your site’s categories are presented based on the customer looking at them. This simplifies navigation, streamlines product discovery, and ultimately increases conversion rates. Adidas used category optimization to increase their mobile conversion rates by 50.3%.

• Instagram-like stories: You can add dynamic stories to your site or mobile app that are personalized to each user who opens them. This increases customer engagement and streamlines product discovery. Dover Saddlery used InStory to drive $1.7 million of incremental revenue.

• Email marketing campaigns. You can use Insider for everything from adding names, milestones, and cart items to extending personalized product recommendations across your email campaigns. Remix used Insider’s email automation capabilities to increase first purchases by 104% compared to the previous quarter.

• Messaging channel personalization. You can use Insider to deliver tailored messages across SMS, WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, Instagram, iMessage, and LINE. Our platforms’ Conversational AI also lets you have unstructured, two-way conversations to market, sell, and support users on any of these channels. Picniq used Insider to achieve a 5x ROI on their WhatsApp marketing spend.

• Push notifications: Our platform lets you use a plethora of web and mobile app push notification types for different use cases. Marks & Spencer used targeted web push notifications to reduce their cart abandonment rates. Thanks to Insider, the company achieved a 15.1% cart recovery rate, which is 353x higher than the industry average.

Lastly, our platform comes with an extensive template library for all supported channels and use cases. For example, you can find proven templates for:

• 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.

There’s also no need for technical assistance when leveraging these templates — you can simply use drag-and-drop editors to customize them to your brand tone, colors, and use cases. 

Benefit #4: Best-in-class global customer support teams

Using an omnichannel marketing platform like Braze or Adobe correctly is always a challenge. Teams often spend months on the setup, data integrations, and learning curve before seeing any meaningful results.

That’s why we’ve strived to build the best possible customer success teams for Insider customers.

First, all our teams and express are trained in-house. That way, you don’t have to rely on system integrators, agencies, or other third parties to set up and manage our platform.

Second, we’re an enterprise-grade solution provider with over 1000 employees in 26 offices across six continents. This means you get fast, high-quality support regardless of your location.

Overall, our support teams will:

• Help you set up Insider with no extra setup charge. For example, our experts will ensure you involve the right commercial and technical stakeholders, bring together the right customer data for your goals, integrate with other parts of the marketing stack, and much more.
• Show you how the platform can work based on your needs. Insider offers a ton of different tools and capabilities, so our team will ensure you know how the ones that are relevant to your business work. Our team will also look at your website and analytics data to give you ideas for implementing marketing strategies that can drive quick results.
• Migrates customer journeys to our platform. If you already have customer journeys created in Braze, Adobe, or another solution, our team will migrate them to our customer journey builder for you. That way, you won’t have to build them from scratch.

That’s why many customers view our support teams as one of the biggest advantages of working with Insider:

Get the fastest time-to-value and partner with the best customer success team with Insider

Insider is an enterprise-grade customer engagement platform that gives you access to 12+ channels, advanced personalization, and an AI-powered customer journey builder. 

Our platform is also an undisputed leader in categories like support quality, ease of setup, time-to-value, and ease of use, which makes it an ideal alternative to Braze, Adobe, and many other omnichannel marketing and engagement platforms.

In a nutshell, Insider ensures you can:

• Make the most out of your marketing efforts and budget by personalizing the entire customer experience.
• Work with experienced in-house support teams that speed up deployment, implementation, and time-to-value.
• Improve key metrics like conversions, revenue, retention, and acquisition costs.
• Leverage easy-to-use tools for building and automating campaigns across all channels, including on-site, email, SMS, WhatsApp, push notifications, and more.
• Access a library of easily customizable templates for any channel or use case — from generating leads fast via gamification to automating cross-channel cart abandonment journeys.
• Rely on the full power of AI to predict customer behaviors, show personalized product recommendations, have unstructured two-way conversations with customers, and work more efficiently.

Click here to book a demo with our team and learn how Insider can help you reach your business goals.