Braze

Definition

Braze is a customer engagement platform used to send personalized, cross-channel marketing messages — push notifications, in-app messages, email, and SMS — based on real-time user behavior, primarily for consumer-facing mobile apps and digital products. It differs from traditional B2B marketing automation tools by focusing on business-to-consumer (B2C) engagement at high message volume and speed, letting product and growth teams trigger messages based on live app events rather than only scheduled batch campaigns.

Overview

Braze exists to address a need specific to consumer mobile apps and digital products: engaging users in near real time based on what they just did in the product, such as abandoning a cart, completing an onboarding step, or letting a subscription lapse, rather than only sending scheduled email newsletters. Earlier generations of marketing tools were largely built for B2B lead nurturing over email, with slower, more scheduled sending patterns that didn't fit the speed and channel mix (push notifications, in-app messages) that consumer apps need. Mechanically, Braze ingests real-time behavioral event data from mobile apps and websites through SDKs and APIs, building a live user profile that updates as events occur. Its Canvas and Campaigns tools let marketers define trigger-based flows — for example, sending a push notification if a user hasn't opened the app in a set number of days, or an in-app message immediately after a specific action — evaluated against this live event stream rather than a periodically refreshed batch export. Braze also supports A/B testing and multivariate experimentation within these flows, and its infrastructure is built to handle the high message volume and low latency that consumer apps with millions of users require, which is a different engineering problem than lower-volume, longer-cycle B2B email sending. Within the customer engagement category, Braze's closest competitors are Iterable and, for a subset of use cases, Salesforce Marketing Cloud; the category as a whole is distinguished from B2B marketing automation platforms like Marketo and HubSpot primarily by consumer-scale message volume, mobile-first channels, and an emphasis on real-time behavioral triggers over lead-scoring workflows aimed at a sales handoff. Braze does not include a CRM or sales pipeline component, reflecting its purely engagement-and-retention focus rather than a full marketing-to-sales funnel. In practice, consumer apps in categories like media streaming, e-commerce, gaming, and fintech use Braze to send personalized push notifications and in-app messages aimed at improving retention and reducing churn, running lifecycle campaigns tied to specific product milestones such as trial expiration or feature adoption. Growth and lifecycle marketing teams typically own Braze configuration, working closely with product and data teams to define the behavioral events the platform triggers on. Limitations include that Braze requires meaningful engineering investment to instrument the event tracking it depends on, since its usefulness is bounded by how well an app's behavioral events are captured and sent to the platform. It is also less suited to long, multi-touch B2B sales cycles than dedicated B2B marketing automation tools, and organizations without a mobile app or high-frequency digital product engagement generally have less use for its core real-time triggering capabilities.

Key Features

• Real-time behavioral event ingestion from mobile SDKs and APIs
• Canvas and Campaigns tools define trigger-based messaging flows
• Cross-channel delivery across push, in-app, email, and SMS
• A/B testing and multivariate experimentation within flows
• Infrastructure built for high message volume and low latency at consumer scale
• Live user profiles update continuously as behavioral events occur
• No built-in CRM or sales pipeline, focused purely on engagement
• Designed primarily for mobile-first consumer apps

Use Cases

Alternatives

Frequently Asked Questions

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