Braze and CleverTap are two of the leading customer engagement and retention platforms.
They’re strong in areas like mobile marketing with support for channels like SMS, WhatsApp, email, in-app messaging, and others. They also offer similar tools for building automated flows and omnichannel campaigns.
Despite these similarities, each platform has its unique benefits and limitations. For example, Braze stands out with more advanced mobile marketing tools and scalability for enterprises, while CleverTap offers better analytics capabilities and more consistent customer support.
This guide explores Braze and CleverTap in detail, highlighting their key differences, so you can make an educated decision about which platform is better for your use case.
In the second part of this guide, we’ll also explore how you can overcome the limitations of both solutions with Insider — our AI-native omnichannel engagement and experience platform.
Braze vs CleverTap: Key differences, pros, and cons
To start off, we’ll dive deeper into Braze and CleverTap’s features and capabilities, as well as other important factors like channel breadth, ease of setup, and customer support.
Braze pros: Proven mobile marketing platform for engaging customers with personalized messages
Founded in 2011, Braze was originally named Appboy. The company started with a strong focus on SMS and push notifications. Appboy rebranded to Braze in 2017 and went public in 2021.
With more than 13 years of expertise in delivering personalized messages via mobile channels, Braze has solidified its position as a leader in the mobile marketing industry. Most customers rank it ahead of CleverTap, as well as other popular names like Attentive, OneSignal, and Iterable.
Its tools for building personalized user journeys across SMS, WhatsApp, and push notifications are highly advanced and scalable. This makes Braze a great option for large businesses looking to scale their efforts across mobile channels using real-time data and behavioral insights.
Braze cons: Harder to set up and use
According to customer reviews, Braze lags behind CleverTap 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 Some customers point out the platform’s outdated user interface as the reason for that and its lack of a true customer data platform (CDP).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 its setup and operations as you need to organize and consolidate data in another platform before passing it to Braze for building personalized campaigns.
CleverTap pros: Behavioral analytics tools, ease of use, and customer support
CleverTap is a customer engagement and retention platform that helps businesses deliver data-driven experiences across different channels.
It was founded in 2013 and since then has retained a strong focus on mobile analytics and marketing. The company doubled down on its efforts in that area in 2022 after acquiring Leanplum — a leader in mobile app lifecycle marketing and user engagement.
CleverTap offers three key benefits over Braze:
- Easier platform setup and management, as we discussed earlier.
- More consistent support quality. Both platforms offer solid customer support but Braze has limitations in certain geographical areas. That’s why most companies rate CleverTap’s support higher than Braze’s.
- Advanced real-time analytics and reporting tools. The platform offers many tools for unifying and analyzing data like their TesseractDB, cohorts, funnels, pivots, return on investment (ROI) predictions, and more.
CleverTap cons: Limited features, customization, and scalability
According to customer reviews, CleverTap has scalability challenges. Specifically, its database management capabilities are limited compared to other solutions, making it difficult for larger teams to use the platform efficiently.
Additionally, CleverTap can easily get overloaded when working with large amounts of data. This can lead to lag, poor performance, and even the platform becoming unresponsive during high-volume periods.
Lastly, CleverTap has some downsides when it comes to building campaigns across various channels. For example, its email templates are quite basic compared to other solutions. Its journey builder also doesn’t have all AI capabilities fully integrated and the platform as a whole doesn’t provide a complete view of the customer journey.
Due to these limitations, Braze is sometimes the preferred choice for enterprise companies with large datasets and complex omnichannel workflows.
How Insider outperforms Braze and CleverTap
Insider is our AI-native omnichannel experience and customer engagement platform. It helps 1200+ brands like Adidas, Phillips, and Lexus unify their customer data, predict key behaviors, and build personalized customer journeys that drive conversions, revenue, and retention.
Our platform supports 12+ channels natively, including the ones that Braze and CleverTap also offer, like email, SMS, WhatsApp, and push notifications. However, Insider provides access to additional touchpoints and capabilities, including advanced website personalization, eCommerce site search, and more.
Put simply, you can use our all-in-one platform to:
- Aggregate your customer data to overcome data silos and get 360-degree customer profiles.
- Personalize all customer touchpoints — including your website, mobile app, emails, messaging channel communications, and more.
- Build automated flows and omnichannel campaigns with a simple customer journey builder.
- Analyze user behavior, omnichannel journeys, and campaign performance using our end-to-end journey analytics software and tools like funnels, flows, retention cohorts, purchase behavior analysis, and more.
- Use AI to its full potential to create content, have two-way conversations at scale, predict customer behaviors, work more efficiently, and drive productivity.
Additionally, Insider’s best-in-class customer support teams and pre-made templates ensure you can drastically speed up your ROI.
That’s why customers rank our solution as the best in terms of support quality, ease of setup, and time-to-value — ahead of Braze, CleverTap, and most other omnichannel engagement platforms (e.g., Bloomreach, Emarsys, and Salesforce Marketing Cloud).
In the next sections, we’ll explore three key benefits of using Insider over Braze and CleverTap.
#1 Complete website personalization to maximize conversion rates
Website personalization is the process of tailoring elements to visitors’ needs and preferences.
The ability to personalize as many elements as possible — like categories, product categories, and site search results — helps you maximize conversion rates and generate additional revenue from your traffic.
Braze and CleverTap have some features in this area. However, they’re fairly limited as they don’t let you create a completely personalized on-site experience.
Conversely, Insider is among the top-rated personalized engines by Gartner and G2. Companies can use our advanced personalization tools to deliver engaging and highly targeted website experiences. Some of these tools include:AI-powered Smart Recommender, which lets you 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 optimizes how your site’s categories are presented to each user depending on their preferences. This is crucial for sites and apps with large product catalogs, where customers can easily get overwhelmed by the number of options. Adidas used this tool to drive a 50.3% increase in mobile conversion rates.
- InStory, which lets you add Instagram-like stories to your site or app. Users can click on these stories and see detailed information about various products, which is a powerful way to streamline product discovery and generate revenue. Dover Saddlery used InStory to drive $1.7 million in incremental revenue
- Eureka, which delivers tailored results to all visitors who use your site’s search functionality. This reduces the bounce rate while increasing conversions and average order value (AOV). As a complete site search and merchandising tool, it also lets you create a better search experience with advanced faceting filters, typo tolerance, product previews, and much more.
Insider also makes it easy to use these capabilities and other engagement strategies thanks to our premade templates. For example, you can use templates to add gamified lead collection pop-ups, display social proof, include purchase progress bars, and much more in minutes, without needing technical assistance.
#2 Best-in-class customer support and versatile templates for fast ROI
Partnering with experienced customer support teams is essential when working with omnichannel customer engagement software. Without that, you can spend months on data unification, implementation, and optimization before seeing any results.
That’s why at Insider, we pride ourselves on providing the best customer support experience for companies all over the world. In fact, customers consistently rank Insider at the top of categories like:
- Time-to-value.
- Quality of support.
- Ease of use, setup, and admin.
In a nutshell, our customer success experts:
- Answer questions and resolve issues quickly. We have over 1000 employees in 26 offices across six continents, allowing us to provide fast support to customers all over the world.
- Guide you through the implementation and onboarding process at no extra setup costs. Our team helps you connect to all relevant data sources and involve the right stakeholders in the implementation process. That way, you can get started with building campaigns and delivering value as fast as possible.
- Ensure 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 (including Braze and CleverTap) to our platform, so you don’t have to rebuild them from scratch.
For a deeper dive, check out this page that goes into more detail on why and how top brands switch to Insider.
#3 Enterprise CDP and 12+ activation channels for maximum convenience and budget utilization
Insider’s ability to analyze and personalize the entire customer journey is powered by our enterprise C
