MoEngage competitors: 7 best alternatives for marketing teams

We’ll explore each solution’s main features and use cases, starting with an in-depth breakdown of Insider — our enterprise-grade platform for creating personalized cross-channel experiences.

Insider can help you connect data across channels, predict future behavior with AI, and automate cross-channel journeys from a single platform with an incredibly fast time to value. Try our platform or book a free demo with our team.

#1 Insider

Insider brings together 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.

Over 1200 brands, including Samsung, Adidas, Lexus, CNN, and Coca-Cola use Insider’s flexible toolkit set to:

• Overcome data silos: Our Actionable Customer Data Platform (CDP) lets you consolidate customer data to get an accurate, 360-degree view of each customer.
• Zero in on the right audiences for each campaign: Insider’s powerful segmentation ensures you’re always targeting the right audiences based on 120+ traits, including behaviors, preferences, characteristics, and even predicted behaviors.
• Unify complex marketing stacks and streamline workflows: Insider offers broad channel support, personalization features, automation capabilities, and native A/B testing. This means you can build, automate, manage, personalize, and analyze cross-channel campaigns — all from one place.
• Lower acquisition costs and boost conversions, revenue, and retention: Our platform helps you send the right content and product recommendations on the right channels, to the right audiences, at the right times. As a result, you can make the most out of your marketing efforts and budget.
• Deliver personalized site search results, Instagram-like stories, and much more.

As a versatile, enterprise-grade solution, Insider has consistently been ranked by G2, Gartner, IDC, and other industry experts as a top solution in categories like:

• Omnichannel marketing platforms.
• Customer data platforms (CDP).
• Mobile marketing software.
• Personalization engines.

Customers have also consistently ranked Insider as the best solution in terms of ease of use, ease of setup, and quality of support.

Below, we’ll explore the benefits of using Insider as an alternative to MoEngage (and as a cross-channel marketing solution in general). If you’re interested in a direct comparison, click here to see how customers rank Insider and MoEngage across various categories.

Fast implementation and ROI thanks to our global support team and extensive templates

Unlike MoEngage, Insider is an enterprise-grade solution provider with over 1000 employees in 26 offices across six continents. 

We consistently deliver fast, high-quality support to customers all across the globe. More importantly, Insider clients only work with our in-house support team, without the need to contact third-party agencies or system integrators. 

As a result:

• You always get timely support from experts who are deeply familiar with the Insider platform and your business needs. Having a large global presence lets us respond quickly to the needs of teams all over the world. Plus, our support experts all work and are trained in-house, so they have experience in helping brands achieve their business goals with the Insider platform.
• You can quickly implement and take advantage of the platform. Our team will walk you through the setup process, which minimizes your learning curve. They’ll also look at your analytics data to help you come up with suitable marketing strategies and migrate any existing automated flows or journeys to our platform for you (including ones built with MoEngage’s customer journey orchestration tool).

Many customers view our experienced, in-house support team as one of the biggest advantages of working with Insider:

“The Insider’s account management team is great, having both global and local experience to draw from when it comes to creating campaigns and making use of the products to their full potential. The technology is also super easy to use and very flexible, enabling us to make the most of it however we would want to.”

We’ve also ensured customers’ time to value is as short as possible by building a massive library of tried and tested templates. You can filter these customizable templates by:

• Use cases, like increasing sign-ups, boosting conversions, reducing cart abandonments, gamifying the user experience, and more.
• Industries, like eCommerce, automotive, banking and finance, and many more.

Channels, like email, SMS, WhatsApp, and push notifications.

For example, Clarins used our Wheel of Fortune template to quickly increase their lead capture by 45% with gamification.

Data unification, powerful segmentation, and 5 years of data storage

At the core of Insider’s ability to deliver highly relevant content, messaging, and product recommendations across channels are:

• Our Actionable CDP. 
• Our powerful segmentation capabilities. 

First, our CDP can ingest information from any online or offline source, including:

• Customer relationship management systems (CRMs), like Salesforce, HubSpot, or Microsoft Dynamics CRM. 
• Marketing analytics software, like Google Analytics, Amplitude, and Mixpanel.
• Other popular SaaS tools, APIs, point-of-sale devices, and more.

This helps brands consolidate their customer data, overcome data silos, and get a clear, 360-degree view of each customer. For example, the screenshot below shows a unified customer profile that contains essential information for marketing teams including:

• The customer’s contact information and channel reachability.
• All interactions they’ve had with the brand across the website, mobile app, and external channels.
• Their predictive characteristics (based on our AI-powered intent engine), including likelihood to purchase, likelihood to churn, projected lifetime value, and more.

Unlike many other CDPs, ours is free, so you don’t have to pay extra for the ability to consolidate your customer data with Insider. Plus, we store your unified customer data for five years and your anonymous data for 90 days. (MoEngage only stores unified data for one year and anonymous data for 60 days.) 

Once your data is unified, Insider offers lots of options for segmenting your audiences. For example, you can start with predefined audiences of people who abandoned their carts, abandoned a product page, or interacted with your brand on a specific channel.

Then, you can enrich that segment by specifying users’ devices, operating systems, specific versions (e.g., iOS 15 or higher), locations (e.g., Canada, India, Brazil, California, specific cities, and so on), demographics, and lots of other characteristics.

Finally, you can make your segments even more precise with our AI-powered predictive audiences. These audiences let you target customers based on their:

• Likelihood to purchase or churn.
• Projected lifetime value.
• Interest clusters.
• Discount affinity.
• Attribute affinity.
• Lifecycle status.

Lastly, you don’t have to unify your data in Insider’s CDP to take advantage of our platform. 

If you already have a CDP like Segment, mParticle, or Tealium and don’t want to move away from it, you can simply connect it to Insider via our integrations or API. That way, you can still use our platform’s powerful segmentation, personalization, or automation capabilities and broad channel support, while relying on the data you’ve already collected.

Advanced personalization across all channels

With your unified data and segments in place, you have a strong foundation for executing successful marketing campaigns. Insider also has extensive capabilities for personalizing every step of your customers’ journeys — from the ads they see to the content on your website, as well as product recommendations on channels like email, SMS, and WhatsApp.

On-site and in-app personalization (including site search)

Everything on your website or mobile app, including banners, pop-ups, categories, and product recommendations can be tailored in real time to fit each customer’s preferences and interests.

For example, here’s how easy it is to deliver personalized product recommendations on your site:

First, you decide whether these recommendations should be placed on:

• All website pages.
• Product or article pages. 
• Product category pages.
• Cart pages.

Then you can choose between a wide variety of recommendations, which can be organized into two broad categories:

• User-based: Here, our AI algorithms automatically match every product recommendation to each individual user. This is a powerful way to put product discovery on autopilot because you can be sure that all customers will only be shown the most relevant products.
• Other recommendation strategies: For example, this can include showing the most popular items or top sells, bundling frequently viewed or purchased products together, and many other strategies shown below.

Here’s how three popular brands used Insider’s extensive on-site personalization suite to achieve (and even exceed) their marketing goals:

• Yves Rocher used personalized product recommendations and personalized banners to generate a 20% uplift in conversion rate and achieve a 7x ROI in the first five months of using Insider. 
• Adidas used personalized product recommendations, category optimization, and segmentation to boost conversion rates by 13% and average order value (AOV) by 259% in just one month. 
• Samsung used category optimization, smart product recommendations, and personalized overlays to achieve a 275% conversion rate uplift during the launch campaign of their Galaxy Note 9.

Besides these capabilities, Insider also offers two distinct products for creating even more unique and engaging on-site experiences: EUREKA and InStory.

1. EUREKA lets you deliver personalized search results to all visitors who use your site’s search functionality. This helps you decrease bounce rates, increase conversions, and boost AOV. It also helps shoppers pinpoint the products they’re looking for with advanced filters and instant search previous.

2. InStory enables you to show engaging, Instagram-like stories to website and mobile app users. These stories can be personalized to each user who opens them, which makes them a powerful weapon for mobile product discovery, as we explained in our guide on the best mobile marketing platforms.

For example, Dover Saddlery used InStory (alongside Insider’s personalization capabilities) to drive $1.7 million of incremental revenue and achieve a 29x ROI.

Email and SMS

Email and SMS are among the most widely used channels in combination, especially for eCommerce businesses. Insider lets you take maximum advantage of them by delivering personalized messages and coordinating your efforts across both channels.

For example, our email marketing solution lets you create individual emails or campaigns with dynamic product recommendations based on each user’s preferences (and the time at which they open their email).

You can also build website-like experiences right in the email using our no-code AMP blocks. 

AMP emails give customers an interactive experience where they can browse products, mix and match different items, submit survey answers, and much more, without leaving the email. This helps you turn emails into revenue generators instead of just using them as a way to redirect users to your site or app.

Sending personalized SMS messages is just as easy. You can simply choose from the list of dynamic attributes, like names, last purchased products, abandoned items, and so on.

Lastly, you also have a plethora of other useful features for both channels, including:

• Spam tests.
• Inbox previews.
• Frequency capping. 
• Send-time optimization, and more. 

Learn more: 8 Best email and SMS marketing software tools for both channels

Push notifications

Push notifications are a fantastic way to engage and convert both known customers and unknown visitors. 

They’re easy to build and there’s no additional cost involved in sending each one (unlike with email, SMS, or online ads, for example). This makes them a great choice for digital marketers looking to reduce acquisition costs and maximize their budget.Sending personalized push notifications with Insider is just as easy as building emails and SMS messages. You can use the drag-and-drop editor to add images and dynamic elements, include deep links, and more.

Our platform supports six different types of web push notifications and eight different mobile app push notifications. This means you can use our push notifications for a variety of use cases — from sending cart abandonment reminders and price drop alerts to driving product discovery with carousels, and much more.

Learn more: 11 Top push notification tools for web and mobile push

WhatsApp

WhatsApp is an exciting (and in some countries — highly popular) marketing channel because it lets you tap into the most widely-used messaging app in the world. 

As a Meta-verified Business Solution Provider, Insider can help you leverage all of WhatsApp’s marketing features. For example, you can use our platform to:

• Remind customers about upcoming reservations, flights, or other events.
• Send personalized promo messages, price drop alerts, and cart recovery prompts.
• Enable end-to-end shopping experiences via WhatsApp conversational commerce. This capability lets customers discover, browse, and buy products without leaving WhatsApp. It’s an exciting new addition to WhatsApp’s marketing functionality that can help you boost product discovery, reduce friction, and drive more sales.

Learn more: 8 Best WhatsApp marketing tools

Social media and search ads

As we said earlier, Insider has powerful segmentation capabilities that let you home in on the right audiences for your campaigns. Our platform also enables you to target these segments with Facebook, Google, or TikTok ads to improve key metrics like cost per click (CPC), acquisition costs (CAC), and return on ad spend (ROAS).

For example, Pierre Cardin used Insider to segment customers based on their lifecycle status (e.g., high churn risk), likelihood to purchase, discount affinity, and more. They then targeted these predictive audiences with online ads, resulting in a:

• 164.83% boost in ROAS.
• 445% uplift in conversions.
• 67.95% reduction in cost per acquisition.

AI-powered customer journey orchestration 

Insider comes with a powerful cross-channel customer journey builder called Architect. 

Architect lets you build, automate, and personalize cross-channel campaigns using a simple drag-and-drop editor and plenty of proven journey templates. As you can see, the editor gives you many options for starting each campaign, including:

• Events.
• Restockings of popular items.
• Price drops.
• And more.

These versatile options, alongside Insider’s broad channel support, make our solution one of the best marketing automation platforms for midsize and enterprise businesses.

Architect’s AI capabilities also ensure that each message in your campaigns is:

• Timely: The send-time optimization (STO) feature analyzes each customer’s behavioral patterns and determines the right time to contact them. Our platform automatically sends each message at that time, so you don’t have to guess or A/B test different send times.
• Relevant: As we said, Insider’s powerful personalization capabilities ensure all content, messaging, and product recommendations are tailored to each customer. This is true for your website and mobile app, as well as for the communications you send over email, push notifications SMS, WhatsApp, and all other channels.

Sent on the right channel: Like STO, the AI-powered next-best channel predictions analyze recipients’ behaviors to find out which touchpoint is best in each scenario. Again, this saves you tons of time and effort from having to manually find the right channels for each customer segment and marketing campaign.

You can even A/B test different messages or even entire journey flows against each other. And with our Winner Auto-Select feature, you don’t even have to review the results and manually adjust each journey. Instead, our platform automatically does that for you based on open rates, conversions, revenue, or any other winning metric you’ve selected.

Overall, Architect is the foundation for many of our customers’ successful automation strategies. For example, Slazenger used Insider omnichannel automation and personalization capabilities to:

• Recover lost revenue with cross-channel cart abandonment messaging.
• Entice shoppers to return with tailored price drop notifications.
• Deliver relevant and timely messages across all channels.

This helped Slazenger generate a 700% increase in customer acquisition and 49x ROI after just eight weeks of using Insider.For more details on how Insider can help your business as well, book a live demo with our team.

#2 CleverTap

CleverTap is a customer engagement platform specialized in maximizing retention and customer lifetime value. It’s traditionally been focused on mobile user engagement and automation with channels like SMS, WhatsApp, and push notifications. In recent years, the platform has expanded to cover use cases like email marketing, web messaging, and customer data unification. Unlike most tools on this list, CleverTap also offers a plan for small businesses that starts at $7500/month.

Note: Click here to see how CleverTap compares to Insider.

#3 Braze

Braze is a customer engagement and marketing platform that helps brands interact with customers on a plethora of channels, including email, SMS, WhatsApp, push notifications, in-app messaging, and more. Braze also offers a customer journey builder, A/B features, advanced segmentation, and on-site personalization (although its capabilities in that regard are limited).

Note: Click here to see how Braze compares to Insider.

Learn more: 11 Braze competitors and alternatives for cross-channel marketing

#4 Salesforce Marketing Cloud

Salesforce Marketing Cloud is a collection of products for running lifecycle marketing marketing campaigns across email, SMS, push notifications, and other channels. These products include:

• A Marketing Cloud CDP for data unification and 360-degree profiles.
• A Journey Builder for creating and automating cross-channel campaigns.
• Email and Mobile Studios for engaging customers via emails, SMS messages, push notifications, or live chat.
• Other tools for use cases, like loyalty management and content management. 

Note: Click here to see how Salesforce Marketing Cloud compares to Insider.

5. Adobe Experience Cloud

Adobe Experience Cloud brings together a set of tools for automation, personalization, content management, user journey orchestration, and more. In terms of competing with MoEnage, the most important of these products are:

• Adobe Target, which is an A/B testing, personalization, and marketing automation software.
• Adobe Campaign, which is a campaign management solution for cross-channel marketers.
• Marketo Engage, which helps B2C and B2B marketing and sales teams automate tasks, build audience segments, and personalize their communications.
• Adobe Analytics, which is an analytics platform that helps marketers make data-driven decisions.

Note: Click here to see how Adobe Target compared to Insider, here for a comparison to Marketo Engage, or here for a comparison to Adobe Campaign.

#6 Netcore

Netcore is an intelligent customer experience platform that helps brands increase engagement, conversions, and retention. It offers a wide range of features for different use cases, including data unification, customer journey orchestration, A/B testing, and personalization. It also has advanced site search and product discovery capabilities.

Note: Click here to see how Netcore compares to Insider.

#7 WebEngage

WebEngage is a cloud-based customer engagement and retention platform. It offers a CDP and segmentation options that help brands find the right audiences for different campaigns. It also supports various channels for reaching customers, including email, SMS, WhatsApp, and push notifications, and it has basic website personalization features.  

Note: Click here to see how WebEngage compares to Insider.

Make the most out of your marketing efforts and budget with Insider

Insider is the ideal MoEngage alternative for scaling midsize and enterprise companies looking for powerful cross-channel personalization and automation capabilities, alongside a global, experienced support team.

Our platform can:

• Aggregate your customer data from all online and offline sources and give you accurate, 360-degree profiles of all your customers.
• Predict behaviors with our AI-powered intent engine, like how much different segments are projected to spend and how likely they are to buy or churn.
• Enable you to personalize every touchpoint in your customers’ journeys, including your website, mobile app, emails, SMS and WhatsApp messages, push notifications, and more.

Lastly, our experienced customer support team and extensive templates will reduce your time to value and drastically speed up your ROI.

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