Braze and Adobe Experience Cloud tools are often compared for use cases like omnichannel marketing, customer targeting, personalization, and journey orchestration. They offer many similar capabilities in these areas but they also have big differences.
For example, Adobe offers over 50+ tools as part of its Experience Cloud, many of which serve use cases that Braze doesn’t, like data unification, content management, and learning management. That’s why Braze can be used both as a substitute or an addition to Adobe’s suite.
In this guide, we’ll explore Braze and Adobe’s offerings in detail, with a focus on their tools for marketing teams. We’ll discuss each platform’s key differentiators, benefits, and downsides, so you can understand if it’s the right option for you.
Here’s a quick breakdown of the most important points:
- If you’re looking for a simple but powerful mobile marketing solution, Braze is the better option. It supports channels like SMS, WhatsApp, and push notifications while also offering solid tools for targeting, personalization, and automation. For many use cases, Braze is also more cost-effective than Adobe’s products.
- In terms of downsides, Braze’s UX is not up to modern standards, making the platform difficult to navigate. Braze also doesn’t have a true customer data platform (CDP) which forces teams to use a separate solution for data management and unification.
- If you need a more comprehensive set of tools for use cases like omnichannel marketing, data unification, and content management, Adobe is the way to go. It offers all of Braze’s key capabilities as well as tons of other tools and platforms, which makes it an all-in-one platform for larger businesses.
- However, Adobe’s versatility comes at the expense of a steep learning curve, complexity, and reliance on technical teams. Plus, as an enterprise-grade solution provider, Adobe is often more expensive than other omnichannel marketing platforms.
Below, we’ll explore these and other aspects of Braze and Adobe Experience Cloud.
We’ll also show you how Insider — our AI-native customer engagement platform — compares to Braze and Adobe across categories like customer support, personalization functionalities, and more.
Braze vs Adobe: Overview, strengths, and limitations
We’ll start by going through each platform’s strengths and weaknesses. Since Adobe offers a ton of products, we’ll be focusing on the differences between Braze and Adobe’s tools that are its most direct competitors, including:
- Adobe Target, which is an A/B testing, personalization, and automation solution.
- Adobe Marketo Engage, which is an AI-powered marketing automation platform for omnichannel engagement and campaign orchestration.
- Adobe Campaign, which pulls together customer data and lets teams build personalized campaigns based on that data (with a particular focus on email marketing).
Braze benefits: Powerful mobile marketing, automation, and targeting capabilities
Braze was founded in 2011 under the name Appboy. It initially focused on mobile marketing channels such as SMS, push notifications, and in-app messaging.
Seven years later, the company rebranded to Braze, expanding its services to include a broader range of capabilities. In 2021, Braze went public, marking another milestone in its growth.
Today, Braze is a prominent player in the customer engagement field, particularly when it comes to automating and optimizing journeys across mobile channels like SMS and WhatsApp. With its deep roots in mobile marketing, it also excels in crafting highly personalized experiences within mobile apps.
This makes Braze a great option for teams interested in engaging customers on mobile channels using real-time data and strong targeting features.
Additionally, Braze tends to be more affordable than Adobe, although its pricing may be higher compared to other omnichannel marketing tools. It’s also easier to set up and use due to Adobe’s plethora of tools and capabilities that usually require lots of expertise and technical assistance.
As a result, Braze is the more marketer-friendly alternative, especially if you’re looking to get started and generate results as fast as possible.
Braze downsides: Unintuitive UI and lack of a true CDP
One of the main criticisms of Braze is its outdated user interface. Although the platform is easier to set up and manage than some of Adobe’s products, the UI can feel cumbersome and harder to navigate when compared to more modern enterprise marketing tools.
Another drawback of Braze is its lack of a true built-in CDP.
CDPs are essential for consolidating customer data from various sources — such as CRMs, email platforms, and analytics tools — into one centralized database hub. This provides a more complete view of customer journeys and sets a foundation of reliable data for running personalized campaigns.
While Adobe offers a real-time CDP, Braze relies heavily on integrations with third-party CDPs (including Adobe’s). As a result, many teams need to prepare and organize their data before transferring it to Braze for activation, adding complexity to the setup and management of their martech ecosystem.
Lastly, Braze’s support infrastructure is primarily concentrated in the US and the EU, where the company has dedicated local teams. As a result, companies located outside these regions may face slower response times and lower-quality customer service.
Learn more: 11 Braze alternatives for cross-channel marketing.
Adobe Experience Cloud benefits: Complete platform with tools for data unification personalization, automation, content management, and more
Adobe was founded back in 1982 and remains one of the most popular tech companies today. Its most recognized products — like Photoshop, Illustrator, and Premier Pro — are focused on creative professionals like web designers, video editors, and photographers.
However, over the last 10 years, Adobe has invested heavily in acquiring marketing and commerce companies (like Magento). Many of these acquisitions, alongside Adobe’s in-house developments, form the basis of today’s Experience Cloud.
As a result Adobe now offers a massive variety of products for different marketing use cases, such as:
- Personalization.
- Data unification.
- Marketing analytics.
- Content management.
- Omnichannel orchestration and automation.
Put simply, most marketing and commerce teams can find a tool for their use cases here. Plus, some of Adobe’s individual solutions are leaders in their respective categories like Marketo Engage and Adobe Analytics.
Adobe’s tools are also highly customizable and scalable for large workloads and complex omnichannel use cases. They can also be integrated with each other, as well as with many other solutions.
That’s why Adobe Experience Cloud is usually better than Braze for enterprise teams that want to consolidate their stack under one platform and connect to other solutions they’re using like data warehouses or eCommerce platforms.
Adobe Experience Cloud cons: Expensive, complex, slow time-to-value, and reliance on technical teams
Complexity is usually the biggest challenge when it comes to utilizing Adobe Experience Cloud. Adobe’s tools, while versatile, can be very hard to set up and use correctly, often requiring the help of technical teams. Customers voice these concerns about many products from the Experience Cloud, including Marketo Engage, Target, and Campaign.
For many teams, using Adobe for more complex use cases requires the assistance of third-party agencies and consultants. This further increases the cost and complexity of operations, which is why Braze outperforms most Adobe products in categories like ease of setup, ease of use, and ease of admin.
Finally, Adobe’s products can be expensive compared to Braze and other popular omnichannel marketing platforms. The pricing structure of the Experience Cloud can also be convoluted, making it difficult to predict exactly how much the platform will cost in advance.
Learn more: 8 Adobe Experience Cloud alternatives for marketing teams.
Insider: The omnichannel customer engagement platform with the fastest ROI
Insider is our AI-led omnichannel experience and customer engagement platform. Over 1200+ leading brands use it to unify customer data, predict future behaviors with AI, personalize all customer touchpoints, and automate marketing campaigns.
As an alternative to Braze, Adobe, and other omnichannel solutions, Insider offers 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.
Our platform is also a leader in time-to-value, ease of setup, and ease of use, compared to Adobe, Braze, and other popular solutions.
In the next sections, we’ll explore why Insider can be an ideal alternative to Braze and Adobe for teams looking to speed up their time-to-value and maximize their ROI
Benefit #1: True CDP for data unification and identity resolution
Unlike Braze, which relies on integrations with other CDPs, Insider comes with a built-in enterprise CDP. You can use it to:
- Unify customer data from any online and offline source. This includes CRMs like Salesforce and HubSpot, analytics software like Amplitude or Mixpanel, conversational platforms like Drift and Intercom, PoS devices, APIs, and many others.
- Get 360-degree views of each customer. These customer profiles contain everything required to build personalized marketing campaigns, including customers’ names, locations, contact information, channel reachability, likelihood to purchase or engage on a channel, and much more.
Our CDP even creates profiles for anonymous website visitors. You can leverage these profiles to create personalized on-site experiences in real-time, e.g., by changing the product recommendations visitors see or sending relevant web push notifications. Learn more: How to get started with anonymous visitor personalization.
Similarly to Braze and Adobe, Insider is very flexible when it comes to integrating with your broader tech stack. For example, our Integration Hub offers 100+ pre-built connectors to popular solutions, including:
- CRMs like Salesforce, Pipedrive, HubSpot, and Microsoft Dynamics CRM.
- Traditional data and analytics CDPs like Segment, mParticle, and Tealium.
- Marketing automation software like Pardot, Keap, and Marketo.
- Ad networks like Google, Facebook, and TikTok.
- And many others.
Plus, we offer a versatile API for connecting to other systems (e.g., DMPs or legacy software), so you can seamlessly plug Insider into your existing infrastructure and workflows. This ensures crucial data is shared across your tech stack and organization in real-time.
Benefit #2: Unparalleled channel breadth
Insider brings together 12+ channels under one platform. These include web and mobile apps, messaging touchpoints like SMS, WhatsApp, and Facebook Messenger, social media and search ads, and even
