Braze vs Attentive

However, while they serve similar use cases, both platforms are drastically different. This makes each one better suited for different scenarios. In short:

• Braze is the better option if you’re looking for broad channel access and real-time personalization. It supports channels that Attentive doesn’t — like push notifications, WhatsApp, and LINE — and enables the creation of true cross-channel marketing campaigns.
• Attentive offers superior SMS marketing capabilities, especially for large companies. It has enterprise-grade SMS functionality, as well as a better customer support experience, leading to faster time-to-value and easier platform management.

In this guide, we’ll dive deeper into these differences and their implications for marketing teams. 

We’ll also discuss why Insider — our omnichannel experience and customer engagement platform — can be an ideal alternative to Braze and Attentive for teams looking to maximize their marketing spend and create personalized customer experiences.

Braze vs Attentive: In-depth comparison of pros, cons, and use cases

Before we dive into the details, note that the sections below focus mainly on the differences between Braze and Attentive. We review their respective strengths, weaknesses, and use cases, so you can understand which one is best for you.

Braze’s pros: Broad channel access and real-time customer targeting

Braze was founded in 2011. At the start, the company focused on mobile marketing channels such as SMS, push notifications, and in-app messaging and was called Appboy. 

In 2018, the rebrand to Braze was complete. The platform expanded to become a true cross-channel marketing solution and eventually went public in 2021.

Today, Braze supports many channels, including email, push notifications, SMS, WhatsApp, and mobile app messaging. It also offers some on-site engagement and personalization features (although they’re limited).

This makes it a better choice than Attentive for:

• Teams looking for broader channel access from one platform. This is often the case for large companies looking to unify their martech stack and simplify operations.
• Mobile app marketers looking to maximize conversions and revenue. Thanks to its deep roots in mobile marketing, Braze excels at building highly personalized experiences and sending contextual messages within mobile apps.

Braze’s cons: Outdated UI and inconsistent customer support

Braze’s outdated UI is among the main gripes users have with the platform. The solution can feel difficult to navigate compared to modern omnichannel marketing tools, resulting in slower deployment and campaign creation times.

Braze also doesn’t offer the same level of customer service as Attentive, especially for businesses looking for a high-end experience. 

Plus, Braze’s support infrastructure is primarily concentrated in the US and the EU, so companies located in other regions can have slower response times and inconsistent customer service quality.

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

Attentive’s pros: Better SMS marketing tools and customer support  

Attentive was founded in 2016 as an SMS marketing platform. Since then, the company has kept its focus on providing a high-quality SMS product for large businesses and has added email as a channel for more versatility.

The company is well-known for its exceptional customer service. Their teams are among the highest-rated among similar marketing tools as they offer 24/7 availability, strategy development, technical services, and white-glove onboarding.

This combination of benefits makes Attentive a better choice than Braze for:

• Marketers interested in mobile strategies with a big focus on SMS. Attentive offers more robust capabilities and unmatched expertise when it comes to building, automating, and optimizing SMS campaigns

Teams looking to see results from their SMS efforts as fast as possible. Due to Attentive’s focus on customer service, the company has a lead over Braze in categories like ease of setup, ease of use, and support quality.

Attentive’s cons: Lack of additional channels

Attentive’s big focus on SMS is also its main weakness in some scenarios. The platform doesn’t support any channels outside of email and SMS, so you have to integrate it with other solutions for WhatsApp marketing, website personalization, push notifications, online ads, and so on.

This is a big issue for large teams that use a plethora of channels to reach their audience. Typically, they have to integrate Attentive with at least two other platforms, which results in a bloated martech stack that’s expensive and difficult to operate compared to a unified marketing platform.

It’s also worth noting that Attentive’s email offering still has a long way to go compared to established email marketing platforms. That’s why some Attentive customers have to integrate the platform with an advanced email solution provider.

Again, this can lead to martech bloat and overcomplicate campaign creation and optimization.

Learn more: 11 Attentive alternatives for SMS, email & omnichannel marketing.

Insider: An omnichannel alternative to Attentive and Klaviyo

Insider is our AI-led omnichannel experience and customer engagement platform. It enables 1200+ brands like Toyota, Adidas, and Coca-Cola to unify customer data, predict future behaviors with AI, personalize all customer touchpoints, and automate omnichannel campaigns. 

Thanks to this versatility, customers rank Insider as a top solution in categories that Braze and Attentive also participle in, including:

• SMS marketing
• Mobile marketing
• Marketing automation

Additionally, Insider is a leader in categories like ease of use, ease of setup, and time-to-value compared to Braze and other major solutions like Bloomreach, Salesforce, CleverTap, and Iterable. This is thanks to our:

• Experienced global support teams. As an enterprise-grade service provider, we deliver exceptional customer support regardless of where you’re located. Our Growth Experts ensure you can set up Insider and see value from its capabilities as fast as possible.

• Templates for all channels and use cases. You can find premade templates for tons of common and niche scenarios — like encouraging purchases with social proof and progress bars, upselling or cross-selling via email, SMS, or WhatsApp, and many more. 

Put simply, Insider can be an ideal alternative to Braze and Attentive for large teams looking to:

• Get access to an unmatched breadth of channels.
• Unify their martech stack to optimize costs, work more efficiently, and overcome data silos.
• Personalize content, messages, and product recommendations across all customer touchpoints.
• Use simple and intuitive tools for building, personalizing, and automating campaigns quickly without any technical assistance.
• Get the fastest return on their investment thanks to an experienced global support team, premade templates, and user-friendly tools.

Insider benefit #1: Unmatched channel breadth

Insider offers access to 12+ channels from one place, making it a truly unified marketing platform. These channels include: 

• Email.
• On-site.
• Mobile apps.
• Online ads across Facebook, Google, and TikTok’s networks.

Messaging channels like SMS,

As a result, you can control all marketing campaigns from one place, instead of using a combination of point solutions like you’d have to with Attentive. You also get access to channels and advanced capabilities that Braze doesn’t support — such as eCommerce site search, Conversational CX, and more.

This combination of broad channel support and personalization tools makes Insider perfect if you’re looking to:

• Simplify operations by managing just one platform, which removes context switching.
• Overcome data silos by unifying all customer and product information into a central database (we’ll discuss this in more detail later).
• Lower the total cost of ownership and complexity of your martech stack, as you don’t have to deal with multiple UIs, various customer success teams, and various pricing plans and renewal periods.

Insider benefit #2: Data unification with an industry-leading Campaign CDP

Large marketing teams usually have customer data spread across multiple solutions. They often need to unify that data with a customer data platform (CDP) to get a clear view of their customer journeys and lay a solid foundation for effective marketing.

However, point solutions like Attentive usually can’t aggregate customer data from different sources and resolve omnichannel identities. Braze also doesn’t offer a true CDP, so many teams have to organize their data in other solutions and pass it to Braze, which drastically increases complexity.

That’s why Insider comes with a built-in enterprise CDP that aggregates data from any online or offline source. This includes CRMs, CMSs, analytics and attribution platforms, eCommerce platforms, customer service tools, data warehouses, point solutions, and tons of popular SaaS tools.

Our CDP also creates 360-degree customer views containing key data points like:

• Emails and phone numbers.
• Top visited product categories.
• Channel preferences and reachability.
• Last visited, purchased, and abandoned products.
• Predictive characteristics, such as likelihood to purchase, likelihood to engage on a channel, lifecycle stage, and more.
• And many others.

Plus, we offer an Integrations Hub that has pre-built connectors for 100+ popular solutions (as well as a flexible API), so you can ensure data is always being shared between the different pieces of your tech stack in real time.

Once your data is unified, you can also take advantage of Insider’s deep segmentation capabilities. For example, you can use Insider to build detailed audience segments for your campaigns like:

• Regular customers who showed interest in a specific product and price range.
• Inactive customers with a high discount affinity who recently viewed a product on your mobile app.
• First-time customers who are located in a certain region and have a high likelihood of engaging via SMS or WhatsApp.

As a result, you can make data-driven decisions and target customers with precision across their entire lifecycle with your brand. This makes it possible to build long-term, profitable customer relationships.

Insider benefit #3: Advanced personalization and automation across all touchpoints

Insider helps you make every customer interaction count by personalizing content, messaging, and product recommendations based on each customer’s needs and preferences.

For example, you can create tailored email campaigns by adding recipients’ names, birthdays, cart items, and other personalized product recommendations with a simple drag-and-drop editor. 

The same goes for SMS and WhatsApp. You can send bulk text messages, transactional updates, highly targeted price drop updates, event reminders, and much more. Again, these can be personalized based on each customer’s needs, interests, and preferences thanks to our platform’s personalization engine.

When it comes to messaging channels, you can also rely on Insider to have AI-powered, two-way conversions at scale. This means you can market, sell, and support customers on their favorite messaging platforms — including SMS, WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, iMessage, Instagram, and chatbots.

Our platform also gives you the tools you can use to tailor all other elements of the customer journey, like:

• Product recommendations by leveraging different algorithms like new arrivals, location-based bestsellers, frequently purchased together, checkout recommendations, and many others. Example: Chow Sang Sang used our product recommendations to achieve a 10.5% conversion rate uplift on their website and a 23.5% conversion rate boost for their email campaigns.

• Categories with our Category Optimizer tool that rearranges how categories are presented to each visitor to streamline purchase journeys as much as possible. Example: Adidas used this technique to achieve a 50.3% conversion rate on their mobile site.

• Instagram-like stories. InStory lets add dynamic stories on your site or mobile app to attract users’ attention, encourage product discovery, and drive more revenue. Example: Dover Saddlery used InStory to generate $1.7 million in incremental revenue. 

You can bring all your channels together into a cohesive experience with our customer journeys builder and marketing automation platform — Architect. 

Architect makes it easy to build everything from simple automated workflows to complex omnichannel campaigns with a drag-and-drop editor that lets you choose channels, wait times, and conditions. For example, you can use Architect to set up:

• Cart recovery flows.
• Cross-sell and upsell campaigns.
• Automated message confirmations.
• A/B tests comparing headlines, body copy, images, channels, and journey flows.
• Omnichannel marketing campaigns spanning email, SMS, WhatsApp, web push, and other touchpoints. Note: eCommerce brand NA-KD used Architect to create seamless journeys across five channels, which led to a 25% increase in customer lifetime value.

Lastly, Architect has built-in journey analytics and AI-powered features that help you track key metrics and optimize campaigns for optimal performance. 

For example, you can use Next-Best Channel and Send-Time Optimization to automatically trigger each message in your campaigns on the channels and at the times recipients are most likely to engage.

Leverage the full power of omnichannel marketing and engagement with Insider

Insider is the perfect alternative to Braze or Attentive for large teams looking to personalize the entire customer experience from one platform. 

It offers access to 12+ channels, personalization tools, an automation platform, an enterprise CDP, and advanced customer journey analytics, making it an ideal choice for unifying your martech stack and maximizing marketing spend.

In short, Insider lets you:

• Build and automate campaigns across all channels, including on-site, email, SMS, WhatsApp, push notifications, and more.
• Unify customer data, get detailed 360-degree customer views, and segment using standard, predefined, and predictive characteristics.
• Optimize conversion rates across your website, mobile app, and communication channels by delivering personalized content, messaging, and product recommendations.
• Unlock the full power of AI to show personalized product recommendations, predict customer behaviors, have unstructured two-way conversations with customers, and work more efficiently.
• See a return on your investment as fast as possible thanks to best-in-class customer support teams and versatile templates for all channels and use cases.
• Analyze campaigns, build custom reporting dashboards, and gain deep customer insights with tools like Funnels, Retention Cohorts, Message Frequency Analytics, and more.

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