WebEngage competitors: 7 alternatives for customer engagement

In this guide, we’ll explore 7 WebEngage alternatives that offer most (or all) of its functionality, while also excelling in areas like AI, customer support, website personalization, and more.

Here are all the solutions we’ll look at below:

1. Insider
2. Braze
3. CleverTap
4. MoEngage
5. Adobe Experience Cloud
6. Salesforce Marketing Cloud
7. HubSpot Marketing Hub

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 Coca-Cola, Samsung, Adidas, MAC Cosmetics, and Toyota use Insider to:

• Partner with an experienced global support team that helps them set up and take full advantage of our platform as quickly as possible. Combined with our easily customizable templates, this results in most customers ranking Insider at the top of categories like ease of setup, time-to-value, and ease of use.
• Take maximum advantage of AI’s marketing potential through a patent-pending mix of predictive, generative, and conversational AI tools that help them work more efficiently, predict customer behaviors, and engage in two-way conversations. 
• Maximize their marketing budget, efforts, and ROI by delivering the right content, messaging, and product recommendations to the right audiences on the right channels, like their websites, mobile apps, push notifications, email, and messaging channels.
• Unify their martech solutions and simplify their workflows by building, personalizing, automating, managing, and analyzing cross-channel campaigns — all from one place.
• Overcome data silos by consolidating customer data to get an accurate, 360-degree view of each customer. 
• And much more.

As an enterprise-grade platform, Insider has consistently been ranked by G2, Gartner, and IDC among the top solutions in categories like:

• Omnichannel marketing platforms.
• Mobile marketing software.
• Personalization engines.
• And more.

In the next section, we’ll explore six key benefits of Insider over other cross-channel marketing and engagement platforms (like WebEngage).

Fast setup, time-to-value, and ROI

Most enterprise marketing platforms and marketing clouds are versatile but very time-consuming to set up and use. 

Between the implementation, data integrations, and learning curve, digital marketing teams often don’t see a meaningful return on investment (ROI) for months. There’s also a heavy reliance on IT teams during and after the setup process.

Insider, however, avoids these problems with:

• Global, 24/7/265 customer support teams.
• Versatile and seamless integration options.
• 100+ templates for different channels and use cases.

That’s why customers consistently rank Insider as the best solution in categories like ease of setup, ease of use, and support quality. You can click here to see how Insider compares to WebEngage in these and other essential benchmarks.

When using Insider, you’ll always be working with experienced in-house support teams (not third-party systems integrators). They’ll help you get started as quickly as possible and see a meaningful ROI by:

• Guiding you through the implementation at no extra setup cost. We also offer flexible implementation options, like using Insider’s website tag to crawl through your site and automatically create a product catalog, uploading catalogs as CSV and XML files, or feeding the necessary data through an API.
• Analyze your analytics data to give you suggestions for improving your marketing, personalization, and engagement strategies.
• Migrating automated flows and customer journeys from other platforms (e.g., email and SMS marketing software) into Insider for you.
• And much more.

You can then launch campaigns in minutes with no IT reliance thanks to versatile templates. and no-code solutions. Insider offers templates for all its supported channels and plenty of use cases, like:

• Using gamification on your site to speed up lead collection.
• Adding progress bars to your site to encourage purchase completions.
• Sending personalized price drop or back-in-stock alerts on messaging channels like SMS or WhatsApp.
• And many more.

You can customize each template using a drag-and-drop editor, so there’s no need to do any coding or even change the HTML. You also have a WYSIWYG editor that lets you easily tailor personalization campaigns and preview how they’ll look on your site.

For example, Clarins used our gamified Wheel of Fortune template to create their “Beauty Wheel” website campaign. The campaign gave visitors a chance to spin the wheel and win a reward in return for submitting an email address, leading to a 45% increase in lead capture and over 8500 new users being identified.

Complete AI-powered marketing toolkit

AI has become an essential part of marketers’ toolkits over the past few years. However, most marketing solutions (including WebEngage) don’t have versatile and reliable toolkits that take advantage of AI’s full potential.

Insider has used AI for years for its product recommendation engine and for delivering messages at the right times and on the right channels. We’ve also taken advantage of the most recent developments in this area and to build and incorporate new patent-pending AI solutions into our platform. Today, Insider enables you to utilize the power of:

• Predictive AI: You can use predictive machine learning (ML) models that understand each unique customer and successfully predict their needs and preferences. For example, you can target customers based on their likelihood to purchase or engage on a specific channel, predicted spending, discount affinity, and much more.

• Generative AI: Insider’s generative AI capabilities can create customer segments, build journeys, and craft engaging campaign copy and images. All you have to do is provide a simple text prompt with your end goal, like generating more leads, driving more sales from a specific customer segment, improving retention, and more.

• Conversational AI: Insider gives you the freedom to have both structured and unstructured conversations with your customers across their favorite channels, like WhatsApp or chatbots. Our Large Language Models (LLMs) detect intent and deliver relevant responses to ensure effective and safe communication.

Overall, this unique combination of capabilities helps you uncover new revenue opportunities and scale your marketing efforts like never before. For a deeper dive into this topic, check out our guide to the 10 best AI personalization tools on the market.

Advanced personalization across channels

As an enterprise-grade unified marketing platform, Insider brings together 12+ channels under one umbrella, including ones that WebEngage doesn’t offer, like site search and InStory. 

This means you can use our solution to reach customers across the touchpoints they prefer, without needing to buy, set up, and manage a bunch of different point solutions.

For example, you can use Insider to personalize your:

• Website. Insider enables you to increase conversion rates (CVR) and revenue by personalizing all website elements, including content, messaging, and product recommendations. You can also use our solution to easily add social proof, progress bars, and other enticing elements. MACROS used Insider’s web personalization suite to achieve a 14% increase in CVR and a 10% boost in AOV.

• Site search results. Insider offers a special tool for personalizing site search results called Eureka. This AI-powered tool drives the search functionality of websites to help people discover what they’re looking for in the shortest possible time, resulting in lower bounce rates, more conversions, and a better customer experience. For more details, check our guide to eCommerce site search.

• Email marketing. Insider makes it easy to send personalized emails and build tailored email marketing campaigns, based on each recipient’s needs, preferences, website interactions, and more. Remix used Insider’s email campaigns and automation capabilities to increase first purchases by 104% compared to the previous quarter.

• Messaging channel communications. Our platform lets you reach customers on a variety of messaging channels, including SMS, WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, and LINE. These can be extremely powerful additions to your engagement strategy for customers who prefer to use them over traditional touchpoints like email. Picniq used Insider to diversify its communications across WhatsApp, instead of relying solely on emails, achieving an 80% open rate and 5x ROI.

• Online ads. With Insider, you can build detailed segments and use them to target customers based on their interests and preferences with your Google, Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok ads. U.S. Polo Assn. used Insider to increase their return on ad spend by 135.03% and reduce customer acquisition costs by 58%.

These are just a few of the touchpoints you can personalize with our platform. You can find more details and examples in our guide to achieving personalization at scale.

Marketing automation and cross-channel journey orchestration

Besides its extremely broad channel access, Insider empowers you to create consistent journeys across all customer touchpoints. This is possible thanks to Architect — our customer journey builder and marketing automation software. 

You can use Architect to easily create, automate, and optimize all sorts of flows and campaigns during the customer lifecycle, like:

• Lead welcome flows for people who just signed up for your newsletter. 
• Cross-sell campaigns across email and messaging channels like SMS or WhatsApp.
• Cost-efficient cart recovery campaigns using personalized web push notifications.
• And many more.

This whole process is controlled through a simple drag-and-drop editor, so anyone can easily build customer journeys without any technical assistance. 

You can find a real example of Architect’s power in our case study with Slazenger. They used our journey builder to build personalized campaigns across email, SMS, and push notifications. This helped them reduce cart abandonments and improve conversion rates, resulting in a 700% increase in customer acquisition and 49x ROI within 12 weeks.

Like the rest of Insider’s toolkit, Architect also takes full advantage of AI’s capabilities when it comes to building and optimizing customer journeys. For example, here are three of its most powerful AI features:

1. Next-Best Channel predictions, which predicts which channels users are most likely to engage on based on their behavioral patterns. This is especially important when you don’t know how to continue a customer journey beyond a certain point.

2. Send-Time Optimization, which analyzes customers’ behaviorals and automatically sends messages at the times they’re most likely to engage with them.

3. A/B Test Winner-Autoselection, which automatically guides users to the winning variant in an A/B test. This process is based on a time period and winning metric you select beforehand (like conversions, open rates, or revenue). This enables you to scale your A/B tests, without manually analyzing and adjusting each experiment.

If you’re interested, we explore this topic further in our guides to:

• eCommerce marketing automation.
• Omnichannel marketing automation.

Bonus: Data unification with a best-in-class customer data platform

Outside of its versatile personalization, automation, and cross-channel user engagement capabilities, Insider lets you aggregate your customer data into a single convenient database. 

You can do this with our customer data platform (CDP) — a solution that helps you overcome data silos and gives you all the necessary data for your personalization campaigns in one place. Our CDP can aggregate information from any online or offline source — including CRMs, APIs, analytics tools, data warehouses, and other solution providers — to create 360-degree profiles of all customers, like the one shown below.

Plus, our enterprise CDP comes at no extra cost when using Insider’s personalization capabilities, so there are no additional fees for consolidating your customer data. If you’re interested, you can learn more in our article on the 11 main CDP use cases for marketing teams.

Finally, Insider also comes with an Integration Hub with ready-made integrations for 100+ widely used solutions across 20+ categories. This makes it possible to connect Insider to the rest of your tools and ensure the necessary data is always flowing through your stack in real-time.

For example, with you can integrate Insider with:

• CRMs, like Salesforce, Microsoft Dynamics, and HubSpot.
• Email marketing tools, like Mailchimp, ActiveCampaign, and Constant Contact.
• Mobile and web analytics platforms, like Mixpanel, Amplitude, and Google Analytics.
• Customer data platforms (CDPs), like Segment, mParticle, and Tealium.
• Marketing automation platforms, like Pardot, Keap, and Marketo.
• And many other SaaS solutions.

For more details on how Insider can help you unify your marketing stack, personalize all customer touchpoints, and automate cross-channel campaigns, book a live demo with our team.

#2 Braze

Braze is a customer engagement platform. It’s primarily focused on cross-channel messaging and engagement across email, SMS, WhatsApp, mobile app and web messaging, and more. It also offers Sage AI — a suite of AI-powered tools for delivering personalization at scale, automating routine tasks, and more. 

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

#3 CleverTap

CleverTap is an omnichannel customer engagement platform. It’s traditionally been a leader in the mobile app analytics and marketing space. However, the platform has expanded to other use cases (like personalization) and multiple channels (like email, SMS, and WhatsApp). It also offers a dedicated AI product with features for segmentation, content generation, experimentation, and more.

Learn more: CleverTap alternatives and competitors for marketing, analytics, and more

#4 MoEngage

MoEngage is a customer engagement platform used by over 1200 brands. It comes with tools for data aggregation, omnichannel automation, and journey orchestration. It also supports channels like:

• SMS.
• Email.
• WhatsApp. 
• Push notifications.
• And more.

While a useful solution for various marketing use cases, MoEngage’s pricing can be unpredictable and non-transparent ahead of time, while its customer support can be slow and unreliable.

Learn more: 7 Best MoEngage alternatives for marketing teams

#5 Adobe Experience Cloud

Adobe Experience Cloud is a broad collection of technologies that can power marketing workflows end-to-end. The products included in this cloud support all sorts of use cases, like data unification, content management, campaign management, analytics, AI-powered content creation and more.

When it comes to replacing WebEngage, the most relevant Adobe Experience Cloud products for most teams are:

• Adobe Marketo Engage, which is a marketing automation and lead management solution.
• Adobe Analytics, which helps teams analyze data from all touchpoints in the customer journey.
• Adobe Target, which is an AI-powered testing, personalization, and automation platform.

Learn more: 11 Best Adobe Target competitors and alternatives in 2024.

#6 Salesforce Marketing Cloud

Marketing Cloud comprises various Salesforce products for use cases like:

• Personalization.
• Email marketing.
• Marketing analytics.
• B2B marketing automation.
• Data unification and management.
• And more.

As an enterprise solution provider, Salesforce offers a lot of variety in terms of marketing products and support for different use cases. However, when it comes to the setup, integration, and management most Marketing Cloud customers have to rely on third-party system integrators (instead of in-house Salesforce teams).

Learn more: 5 Best Salesforce Marketing Cloud competitors and alternatives

#7 HubSpot Marketing Hub

Marketing Hub helps teams reach customers across email, landing pages, forms, and other touchpoints. It’s also a useful solution for automating specific tasks, working more efficiently, and measuring campaign performance — all powered by data in your CRM. While not as versatile or robust as the previous options, HubSpot’s Marketing Hub is suitable for startups and small businesses with starting prices around $20/month per user seat.

Deliver individualized experiences at scale using the full power of AI with Insider

Insider is an ideal WebEngage alternative for midsized and enterprise brands looking for advanced personalization capabilities (across all channels), fast and competent customer support, and robust AI-powered tools for various marketing use cases.

Our platform can help you:

• Speed up your marketing ROI and reduce time-to-value by working with an experienced customer support team and using easily customizable templates for your website, mobile app, email communications, and messaging channels. 
• Leverage a unique combination of generative, conversational, and predictive AI solutions to save time, work more efficiently, anticipate user behaviors, and engage in unstructured conversations with your customers.
• Unify your martech stack by building, automating, and analyzing campaigns across all channels from one platform.
• Personalize every touchpoint in your customers’ journeys — from your website and mobile app to channels like email, SMS, WhatsApp, push notifications, and more.
• Aggregate your customer data from online and offline sources and get detailed, 360-degree views of all customers.
• And much more!

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