Braze, Inc.

Braze's main use case for our organization is marketing automation, creating automated workflows triggered with action-based logic.

I can discuss the abandoned cart canvas, or the cart reminder with personalized products. Braze is very useful for this type of workflow since it allows me to insert personalized data using Liquid content, and it is straightforward once you master the Liquid logic.

I use Braze on a day-to-day basis for one-off campaigns as part of our marketing plan, and it is very handy because it allows me to put forward offers from Braze catalogs, which are directly linked to our data warehouse. We also use it on a day-to-day basis to run analysis, whether simple or more complex. I also find the SQL query builder very helpful when I want to run deeper segment analysis or a user's behavior analysis.

The best feature that Braze offers is Canvas, which has many components including action paths, audience paths, delays, user updates, decision splits, send to destination, and feature flags. I also value all of the analysis features that Braze has, such as email performance, the deliverability center connected to Postmaster and Microsoft SNDS, the report builder, and many other report features that are very useful.

I rely most on Canvases, Connected Content, and Liquid code because all of this, combined with cloud data ingestion and the synchronization between our data warehouse, BigQuery, and Looker, makes it very easy to use our backend data without overly complex development.

Thanks to Braze and particularly the training and learning paths that exist within Braze Lab, it is very easy to get trained and practice whenever needed or when I have more time. Even though the learning paths are very long, I found the certifications very useful because they force you to master the tool and to really engage with it and practice hands-on. One of the very positive impacts that Braze has had on our organization is how easy it is to train, practice, and how clear the documentation is.

Braze still has some improvements to make on the user interface. Sometimes it is lagging and taking time to load pages when I have many Canvases or campaigns open. I have also noticed that sometimes in the email performance dashboard, when selecting tags or Canvases, the interface is a bit buggy. When we send too much data or large amounts of data, the interface is not as fast as expected and can be somewhat frustrating, but nothing really blocks us.

Regarding support, I can definitely say from my experience that sometimes the technical support is very helpful and provides answers that I would not have guessed without their help because the information is not appearing in the documentation, or it is just very easy and fast for Braze technical support and experts to find the solution to our issue. However, I feel this was more fluent in the past, roughly five to eight years ago. Following the years, I felt the support team really grew larger, increased in size, and the technical expertise decreased, which makes sense because the larger the team, the less experience each individual can have. However, the faster you answer and the less frustrated users you have. In my case, when I contact support, it is really for technical matters or very specific technical issues that I could not find any solution for, and I know it is not always an easy task because I have been working on Braze for years. In my case, I have noticed that it is not always straightforward to have a solution.

I have been using Braze for eight years.

Braze has presented stability issues.

Braze's scalability is very good.

Braze's customer service is faster to reply and pretty helpful.

In other companies, I have used Adobe Campaign, Brevo, Sendinblue, Batch for push notifications, Airship, and Actito, which is a French CRM tool. In almost all the companies where I was a CRM team lead or head of CRM, I managed to change the CRM tool and migrate to another one, and it was always Braze that won the request for proposal, simply because they performed the best during the technical demonstration. The fact that I was already certified and I knew the tool very well also helped a lot in the decision, even though I was always open to switching to another tool, especially because of the pricing.

Braze has allowed us to reduce the time of creation and setup by half for campaign creation, for at least one-off campaigns and automated workflows, which is really great. When it took one hour to create a campaign from start to finish before, it now takes only thirty minutes. Regarding performance measurement, it is really a game changer; it takes literally three minutes to check and write analysis about a Canvas, a campaign, or a segment's behavior. It is not only a matter of time-saving but also of data enablement; all of this data were not always available before in legacy or previous tools, so having them in Braze is really valuable.

Braze is a pretty expensive tool, but because it is also a very qualitative one. Given the higher price than other tools, we would expect in that case the tool to be very fluent, one hundred percent perfect, with no bugs and no latency, and that is not always the case. I have a mitigated experience when it comes to pricing.

We always evaluated other options and compared Braze to Salesforce Marketing Cloud, Brevo, Batch, and Emarsys.

I would advise new users to practice, train, and get certified.

This review has been rated eight out of ten.