Braze and MoEngage offer many similar products for data-driven markets looking to engage, convert, and retain customers.
For example, both platforms support channels like email, push notifications, SMS, and WhatsApp. Teams can use them to build automated flows and complex omnichannel campaigns across these touchpoints via intuitive customer journey builders.
However, each platform also has its strengths and weaknesses. For example, Braze is the more scalable solution with better real-time data streaming capabilities. MoEngage offers more reliable customer support and is usually more cost-effective.
In this guide, we’ll explore Braze and MoEngage in detail with a focus on their most important differences, so you can make a well-educated decision. We’ll also discuss how Insider — our AI-native customer engagement platform — helps teams overcome the limitations of both platforms.
Braze vs MoEngage: Key differences, pros, and cons
In this first section, we’ll cover Braze and MoEngage’s respective histories, strengths, and limitations across categories like features, ease of setup and use, customer support quality, and more.
Braze: Proven and scalable marketing platform for engaging customers using real-time data
Braze was founded in 2011 with the company’s initial name being Appboy. Its goal was to help companies engage customers with personalized messages on mobile channels like SMS and push notifications. Eventually, the company rebranded to Braze in 2017 and went public in 2021.
Despite these changes, its focus remained on mobile marketing, which is why the company is still a leader in that space today. Specifically, Braze offers many tools for building, automating, and personalizing customer journeys using SMS, WhatsApp, and in-app messaging.
Compared to MoEngage, Braze offers slightly more advanced mobile marketing features, especially when it comes to using real-time events to trigger contextual messages. MoEngage has some capabilities in this regard but for use cases where real-time data is essential (e.g., for location- or weather-based marketing campaigns), Braze has a definite edge.
Additionally, Braze is a better fit for enterprises as it offers more extensive integrations and scalability. As we’ll discuss in a bit, MoEngage doesn’t offer as many opportunities as Braze here and sometimes struggles when processing large amounts of data.
Braze downsides: Limited customer support, UI, and reporting capabilities
Despite being a large company, Braze still faces some challenges with customer service. The company’s teams are mostly based and focused on the US and Europe, which results in support outside of those regions sometimes being slower and inconsistent.
Braze also lags behind MoEngage when it comes to ease of setup, use, and administration.
One of the main reasons for that is Brazes’s outdated UI. According to various customer reviews, the platform feels cumbersome and harder to navigate compared to modern user engagement platforms like MoEngage, Insider, or Iterable.
Lastly, some Braze customers consider the platform’s reporting capabilities to be lacking behind MoEngage and other engagement solutions.
As a result, many teams need to move their data back and forth between Braze and another analytics solution, which leads to overly complicated workflows.
MoEngage: User-friendly platform with solid customer support
MoEngage was founded in 2014 as a customer engagement solution. Today, the brand has a presence in 13 countries and over 700 team members, while still being focused on helping companies deliver engaging, personalized experiences to their customers.
MoEngage offers two key benefits over Braze:
- Customer support quality. MoEngage’s customer support teams are among the highest-rated in the industry. They offer more consistency than Braze across regions like MENA, for example.
- Ease of setup, use, and administration. MoEngage excels in these categories, in part due to its solid customer support. Ease of use and admin are closer between both platforms but MoEngage has a sizable lead in the ease of setup category, making it a better choice for companies looking to get started as fast as possible.
Additionally, MoEngage is more cost-effective than Braze for various use cases. However, there is a caveat here since its pricing is not always transparent and predictable, as we’ll discuss in the next section.
MoEngage downsides: Lack of scalability and unpredictable pricing
According to customer reviews, MoEngage lacks some of Braze’s scalability, particularly for larger teams looking to integrate it into a broader tech stack. Additionally, the platform can get laggy and even crash when dealing with large datasets, which can be an issue for teams looking to manage campaigns quickly and make real-time decisions.
Also, while MoEngage is the cheaper solution initially, its pricing can be very unpredictable. Additional features and capabilities that teams need down the line can often be quite expensive, making the total cost of ownership (TCO) way higher than expected.
Why Insider is an ideal alternative to Braze and MoEngage
Insider is our AI-native, end-to-end customer engagement platform with an integrated CDP and the fastest ROI.
Similarly to Braze and MoEngage, Insider supports many channels natively, like email, SMS, WhatsApp, push notifications, and more. It also offers omnichannel marketing automation and journey orchestration capabilities.
However, Insider comes with additional tools for use cases that Braze and MoEngage don’t support, including:
- eCommerce site search.
- Complete on-site personalization.
- Conversational CX across tons of messaging channels.
Our platform is also a leader in time-to-value, ease of setup, and ease of use, compared to Braze, MoEngage, and other omnichannel solutions. This is the result of our best-in-class customer support teams and extensive templates that ensure fast time-to-value and ROI.
Insider benefit #1: Optimized conversion rates via advanced personalization
Personalization is the process of tailoring categories, banners, product recommendations, and other website elements to each visitor’s needs, interests, and preferences.
Braze and MoEngage have some website personalization capabilities but they’re fairly limited in comparison to Insider, which is among the top-rated personalization engines by Gartner.
Our platform offers many tools for maximizing website conversion rates and revenue by creating a completely personalized on-site experience. Some of these include:
- AI-powered Smart Recommender, which can show personalized product recommendations across your site or mobile app. It combines user-based and generic algorithms (e.g., best-sellers, top-rated, new arrivals, and so on) to maximize engagement and revenue. Yves Rocher used this tool to generate a 20% uplift in conversion rate and achieve a 7x ROI in five months.
- Category Optimizer, which rearranges your site’s categories based on each visitor’s preferences. This improves the shopping experience by reducing clutter and optimizing product discovery. Adidas used this tool to achieve a 50.3% increase in mobile conversion rates.
- InStory, which lets you add Instagram-like stories to your site or app. These stories are a powerful way to drive engagement and convince more visitors to explore and purchase products. Dover Saddlery used InStory to drive $1.7 million in incremental revenue.
- Eureka, which is an AI-powered site search and merchandising tool. Similar to Category Optimizer and InStory, it streamlines the shopping experience by delivering personalized results to all visitors who use your site’s search functionality. It also offers advanced faceting filters that let users refine search results based on defined attributes like price, category, brand, and rating.
Lastly, Insider makes it easy to leverage these and other engagement tools without any technical assistance via premade, customizable templates. For example, you have templates for adding different types of product recommendations, purchase progress bars, opt-in pop-ups, and much more.
Insider benefit #2: Fast ROI thanks to best-in-class support teams
Outside of using proven templates, the most important way to guarantee a fast ROI is to work with experienced customer support teams.
This ensures that lengthy and complex processes — like the setup, data migration, and initial learning curve — are completed as fast as possible. It also guarantees you can take maximum advantage of the platform’s capabilities, based on your business needs.
As we said, Braze has some issues here, especially when it comes to ease of setup. MoEngage is typically better for most customers, although it also has room to improve.
At Insider, we consistently provide the best support experience for companies across the globe.
That’s why customers rank our platform as the best in categories like time-to-value, support quality, and ease of use, setup, and admin, not just compared to Braze and MoEngage but to all other omnichannel engagement solutions.
In a nutshell, our experienced support teams:
- Guide you through the implementation and onboarding process at no extra setup costs. This includes all sorts of activities, like connecting relevant data sources, invoicing the right technical and commercial stakeholders,
- Answer questions and resolve issues quickl
