Klaviyo vs Braze: Use cases, pros, cons & an alternative platform

We’ll also discuss how Insider — our AI-native platform for individualized, cross-channel customer experiences — can help you overcome the limitations of Klaviyo and Braze and build high-converting campaigns across 12+ channels.

Braze vs Klaviyo: Overview, pros, and cons of each platform

Before we dive into the details, here’s a quick overview of the most important differences between Klaviyo and Braze:

• Klaviyo specializes in SMS and email marketing for eCommerce businesses. It offers a lot of templates, integrations, and a large ecosystem of experts who help businesses set up and use the platform. 
• Braze is a more versatile mobile marketing platform that supports additional use cases and industries. You can use Braze for email and SMS marketing, as well as for running WhatsApp marketing campaigns and personalizing mobile app experiences.
• Both tools offer some website engagement and product recommendation features. However, they’re very limited compared to other personalization solutions and product recommendation engines.
• In terms of pricing, Klaviyo offers more transparency upfront because Braze doesn’t have publicly available pricing plans. However, Klaviyo also has hidden costs and gets quite expensive as you scale your contact list.
• Klaviyo is easier to set up and use than Braze due to the latter’s complexity and outdated UI. However, Braze offers better and more consistent customer support across the board.

With that out of the way, let’s dive into the details of each platform.

Klaviyo: Leading email and SMS marketing solution for eCommerce businesses

Klaviyo has long been the leading email and SMS marketing platform in many regions around the world. The company was started back in 2012 and since then has focused on eCommerce businesses, especially ones using Shopify.

Over the years, Klaviyo has added new features like mobile push notifications, a web form builder, and product reviews. These capabilities make it a more versatile marketing automation platform, although its main strength remains email and SMS marketing.

Thanks to its long experience in this space, Klaviyo has built an impressive ecosystem of agencies, developers, and other experts.

Businesses can always rely on third-party assistance for setting up and managing the platform, as well as hundreds of pre-built integrations with other popular tools. This makes Klaviyo a safe bet for teams who need a reliable email and SMS solution that works well with most martech stacks and eCommerce platforms (e.g., Shopify, Magento, or WooCommerce).

The biggest downside of working with Klaviyo is pricing. Many small businesses have complained that the platform is too expensive, especially after the company went public in 2023 and changed its pricing plans.

Additionally, Klaviyo’s pricing increases as the number of active contacts in your base grows (not only as you send more emails or SMS messages). As a result, scalability becomes an issue for businesses of all sizes as growing your lists gets very expensive. 

Lastly, Klaviyo still isn’t a complete omnichannel marketing solution. The company has been adding features like Form Builder and Reviews to expand their use cases but they’re still far from unified platforms like Insider or Bloomreach, for example.

This might not be an issue for smaller businesses interested in email and SMS but larger brands can outgrow what Klaviyo has to offer when looking to create a personalized customer experience across all channels. 

Braze: Versatile customer engagement platform specialized in mobile channels

Braze was founded one year before Klaviyo in 2011 as Appboy — a tool for engaging customers across mobile channels like SMS, push, and in-app notifications. This remained the main focus for the company after the rebrand to Braze in 2018.

As a result, Braze is a leader in the mobile marketing world. In fact, G2 customers rank it as the second-best mobile marketing software. 

Teams looking to engage customers and automate journeys across email, mobile apps, SMS, WhatsApp, and other mobile touchpoints should consider Braze as it supports more channels and use cases than Klaviyo. And while Klaviyo is focused on eCommerce businesses, Braze also works with clients in other industries, like financial services, media, and travel and hospitality.

In terms of customer support, Braze has limitations in some regions but companies typically rank its customer service quality higher than Klaviyo.

However, Braze also doesn’t offer a true CDP like Klaviyo and other enterprise marketing platforms. Instead, it relies on integrations with other CDPs. 

This makes the setup and management process more complicated, as teams need to organize their data in another solution before passing it to Braze. 

Similar to Klaviyo, Braze offers some onsite engagement features, like In-Browser Messaging and Content Cards. However, it’s also quite limited when it comes to website personalization, especially compared to specialized solutions like Insider or Dynamic Yield.

Insider: A true, enterprise-grade omnichannel marketing platform

Insider is our AI-led platform that helps you unify customer data, predict future behaviors with AI, and build personalized omnichannel campaigns across your website, mobile app, email, push notifications, SMS, WhatsApp, and other channels. 

We work with 1200+ clients across a plethora of industries — including retail and eCommerce (like AVON and Adidas), automotive (like Toyota and Lexus), financial services (like Allianz and Generali), travel (like Singapore Airlines and airBaltic), and others — to help them create personalized customer experiences that drive conversions, revenue, and retention.

Thanks to this versatility, Insider has been ranked as a top solution by G2, Gartner, Forrester, and IDC across categories like:

• Omnichannel marketing platforms.
• Mobile marketing software.
• Customer data platforms.

Our platform is also an undisputed leader in time-to-value, ease of setup, and ease of use, thanks to our focus on delivering a seamless integration experience, best-in-class customer service, and a plethora of templates for all channels and use cases.

#1 Best-in-class customer support and customizable templates

Both Klaviyo and Braze have customer support limitations that can slow down the implementation and make it more difficult to manage either platform. At the same time, having fast access to reliable and experienced customer service teams is essential for speeding up your return on investment (ROI) and time-to-value.

That’s why we’ve put a lot of effort into building the best global customer support teams for Insider. 

As an enterprise solutions provider, we have over 1000 employees, with 26 offices across six continents, so you can get fast customer service, regardless of where your business is located. Our teams will:

• Help you set up Insider (with no extra setup charge). 
• Show you how the platform’s tools and features can work based on your needs. 
• Migrate the customer journeys you’ve built in Klaviyo, Braze, or another platform to our journey builder for you.
• Analyze your customer data to give you ideas for implementing marketing strategies that can drive quick results.
• And much more.

Companies consistently rank Insider as the top solution in categories like support quality, ease of setup, and ease of use when compared to Klaviyo, Braze, and other popular omnichannel marketing solutions (e.g., Salesforce, Bloomreach, Iterable, and so on).

Additionally, Insider offers versatile templates for all supported channels and use cases. 

You have templates for generating more leads on your website, driving revenue with cross-channel upsell campaigns, gathering customer feedback with post-purchase surveys, and much more. You can use and customize these templates without any coding, enabling you to build and launch campaigns quickly with no IT assistance.

For example, MAC Cosmetics used our gamified Wheel of Fortune template on their website to attract first-time visitors and get them to submit their email addresses. This helped them increase conversion rates by 4.43% and generate over 53,000 new leads.

#2 Industry-leading personalization engine 

As we said, Klaviyo and Braze offer some standard personalization capabilities and algorithms. However, Insider can take your personalization efforts to the next level by tailoring every touchpoint to your customers’ needs, behaviors, and preferences.

That’s why our platform is ranked among the best personalization engines in Gartner’s Magic Quadrant.

For example, you can use our Web Suite to create an engaging, individualized experience for every website visitor. This includes our AI-powered Smart Recommender, which lets you add personalized product recommendations via different types of algorithms, including: 

• User-based, recently viewed, and purchased with last purchased, all of which rely on product and user data to automatically deliver personalized product recommendations to each individual user. 
• Cookie-free based, which relies only on product data to deliver different types of recommendations, like trending products, highest discounted products, new product arrivals, frequently purchased together, and more. 

Plus, our automated recommendation algorithm (Chef) can automatically detect the best combination of algorithms. This means our platform can do the heavy lifting of testing and evaluating the performance of your product recommendations, so you don’t have to do so manually.

Additionally, Insider offers two website engagement and personalization tools that you can’t get with Klaviyo or Braze:

1. Eureka, which is an AI-powered site search and merchandising tool. It delivers personalized results to all visitors who use your site’s search functionality, leading to lower bounce rates, more conversions, and a higher average order value (AOV). It also improves search precisions with advanced faceting filters that help users refine results based on defined attributes like price, category, brand, and rating.

2. InStory, which lets you add dynamic, Instagram-like stories to your website or mobile app. You can use this tool to blend AI-powered product recommendations with captivating fullscreen user experiences that help shoppers discover the best products for them. Dover Saddlery used this tool to drive $1.7 million in incremental revenue by repurposing their Instagram content on their website.

Finally, you can extend the personalized content, messaging, and product recommendations across:

• Email campaigns using a simple user-friendly editor that lets you add all sorts of individualized elements, like names, birthdays, cart items, recommended products, and more. You can also enrich the email experience with AMP by letting customers browse products, make reservations, and submit survey responses without leaving your emails.  

• Messaging channel communications across SMS, WhatsApp, Facebook, Messenger, and LINE. You can use these channels to promote new products, send back-in-stock and price drop alerts, remind customers about upcoming events, and much more. For example, Picniq used WhatsApp to re-engage cart abandoners and generate more repeat purchases which helped the brand achieve a 5x ROI.

• Social media and search ads across Google, Facebook, and TikTok. Thanks to Insider’s segmentation capabilities, you can create detailed audience segments using 120+ traits, behaviors, and characteristics (including predictive ones). You can then target those audiences with online ads that are tailored to their needs and interests. U.S. Polo Association used this strategy to drive a 135% increase in return on ad spend and a 58% decrease in cost per acquisition.

For more details on how to create a completely individualized customer experience across channels, check out our guide to achieving personalization at scale.

#3 Broad channel access, enterprise CDP, and omnichannel automation — all in one platform

As you can see, Insider lets you access 12+ channels, including ones that Klaviyo and Braze don’t support. This makes it a truly unified marketing platform for teams looking to consolidate their martech stack, save resources, and streamline their workflows.

Our platform also ensures all your efforts across these channels are based on reliable, real-time customer data thanks to our enterprise CDP.

The CDP is built to unify customer data from any online and offline source — including CRMs, CMSs, analytics software, customer service platforms, PoS devices, APIs, and many others. It resolves omnichannel identities to create detailed, 360-degree customer views, like the one you see below. 

You also get access to a versatile customer journey builder and marketing automation solution — Architect. 

This tool lets you build, automate, optimize, and analyze campaigns across all supported channels from one place. You can use it to create anything from simple welcome automation flows to personalized omnichannel journeys that evolve based on customers’ interactions with your brand.

This is all controlled through a simple drag-and-drop editor that lets you choose channels, wait times, conditions, and much more. Plus, you can leverage plenty of AI-powered features that speed up campaign creation and optimization, including:

• Send-Time Optimization and Next-Best Channel Selection: These features analyze customer behavior and determine the best send time and channel for each message. This can save you rounds of manual A/B testing and put important parts of the campaign management process on autopilot.

• Generative journey, segment, and content creation: Our Generative AI suite can create customer segments, journeys, images, and campaign copy, based on simple text prompts provided by you. Additionally, our Predictive and Conversational AI help you save even more time by predicting customer behaviors and having two-way conversations with customers at scale.

• A/B Test Winner Auto-Selection: With this feature, you can set up A/B tests and have our platform automatically guide users to the winning variants. All you need to do is provide a winning metric and duration for each test to run. This can save a lot of time from manually reviewing results and optimizing journeys based on them.

Put simply, Insider’s omnichannel automation capabilities support a lot of use cases across many different touchpoints. For a deeper dive into this topic, check out our guides to: 

• eCommerce marketing automation.
• Omnichannel marketing automation.
• The best marketing automation platforms.

Maximize your marketing spend and ROI with Insider

Insider is an ideal alternative to both Klaviyo and Braze for enterprise brands looking to maximize their marketing spend by creating personalized customer experiences across all channels.

Our platform gives you access to 12+ channels, advanced personalization, and an AI-powered customer journey builder for building, automating, and analyzing omnichannel campaigns. It’s also an undisputed leader in categories like customer support quality, ease of setup, time-to-value, and ease of use.

Put simply, our platform enables you to:

• Make the most out of your marketing efforts and budget.
• Work with experienced in-house support teams that ensure fast deployment, easy management, and quick problem resolution.
• Build long-term profitable customer relationships and improve key metrics like conversions, revenue, retention, and acquisition costs.
• Use advanced website personalization to maximize conversion rates by tailoring content, messaging, and product recommendations to each user’s preferences.
• 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.