.png)
Braze is excellent at outbound messaging at scale: email, SMS, push and in-app, personalized for each customer by BrazeAI. Teams look elsewhere when their most important customer moments happen inside the product.
The right pick depends on where your most important engagement actually happens.
Let's start with what's true: Braze is really good at what it does. If you need to send millions of emails, push notifications, and SMS messages to precisely targeted audiences across dozens of markets, it's one of the best customer engagement platforms money can buy. There's a reason it's a $600-million-a-year business.
But "best tool money can buy" is doing a lot of work in that sentence. And if you're reading this, you've probably already run into one of the reasons teams start looking elsewhere.
Maybe it's the price. Maybe it's the realization that Braze can send a message about your product but can't really help you guide people through it. Maybe you're tired of needing engineering for everything. Or maybe it's the feeling that your engagement strategy should start inside your product, not in someone's inbox, and Braze just isn't built for that.
Whatever brought you here, this post walks through seven Braze alternatives that approach the problem differently. Some are direct Braze competitors. Others take a fundamentally different angle. We'll be honest about all of them.
Braze is built for outbound messaging at scale. That includes email, SMS, push, WhatsApp, orchestrated in Canvas. Its in-app layer is messages, banners, and content cards. If your engagement happens inside the product (like tours, checklists, and launchpads), that's where teams begin to look in other places. Braze sells four quote-based tiers (Go, Select, Pro, Enterprise), with predictive AI on Pro and up and 1:1 AI decisioning from its OfferFit acquisition. At Forge in September 2026 it added, in beta, conversational AI agents for WhatsApp, SMS, RCS and web messaging, and Operator Connect, which lets teams work in Braze from AI assistants like Claude and ChatGPT.
Not every tool on this list is trying to do the same thing, so comparing them feature by feature doesn't quite work. We focused on the questions that come up most when teams are actively weighing a switch:
Those threads run through each write-up below.
Here's the simplest way to think about the difference. Braze starts with a message and hopes it pulls someone into your product. Appcues starts with what someone is already doing in your product and meets them there.
Both run on AI, pointed at different jobs. BrazeAI is very good at deciding which message each customer gets, on which channel, and when. Appcues AI works one step earlier: looking at what people actually do in your product, it helps you figure out what should happen there, builds it with you, and shows you whether it worked. If you're leaving Braze because your in-app experience feels like an afterthought, that difference is probably the whole reason.
How the AI changes the work. Appcues AI is a small team of agents, each with a job:
You ask in plain language, and the answer comes back as a recommendation, a chart, or a first draft. Nothing goes live until your team reviews and publishes it.
What it looks like in practice. Say trial users keep stalling before they connect their data.
That's the job Appcues was designed for: deciding what should happen inside the product, then shipping it.
What you can build. Flows (tours with tooltips, modals and slideouts), Pins, Banners, Checklists, Embeds, NPS and surveys, and Launchpads, an in-app resource center. In-app leads. Email and push come in when the moment calls for them, so you're not choosing between "in the product" and "everywhere else." Branded themes make it all look like your product rather than a third-party overlay, with no custom CSS.
Your team ships it, not the roadmap. For most lifecycle teams, email and push already run without engineering. Anything inside the product still waits in a ticket queue behind someone else's priorities. Appcues removes that queue: marketers build, target and launch in-app programs themselves, and a strategy team works with you on what to run, not just how to set it up.
Where it falls short. Appcues isn't an outbound powerhouse. If most of your engagement happens through SMS, WhatsApp or high-volume email, Braze or Iterable will fit better. If your team lives in deep product analytics, keep Amplitude or Mixpanel. Appcues' own dashboards (funnels, retention, user journeys, AI-built reports) are there to answer a narrower question about the experiences you ship. Much of the newest work, including Key Moments, Campaigns, the new dashboards and two of the AI agents, is rolling out to accounts in stages or still in beta, so ask what's live on yours.
Pricing: Start, Grow and Enterprise plans, with the full platform on every plan and pricing that scales with usage. Not the cheapest option if all you need is email. Strong value when you're running several in-product programs from one place.
Best for: Mid-market and enterprise teams whose most important customer moments happen inside the product, from onboarding through adoption and retention, and who want AI helping them decide what to do there, not just when to send.
If you like what Braze does but want a fresh start on the platform, Iterable is the most natural lateral move. It's the closest direct Braze competitor on this list: a cross-channel platform built for large-scale campaigns across email, SMS, WhatsApp, push, web push, in-app and embedded messages.
Journeys are built in Studio, a drag-and-drop canvas for entry rules, messages, delays and profile updates across channels. Embedded messaging places personalized content natively inside your app or site, not as a pop-up. Iterable's AI, Nova Agent, launched in April 2026. It drafts campaign copy, builds audiences and journeys, and with the fall release, explains why a program's performance changed and what to do next.
The catch: Iterable is built around campaigns and messages. Its in-app layer is in-app and embedded messages, not guided product patterns like checklists, launchpads or multi-step tours. If the in-app gap is why you're leaving Braze, Iterable moves you sideways rather than forward. It's also enterprise-oriented, so expect a sales-led evaluation.
Pricing: Quote-based, sold through sales.
Best for: Enterprise marketers who want Braze-style cross-channel campaigns with a new platform and contract. Not the fix if your problem is engagement inside the product.
Customer.io is organized around what users do. Events, attributes and custom objects drive everything, which makes triggered, personalized messaging feel natural if your team thinks in data. Email (marketing and transactional), push, in-app, SMS, WhatsApp and webhooks are all included, and Journeys orchestrates them in a visual workflow builder.
In-app is more capable than it used to be: modals, inline messages, web tooltips anchored to page elements, multi-step tooltip tours, and in-app NPS surveys. Its AI Agent (in beta) builds campaigns and segments from plain-language prompts, audits campaigns for gaps, and keeps context about your business. By default it asks before making high-impact changes.
The catch: Customer.io's center of gravity is cross-channel messaging driven by data, not guided in-product patterns like checklists, launchpads or a resource center. Teams without someone comfortable working with events and data models will get less out of it.
Pricing: Published tiers (Essentials, Premium, Enterprise) that scale with profiles and email volume, with unlimited seats. 14-day free trial.
Best for: Data-savvy lifecycle teams running event-triggered, cross-channel messaging. Not a fit if in-product engagement is the priority.
If your customers mostly interact with you through a mobile app, and you're a consumer brand rather than a B2B SaaS company, MoEngage is worth a look. It covers more than 16 channels, including push, email, SMS, WhatsApp, RCS, in-app, on-site messaging and content cards, with web personalization available as a separate product.
Its AI suite, Merlin AI, includes Flow Assist, which turns a plain-language strategy into a ready-to-deploy journey, and a Campaign Insights Agent that explains push and email performance and recommends next steps. Through its acquisition of Aampe, MoEngage also runs 1:1 decisioning that adapts what each customer receives.
The catch: MoEngage is tuned for B2C engagement: purchase behavior, mobile app retention and high-volume campaigns. Its in-app formats are messages, on-site prompts and cards rather than guided product patterns, so B2B SaaS teams focused on onboarding or feature adoption may find the fit awkward.
Pricing: Quote-based (Growth and Enterprise).
Best for: Consumer apps and mobile-first brands running cross-channel engagement at scale. Less relevant for B2B SaaS teams.
OneSignal started as the "just get push working" option and has grown well beyond it. Every plan, including the free one, covers mobile and web push, email, SMS/RCS, in-app messages and Live Activities, and Journeys ties them together. Setup is quick and developer-friendly.
OneSignal AI, in open beta for every customer, builds segments, drafts journeys and answers analytics questions in plain language. Journeys it drafts wait for your team to review and activate. OneSignal is also bringing more to its free plan, including AI and more Journey steps.
The catch: OneSignal is built around delivery: reaching people reliably on the channels where they get notifications. Its in-app messages cover prompts and announcements, not guided product experiences like multi-step tours, checklists or a resource center.
Pricing: Free plan, then Growth; Professional and Enterprise are quote-based.
Best for: Teams that want reliable push, email and in-app messaging fast, and a free place to start.
CleverTap's pitch is that you shouldn't need one tool to understand customers and another to reach them. For mobile-heavy consumer businesses (gaming, fintech, retail), you get retention analytics and engagement in the same platform: cohorts, RFM analysis and real-time behavioral segmentation.
Channels include push, email, SMS, WhatsApp, RCS and in-app, plus web messaging such as pop-ups, an app inbox and native display. Its AI, CleverAI, is built into every tier. It includes a decisioning engine and a suite of agents (analytics, journey, segment, content, recommendations and predictions) that predict churn and conversion and adapt journeys in real time.
The catch: CleverTap is designed for B2C mobile apps, so B2B SaaS teams working on onboarding and feature adoption inside a web product will find it pointed at a different job. Getting full value from the analytics side takes someone comfortable configuring it.
Pricing: Core, Pro and Ultimate, scaled by monthly active users. Free trial on Core.
Best for: Mobile-first consumer companies (e-commerce, gaming, fintech) that want analytics and engagement combined. Not built for B2B SaaS.
Pendo is the odd one out on this list, and that's why it belongs here. Some teams search for "Braze alternatives" when what they actually need is better visibility into what users do in the product. If that sounds familiar, Pendo answers a different question than the one you started with.
Product analytics is the center: feature adoption, paths and session replay (on higher tiers). In-app guides layer on top on every plan, along with feedback and roadmap tools. Leo, Pendo's AI, is included on every plan and builds reports from plain-language questions. Agent Analytics, sold as an add-on, measures how customers use your own AI agents. On its top-tier Ultimate plan, Orchestrate sequences in-app guides and email (sent through HubSpot) into journeys.
The catch: Pendo is analytics-first. Its guides are there to support what the data shows, and cross-channel journeys sit in its top tier rather than at the core of the product.
Pricing: Free, Base, Core and Ultimate, with key capabilities (session replay, Orchestrate) on higher tiers.
Best for: Product teams that need to understand usage first and add in-app guidance second. Not the pick if cross-channel lifecycle engagement is the job.
If you're evaluating Braze alternatives, Salesforce Marketing Cloud has probably come up. It's a comprehensive marketing automation suite with deep CRM integration. For teams already running on Salesforce, it can be a natural fit for email, SMS and cross-channel campaigns.
For most teams reading this post, though, it solves a different problem. It's designed for large enterprise marketing teams, usually with dedicated Salesforce admins, and it's centered on campaigns and CRM data rather than engagement inside your product. If the in-app gap is what's driving your search, it won't close it.
Worth knowing about, but probably not the answer if you're on this page.
Forget feature matrices for a second. The real question is: where does your most important customer engagement happen? The answer tells you whether you need a messaging platform, an engagement platform built around your product, or something else entirely.
Here's what most teams figure out eventually: the reason they're leaving Braze tells them what to pick next.
Braze is a genuinely good tool for what it was built to do: send personalized messaging at scale across channels. If that's your core need, you've got strong Braze competitors on this list (Iterable and Customer.io chief among them).
But a lot of teams searching for "Braze alternatives" have realized that their real problem isn't messaging. It's that the most important customer experiences happen inside the product — during onboarding, when someone discovers a new feature, when they're about to churn, when they're ready to expand — and their current tools don't help with any of that. Stitching together multiple tools and hoping the data stays in sync isn't a strategy. It's a workaround.
That's the gap Appcues fills. Not by out-messaging Braze, but by starting somewhere else: inside the product, where your customers already are. Appcues AI reads what people actually do there, helps your team decide what should happen next, and builds it with you. Email and push join in when they're the right channel, and a strategy team helps you figure out what to run, not just how to set it up.
Braze decides what to send. Appcues helps you decide what should happen once people arrive.
Lifecycle Marketing
Product Launches
User Engagement
Customer Engagement
TL;DR
Braze is excellent at outbound messaging at scale: email, SMS, push and in-app, personalized for each customer by BrazeAI. Teams look elsewhere when their most important customer moments happen inside the product.
The right pick depends on where your most important engagement actually happens.
Let's start with what's true: Braze is really good at what it does. If you need to send millions of emails, push notifications, and SMS messages to precisely targeted audiences across dozens of markets, it's one of the best customer engagement platforms money can buy. There's a reason it's a $600-million-a-year business.
But "best tool money can buy" is doing a lot of work in that sentence. And if you're reading this, you've probably already run into one of the reasons teams start looking elsewhere.
Maybe it's the price. Maybe it's the realization that Braze can send a message about your product but can't really help you guide people through it. Maybe you're tired of needing engineering for everything. Or maybe it's the feeling that your engagement strategy should start inside your product, not in someone's inbox, and Braze just isn't built for that.
Whatever brought you here, this post walks through seven Braze alternatives that approach the problem differently. Some are direct Braze competitors. Others take a fundamentally different angle. We'll be honest about all of them.
Braze is built for outbound messaging at scale. That includes email, SMS, push, WhatsApp, orchestrated in Canvas. Its in-app layer is messages, banners, and content cards. If your engagement happens inside the product (like tours, checklists, and launchpads), that's where teams begin to look in other places. Braze sells four quote-based tiers (Go, Select, Pro, Enterprise), with predictive AI on Pro and up and 1:1 AI decisioning from its OfferFit acquisition. At Forge in September 2026 it added, in beta, conversational AI agents for WhatsApp, SMS, RCS and web messaging, and Operator Connect, which lets teams work in Braze from AI assistants like Claude and ChatGPT.
Not every tool on this list is trying to do the same thing, so comparing them feature by feature doesn't quite work. We focused on the questions that come up most when teams are actively weighing a switch:
Those threads run through each write-up below.
Here's the simplest way to think about the difference. Braze starts with a message and hopes it pulls someone into your product. Appcues starts with what someone is already doing in your product and meets them there.
Both run on AI, pointed at different jobs. BrazeAI is very good at deciding which message each customer gets, on which channel, and when. Appcues AI works one step earlier: looking at what people actually do in your product, it helps you figure out what should happen there, builds it with you, and shows you whether it worked. If you're leaving Braze because your in-app experience feels like an afterthought, that difference is probably the whole reason.
How the AI changes the work. Appcues AI is a small team of agents, each with a job:
You ask in plain language, and the answer comes back as a recommendation, a chart, or a first draft. Nothing goes live until your team reviews and publishes it.
What it looks like in practice. Say trial users keep stalling before they connect their data.
That's the job Appcues was designed for: deciding what should happen inside the product, then shipping it.
What you can build. Flows (tours with tooltips, modals and slideouts), Pins, Banners, Checklists, Embeds, NPS and surveys, and Launchpads, an in-app resource center. In-app leads. Email and push come in when the moment calls for them, so you're not choosing between "in the product" and "everywhere else." Branded themes make it all look like your product rather than a third-party overlay, with no custom CSS.
Your team ships it, not the roadmap. For most lifecycle teams, email and push already run without engineering. Anything inside the product still waits in a ticket queue behind someone else's priorities. Appcues removes that queue: marketers build, target and launch in-app programs themselves, and a strategy team works with you on what to run, not just how to set it up.
Where it falls short. Appcues isn't an outbound powerhouse. If most of your engagement happens through SMS, WhatsApp or high-volume email, Braze or Iterable will fit better. If your team lives in deep product analytics, keep Amplitude or Mixpanel. Appcues' own dashboards (funnels, retention, user journeys, AI-built reports) are there to answer a narrower question about the experiences you ship. Much of the newest work, including Key Moments, Campaigns, the new dashboards and two of the AI agents, is rolling out to accounts in stages or still in beta, so ask what's live on yours.
Pricing: Start, Grow and Enterprise plans, with the full platform on every plan and pricing that scales with usage. Not the cheapest option if all you need is email. Strong value when you're running several in-product programs from one place.
Best for: Mid-market and enterprise teams whose most important customer moments happen inside the product, from onboarding through adoption and retention, and who want AI helping them decide what to do there, not just when to send.
If you like what Braze does but want a fresh start on the platform, Iterable is the most natural lateral move. It's the closest direct Braze competitor on this list: a cross-channel platform built for large-scale campaigns across email, SMS, WhatsApp, push, web push, in-app and embedded messages.
Journeys are built in Studio, a drag-and-drop canvas for entry rules, messages, delays and profile updates across channels. Embedded messaging places personalized content natively inside your app or site, not as a pop-up. Iterable's AI, Nova Agent, launched in April 2026. It drafts campaign copy, builds audiences and journeys, and with the fall release, explains why a program's performance changed and what to do next.
The catch: Iterable is built around campaigns and messages. Its in-app layer is in-app and embedded messages, not guided product patterns like checklists, launchpads or multi-step tours. If the in-app gap is why you're leaving Braze, Iterable moves you sideways rather than forward. It's also enterprise-oriented, so expect a sales-led evaluation.
Pricing: Quote-based, sold through sales.
Best for: Enterprise marketers who want Braze-style cross-channel campaigns with a new platform and contract. Not the fix if your problem is engagement inside the product.
Customer.io is organized around what users do. Events, attributes and custom objects drive everything, which makes triggered, personalized messaging feel natural if your team thinks in data. Email (marketing and transactional), push, in-app, SMS, WhatsApp and webhooks are all included, and Journeys orchestrates them in a visual workflow builder.
In-app is more capable than it used to be: modals, inline messages, web tooltips anchored to page elements, multi-step tooltip tours, and in-app NPS surveys. Its AI Agent (in beta) builds campaigns and segments from plain-language prompts, audits campaigns for gaps, and keeps context about your business. By default it asks before making high-impact changes.
The catch: Customer.io's center of gravity is cross-channel messaging driven by data, not guided in-product patterns like checklists, launchpads or a resource center. Teams without someone comfortable working with events and data models will get less out of it.
Pricing: Published tiers (Essentials, Premium, Enterprise) that scale with profiles and email volume, with unlimited seats. 14-day free trial.
Best for: Data-savvy lifecycle teams running event-triggered, cross-channel messaging. Not a fit if in-product engagement is the priority.
If your customers mostly interact with you through a mobile app, and you're a consumer brand rather than a B2B SaaS company, MoEngage is worth a look. It covers more than 16 channels, including push, email, SMS, WhatsApp, RCS, in-app, on-site messaging and content cards, with web personalization available as a separate product.
Its AI suite, Merlin AI, includes Flow Assist, which turns a plain-language strategy into a ready-to-deploy journey, and a Campaign Insights Agent that explains push and email performance and recommends next steps. Through its acquisition of Aampe, MoEngage also runs 1:1 decisioning that adapts what each customer receives.
The catch: MoEngage is tuned for B2C engagement: purchase behavior, mobile app retention and high-volume campaigns. Its in-app formats are messages, on-site prompts and cards rather than guided product patterns, so B2B SaaS teams focused on onboarding or feature adoption may find the fit awkward.
Pricing: Quote-based (Growth and Enterprise).
Best for: Consumer apps and mobile-first brands running cross-channel engagement at scale. Less relevant for B2B SaaS teams.
OneSignal started as the "just get push working" option and has grown well beyond it. Every plan, including the free one, covers mobile and web push, email, SMS/RCS, in-app messages and Live Activities, and Journeys ties them together. Setup is quick and developer-friendly.
OneSignal AI, in open beta for every customer, builds segments, drafts journeys and answers analytics questions in plain language. Journeys it drafts wait for your team to review and activate. OneSignal is also bringing more to its free plan, including AI and more Journey steps.
The catch: OneSignal is built around delivery: reaching people reliably on the channels where they get notifications. Its in-app messages cover prompts and announcements, not guided product experiences like multi-step tours, checklists or a resource center.
Pricing: Free plan, then Growth; Professional and Enterprise are quote-based.
Best for: Teams that want reliable push, email and in-app messaging fast, and a free place to start.
CleverTap's pitch is that you shouldn't need one tool to understand customers and another to reach them. For mobile-heavy consumer businesses (gaming, fintech, retail), you get retention analytics and engagement in the same platform: cohorts, RFM analysis and real-time behavioral segmentation.
Channels include push, email, SMS, WhatsApp, RCS and in-app, plus web messaging such as pop-ups, an app inbox and native display. Its AI, CleverAI, is built into every tier. It includes a decisioning engine and a suite of agents (analytics, journey, segment, content, recommendations and predictions) that predict churn and conversion and adapt journeys in real time.
The catch: CleverTap is designed for B2C mobile apps, so B2B SaaS teams working on onboarding and feature adoption inside a web product will find it pointed at a different job. Getting full value from the analytics side takes someone comfortable configuring it.
Pricing: Core, Pro and Ultimate, scaled by monthly active users. Free trial on Core.
Best for: Mobile-first consumer companies (e-commerce, gaming, fintech) that want analytics and engagement combined. Not built for B2B SaaS.
Pendo is the odd one out on this list, and that's why it belongs here. Some teams search for "Braze alternatives" when what they actually need is better visibility into what users do in the product. If that sounds familiar, Pendo answers a different question than the one you started with.
Product analytics is the center: feature adoption, paths and session replay (on higher tiers). In-app guides layer on top on every plan, along with feedback and roadmap tools. Leo, Pendo's AI, is included on every plan and builds reports from plain-language questions. Agent Analytics, sold as an add-on, measures how customers use your own AI agents. On its top-tier Ultimate plan, Orchestrate sequences in-app guides and email (sent through HubSpot) into journeys.
The catch: Pendo is analytics-first. Its guides are there to support what the data shows, and cross-channel journeys sit in its top tier rather than at the core of the product.
Pricing: Free, Base, Core and Ultimate, with key capabilities (session replay, Orchestrate) on higher tiers.
Best for: Product teams that need to understand usage first and add in-app guidance second. Not the pick if cross-channel lifecycle engagement is the job.
If you're evaluating Braze alternatives, Salesforce Marketing Cloud has probably come up. It's a comprehensive marketing automation suite with deep CRM integration. For teams already running on Salesforce, it can be a natural fit for email, SMS and cross-channel campaigns.
For most teams reading this post, though, it solves a different problem. It's designed for large enterprise marketing teams, usually with dedicated Salesforce admins, and it's centered on campaigns and CRM data rather than engagement inside your product. If the in-app gap is what's driving your search, it won't close it.
Worth knowing about, but probably not the answer if you're on this page.
Forget feature matrices for a second. The real question is: where does your most important customer engagement happen? The answer tells you whether you need a messaging platform, an engagement platform built around your product, or something else entirely.
Here's what most teams figure out eventually: the reason they're leaving Braze tells them what to pick next.
Braze is a genuinely good tool for what it was built to do: send personalized messaging at scale across channels. If that's your core need, you've got strong Braze competitors on this list (Iterable and Customer.io chief among them).
But a lot of teams searching for "Braze alternatives" have realized that their real problem isn't messaging. It's that the most important customer experiences happen inside the product — during onboarding, when someone discovers a new feature, when they're about to churn, when they're ready to expand — and their current tools don't help with any of that. Stitching together multiple tools and hoping the data stays in sync isn't a strategy. It's a workaround.
That's the gap Appcues fills. Not by out-messaging Braze, but by starting somewhere else: inside the product, where your customers already are. Appcues AI reads what people actually do there, helps your team decide what should happen next, and builds it with you. Email and push join in when they're the right channel, and a strategy team helps you figure out what to run, not just how to set it up.
Braze decides what to send. Appcues helps you decide what should happen once people arrive.
Sign up for Quickcues and get our monthly updates!
.svg)
