Braze vs Iterable: Comparison & alternative omnichannel platform

Both platforms support similar channels, like email, push notifications, SMS, and WhatsApp. They offer journey builders for creating automated campaigns across these channels, as well as AI features for streamlining workflows and predicting customer behaviors.

Each one also has key differentiators. For example, Braze has stronger mobile marketing and reporting capabilities, while Iterable offers better customer support quality across the board.

In this guide, we’ll explore Braze and Iterable in detail and the most important differences between them. We’ll also discuss the limitations of both platforms and how Insider — our AI-native cross-channel platform — can help you overcome them.

Braze vs Iterable: Key differences, pros, and cons

First, let’s explore where Braze and Iterable differ, as well as each platform’s pros and cons when it comes to specific channels, ease of setup and use, and customer support.

Braze: Proven mobile marketing platform for engaging customers with personalized messages

Braze was founded in 2011 with the goal of engaging customers on mobile channels, like push notifications and SMS. The company was called Appboy before rebranding to Braze in 2017 and going public in 2021.

As a result, Braze has over 13 years of experience delivering personalized messages on mobile channels. That’s why the platform remains a leader in the mobile marketing space, specifically for building and automating personalized journeys using SMS, WhatsApp, and in-app messaging.

Most customers rank Braze higher than Iterable when it comes to tools for mobile channels like SMS or push notifications, for example. Braze also offers more comprehensive journey analytics and reporting capabilities, which are areas where Iterable struggles.

Braze also offers more versatile tools for behavioral and contextual targeting than Iterable. Again, this makes it the better option for teams looking to deliver personalized messages on mobile channels using real-time data and behavioral insights.

Braze downsides: Limited customer service in some regions and lack of a true CDP

One of Braze’s main limitations is customer service. While solid in general, Braze’s teams are mostly based in the US and Europe, making it difficult for some customers outside of those regions to get fast, high–quality customer support.

Braze also lags behind Iterable when it comes to ease of setup and ease of use. Some customers point out the platform’s outdated user interface as the reason for that, as well as its lack of a true customer data platform (CDP).

In fact, Braze mostly relies on data integrations with other enterprise CDPs to get the insights necessary for running personalized campaigns. This brings complexity to the setup and operations processes.

Iterable: Cross-channel marketing platform with solid channel selection and great customer support 

Iterable was founded in 2013 and since then has evolved into a well-rounded cross-channel customer engagement platform for websites, mobile apps, email, push notifications, SMS, MMS, and WhatsApp. It supports many of Braze’s channels and functionalities, although it’s still slightly behind in the mobile marketing department.

However, Iterable has an advantage over Braze in one key category — customer support. The platform boasts an impressive 9.0 support quality rating in G2, which puts it above Braze and near the top compared to other cross-channel marketing platforms.

Put simply, if excellent customer support is a must for your organization, Iterable might be the better choice between both platforms.

Iterable downsides: Difficult platform management and poor reporting capabilities

Like Braze, Iterable also lacks comprehensive website personalization features. This means it’s not a great choice if you’re looking to maximize the budget you’re spending to get people to your site by optimizing conversion rates.

Additionally, many user reviews mention various small issues that disrupt workflows and make managing Iterable more difficult than it needs to be. These include slow processing time, complicated APIs and integrations with other platforms, and the complexity of how data is organized in the platform.

Iterable has taken steps to improve some of these issues (e.g., its UI is pretty straightforward) but it still lags behind Braze when it comes to ease of admin. Iterable has an edge when it comes to ease of use and setup, although both platforms have room for improvements in these categories.

Finally, Iterable’s reporting and analytics capabilities are also limited, which forces teams to either export their data or integrate with other platforms that can provide the necessary customer behavior insights.

Why Insider is an ideal alternative to Braze and Iterable

Insider is our AI-native platform for individualized, cross-channel customer experiences. 

Like Braze and Iterable, it also supports plenty of channels, like email, push notifications, SMS, and WhatsApp, while offering robust automation and journey orchestration capabilities. 

However, Insider offers access to additional channels and capabilities, like advanced website personalization, site search, and more. We also have global, experienced support teams — which is why our solution is ranked as the best option in terms of support quality, ease of setup, use, and admin, and time-to-value.

In the next sections, we’ll explore five key benefits of using Insider over Braze and Iterable (and most other similar platforms).

#1 Complete website personalization to maximize conversion rates

Website personalization is the process of tailoring elements — like categories, banners, and product recommendations — to each visitor’s needs, interests, and preferences. The process is essential for maximizing the budget you’re spending to get people to your site as it helps you optimize conversion rates and generate more revenue.

While Braze and Iterable have some website engagement capabilities, they’re not enough to create a completely personalized on-site experience. Insider, on the other hand, is among the top-rated personalization engines by Gartner due to its advanced personalization tools, including:

• AI-powered Smart Recommender, which lets you deliver personalized product recommendations across your site or mobile app. You can also use a combination of user-based and generic algorithms (e.g., best-sellers, top-rated, new arrivals, and so on) to maximize engagement and revenue. Phillips used this tool to achieve a 40% conversion rate increase and drive over €20,000 in incremental revenue.

• Category Optimizer, which changes how your site’s categories are presented to each user based on their preferences. This is a great way to streamline the shopping experience, especially for brands with large product catalogs. Adidas used this strategy to drive a 50.3% increase in mobile conversion rates.

• Eureka, which is an AI-powered site search and merchandising tool. It delivers tailored results to all visitors who use your site’s search functionality. It also creates a better search experience with advanced faceting filters that let users refine search results based on defined attributes like price, category, brand, and rating.

• InStory, which lets you add Instagram-like stories to your site or app that can be personalized to each user who clicks on them. This is a great way to improve mobile product discovery and drive additional revenue. Dover Saddlery used this tool to drive $1.7 million in incremental revenue.

You also have plenty of customizable templates for adding various engaging elements to your site. For example, you can add gamified lead collection pop-ups, social proof, purchase progress bars, and much more using a simple no-code editor.

#2 Best-in-class customer support and versatile templates for fast ROI

Between their setup, data migrations, and learning curve, most omnichannel marketing platforms take months to produce any meaningful results. That’s why it’s so essential to partner with an experienced customer support team that can guide you through the tools and strategies you need to achieve your goals.

At Insider, we pride ourselves on providing the best customer support experience for companies all over the world. Customers consistently rank Insider as the best solution in categories like:

• Time-to-value.
• Quality of support.
• Ease of use, setup, and admin.

Our experienced customer support teams ensure a smooth experience with our platform from the start by:

• Answering questions and resolving issues quickly. As an enterprise-grade solution provider, we have over 1000 employees in 26 offices across six continents. This lets us provide fast, high-quality support to customers all over the world. 
• Guiding you through the implementation and onboarding process (with no extra setup costs). Our team helps you connect to all relevant data sources and involve the right stakeholders in the implementation process.
• Ensuring you see value from our platform as fast as possible. Our experts will look at your website and analytics data to give you ideas for implementing various marketing strategies. They’ll also migrate any flows or journeys you may have in other solutions — like purchase confirmation emails, upsell campaigns, or cart recovery flows — to our platform, so you don’t have to rebuild them from scratch.

#3 Enterprise CDP and 12+ activation channels for maximum convenience and budget utilization

With Insider, you get access to a true enterprise CDP that’s built to unify data from all online and offline sources — CRMs, CMSs, APIs, analytics tools, customer service software, automation platforms, and more.

Our CDP then creates 360-degree profiles of all customers that contain key insights like: 

• Their names, demographics, and contact info.
• Predictive characteristics, like likelihood to purchase or engage.
• Behavioral data, like interactions with your website or messaging channels.
• Last purchased, visited, and abandoned products.

Our Integration Hub also makes it easy to pull data from other solutions and integrate Insider into your stack. For example, you can easily integrate our solution with:

• eCommerce platforms, like Shopify, VTEX, and Akinon.
• SMS and email marketing platforms like Mailchimp, Twilio, and Klaviyo.
• Marketing analytics software, like Google Analytics, Amplitude, and Mixpanel.
• Customer relationship management systems (CRMs), like Salesforce, HubSpot CRM, or Microsoft Dynamics CRM. 
• Data warehouses and storage systems, like BigQuery and Amazon S3. 
• And many other SaaS solutions.

Additionally, unlike a traditional CDP, Insider also gives you access to 12+ data activation channels, including:

• Email: You can easily build and automate personalized emails with tailored product recommendations, milestone celebrations, optimized send times, and much more. You also have access to AMP emails that let customers answer surveys, browse products, and schedule events (hotel reservations, flight bookings, doctor appointments, and so on) without leaving the email.

• Messaging channels: These include SMS, WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, and LINE. You can send personalized product promotions, price drop and back-in-stock alerts, event reminders, and much more. As we’ll explore in the next section, you can also easily automate messages across these channels and A/B test them against your emails (or other touchpoints).

• Online ads: You can target customer segments created with Insider across Google, Facebook, and TikTok. For example, you can use Insider to segment customers who’ve shown an interest in a specific product and have a high discount affinity, as well as a high likelihood to purchase. Then, you can target them with personalized ads that show limited-time offers for those products.

#4 Marketing automation and journey orchestration powered by industry-leading AI 

Similar to Braze and Iterable, Insider also offers a customer journey builder, called Architect. This tool is controlled via a user-friendly drag-and-drop editor that lets you choose channels, wait times, conditions, and much more.

Put simply, you can use Architect to bring all channels into a cohesive, personalized experience for your customers. For example, NA-KD used Architect to create personalized customer journeys across five channels, which helped them increase customer lifetime value (CLTV) by 25% and achieve a 72x ROI.

You also have plenty of AI-powered features that can help you build campaigns faster, work efficiently, and drive more revenue, including:

• Send-Time Optimization and Next-Best Channel, which analyze users’ behavioral patterns to determine the best times and channels for triggering each message. They can save you hours of time and effort from analyzing data and running A/B tests to determine what channels and send times to use.

• A/B Test Winner Auto-Selection, which analyzes the results of your A/B tests and automatically guides users to the winning variants. All you have to do is select a duration and winning metric, like open rates, conversion rates, revenue, and so on.

• Conversational, Predictive, and Generative AI, which enable you to have unstructured two-way conversations with customers at scale, predict behaviors like purchases and channel engagement, and generate segments, journeys, campaign copy, and images via simple text prompts. 

#5 Advanced customer journey and behavioral analytics for valuable insights

Besides being one of the most versatile solutions for building personalized omnichannel journeys, Insider gives you all the tools you need to analyze how your campaigns are performing. 

Our platform has been ranked among the top customer journey analytics solutions on the market.

You can analyze your customer journeys inside Architect by tracking the number of users entering and dropping specific at stages. You also have dedicated dashboards that you can customize and monitor key metrics like conversions, revenue, and much more.

Our platform also offers plenty of behavioral analytics tools that you can use to understand your customers’ channel preferences and purchase decisions. These include:

• Channel reachability and message frequency analytics, which help you analyze the channels your most important segments prefer and how often you should contact them.

• Retention cohorts, which help you find out how to keep customers consistently engaged and form valuable long-term relationships.

• Funnels, which show you how customers navigate key flows and where they’re struggling, so you can find ways to improve their experience and generate more conversions.

Lastly, you can analyze offline-to-online experiences using our API-integrated events. This is essential for businesses that have physical locations (e.g., brick-and-mortar stores) and online channels, as it allows them to track the entire customer lifecycle across all touchpoints.

Use Insider to maximize your marketing efforts and budget

Insider is an ideal platform for midsized and enterprise companies looking to create personalized customer experiences that drive engagement, revenue, and retention. 

Like Braze and Iterable, our solution gives you the tools you need to build campaigns across channels like email, push notifications, SMS, and WhatsApp. However, Insider also offers access to other channels, advanced website personalization, and a best-in-class customer support team.

Our enterprise marketing platform can help you:

• Unify your marketing stack and customer data to overcome data silos, reduce context switching, and work more efficiently.
• Make the most out of your marketing budget and efforts by personalizing every customer touchpoint — from your website and mobile app to channels like email, SMS, WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, and push notifications.
• Work with an experienced global support team that can help you set up the platform and ensure you’re making the most out of its features.
• Leverage AI and machine learning to their maximum marketing potential to create content, automate time-consuming tasks, predict customer behaviors, have unstructured, two-way conversations with users, and much more.
• Use proven templates to get started quickly with any use case — from generating leads with the help of gamification to automating cross-channel cart abandonment journeys or cross-sell campaigns.

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