Braze vs Salesforce: Which Marketing Platform is Right for You?

With soaring customer expectations and the ever-evolving demand for seamless cross-channel experiences, real-time automation, behavioral targeting, and personalization have become essential for success.

At Mavlers, we are seeing more brands, from quick-scaling startups to established enterprises, rethinking their customer engagement stack. They are looking for platforms that offer AI/agentic solutions to truly power dynamic, data-driven journeys. 

Two platforms leading the evolution are Braze and Salesforce, each bringing unique strengths to the table. 

But which one gives your brand the edge this year?

This sets the stage for a fresh breakdown of the Braze vs Salesforce faceoff.

We unpack their capabilities, pricing, scalability, and performance to help you choose the platform that best fits your goals. Let’s explore the differences between Braze and Salesforce and how they shape modern customer experiences.

What is Braze?

What is Salesforce?

Braze vs. Salesforce: Feature faceoff

1. Ease of use 

2. Integration and ecosystem

3. Price and scalability

4. Automation

5. Reporting and analytics

Which should you choose?

Wrapping up

What is Braze?

Braze is a customer engagement platform designed to help brands create personalized, targeted campaigns across multiple channels. Its roots are in mobile marketing automation, but it has grown into a robust, cross-channel engagement tool used by more than 2,000 global brands. 

The platform offers:

• Real-Time Data Activation: Braze enables marketers to collect, unify, and act on customer data in real time, allowing for highly responsive and personalized messaging.

• Cross-Channel Messaging: Supports push notifications, email, in-app messaging, SMS, and webhooks, all orchestrated from a single platform.

• AI-Powered Personalization: BrazeAI™ helps marketers predict customer behavior, personalize journeys, and optimize campaigns for maximum impact.

• Journey Orchestration: With its intuitive drag-and-drop interface, marketers can build complex, multi-step customer journeys based on real-time triggers and behaviors.

• Experimentation and Optimization: Built-in A/B/n testing and analytics help teams continuously improve campaign performance.

As a certified Braze Partner, we offer expert support to help you get started. If you choose Braze, feel free to book a free 30-minute call with one of our Braze email marketing specialists.

What is Salesforce?

Salesforce is the world’s leading CRM platform. Founded in 1999, Salesforce revolutionized the CRM market by offering a cloud-based solution that centralizes customer data, sales operations, marketing automation, and customer support. 

Salesforce offers a dazzling range of features, but to start with, here’s a top-level overview of its key features:

• Comprehensive CRM: Manages customer accounts, sales leads, opportunities, and support cases in one place.

• Sales, Marketing, and Service Clouds: Offers specialized modules for sales automation, marketing campaigns, customer service, and commerce.

• Customization and Extensibility: Highly customizable with support for custom objects, fields, workflows, and integrations with thousands of third-party apps.

• AI and Analytics: Einstein AI provides predictive insights, while advanced analytics tools empower data-driven decision-making.

• Workflow Automation: Automates repetitive tasks, sends reminders, and streamlines business processes.

Salesforce’s stated mission is to help businesses build and improve customer relationships at scale, offering end-to-end solutions for companies of all sizes. 

As certified Salesforce Marketing Cloud experts, we help brands unlock the full potential of SFMC. If you decide to go with Salesforce, you can schedule a free 30-minute call with one of our specialists to discuss your email marketing strategy.

“Misleading and false advertising is rampant in Martech, particularly in an age of AI washing.

Competition in Martech is only getting hotter, which means that vendors will only make more and more outlandish claims for us to laboriously cut through. Marketers need to find reliable ways to tune out the hype now to help them avoid falling for false and misleading product marketing by vendors.”

— Keanu Taylor, the Martech Weekly

Braze vs. Salesforce: Feature face-off

To make an informed decision, it’s important to understand how each marketing platform stacks up in key areas like automation, personalization, data handling, and scalability.

Let’s break down the core features of Braze and Salesforce.

1. Ease of use 

Braze

As far as Braze is concerned, marketers can easily create, test, and optimize multi-channel campaigns without heavy reliance on IT or development resources. The platform is designed to be agile, making it a favorite among teams that need to move quickly and iterate frequently.

Salesforce

Salesforce offers a comprehensive but complex user experience. Its vast functionality can be overwhelming, especially for new users or small teams. 

However, Salesforce’s interface has improved over the years, and its modular approach (Sales Cloud, Marketing Cloud, Service Cloud) allows businesses to implement only what they need. 

Training and onboarding are often required, and many organizations rely on third-party consultants for setup and optimization.

2. Integration and ecosystem 

Braze

Braze integrates seamlessly with a wide range of analytics, data warehouses, and marketing tools. It’s designed to fit into a composable stack, allowing businesses to connect Braze with their preferred data sources and downstream applications. 

This flexibility is ideal if you want best-in-class engagement without being locked into a single vendor ecosystem.

Salesforce

Salesforce’s app ecosystem is clearly unmatched, with thousands of integrations available via the Salesforce AppExchange. 

Source: Synebo

Its products are very tightly integrated with each other, creating a unified experience for sales, marketing, service, and commerce teams. However, this can also lead to vendor lock-in and higher costs if you rely solely on Salesforce for all functions. 

When weighing the differences between Braze and Salesforce, this centralized ecosystem can be a deciding factor for some brands.

3. Price and scalability

Braze

Braze’s pricing is custom and premium, typically based on factors like monthly active users (MAUs), messaging volume, and required features. It’s best suited for mid-sized to large enterprises with significant engagement needs. 

While the investment is substantial, Braze’s real-time capabilities and personalization can deliver strong ROI for brands focused on customer engagement.

Salesforce

Salesforce offers a wide range of pricing plans, from SMB-friendly options to enterprise-level solutions. 

However, costs can escalate quickly as you add more modules and users. Implementation and ongoing management often require additional investment in consulting and support. 

For organizations seeking a single platform for CRM, marketing, and service, Salesforce’s scalability is a major advantage.

4. Automation

Braze

Braze is designed for those who need flexible, real-time automation across a wide range of channels. 

Its drag-and-drop campaign builder allows users to set up complex, highly personalized customer journeys triggered by user behaviors, events, or data changes. Automation in Braze is not limited to emails—it spans push notifications, in-app messages, SMS, and webhooks, making it possible to create truly omnichannel experiences. 

Source: Braze

Braze’s automation is enhanced by AI-driven personalization, enabling dynamic content and timing adjustments based on user data and engagement patterns. 

Salesforce

Salesforce offers robust workflow automation but with a different focus. Its automation tools are deeply integrated with CRM data, allowing for sophisticated lead scoring, sales pipeline triggers, and multi-step marketing journeys. Automation can be set up based on customer attributes, sales stages, or support interactions, providing a holistic view of the customer lifecycle. 

However, Salesforce’s automation tools can be more complex to configure and may require more technical expertise or support from IT teams, especially when tailoring campaigns for diverse audiences or brands. While powerful, Salesforce’s automation is often described as more structured and less agile compared to Braze’s real-time, marketer-friendly approach.

5. Reporting and analytics 

Braze

Braze excels in engagement analytics. 

The platform provides detailed, real-time insights into user behavior, campaign performance, and message effectiveness across all channels. Marketers can quickly visualize how users are moving through journeys, which messages are resonating, and where drop-offs occur.

Source: Braze

Braze’s Currents feature allows for real-time data streaming to analytics platforms and data warehouses, making it easy for organizations to centralize and analyze customer engagement data alongside other business metrics. 

This is especially valuable for data-driven teams that want to iterate rapidly and optimize campaigns on the fly.

Salesforce

Leveraging the power of Salesforce’s CRM, Marketing Cloud users can generate in-depth reports that combine marketing, sales, and service data. This enables advanced attribution modeling, customer lifetime value analysis, and ROI tracking across the entire customer lifecycle. 

Source: Salesforce

Salesforce’s analytics tools, including Einstein AI, provide predictive insights and recommendations, but the platform’s depth can also make it more challenging to extract actionable insights quickly without proper training or customization. For organizations needing a single source of truth for all customer interactions, Salesforce’s analytics are a major advantage.

Which should you choose?

Unfortunately, there’s no one-size-fits-all answer in the Braze vs Salesforce debate. Both platforms are leaders in their own right (see image below). Braze shines with its agility, real-time engagement, and marketer-first experience. Salesforce, on the other hand, is ideal for brands seeking an all-encompassing ecosystem that unifies sales, service, and marketing.

Source: Gartner Peer Insights

The choice between Braze and Salesforce really depends on your organization’s needs, size, and digital maturity. 

Choose Braze if:

• Your primary goal is real-time customer engagement and personalized marketing across channels.

• You want a flexible, composable stack that integrates with your existing data and analytics tools.

• Your team values ease of use and the ability to iterate quickly on campaigns.

• You already have a CRM or are willing to integrate Braze with your sales/customer management systems.

Choose Salesforce if:

• You need an all-in-one CRM that manages sales, marketing, service, and commerce.

• Your business requires advanced workflow automation and end-to-end customer lifecycle management.

• You want access to a massive ecosystem of apps and integrations.

• You have the resources for implementation, customization, and ongoing management.

Braze is essentially tailored for the modern marketer, excelling in cross-channel communication with a strong emphasis on mobile engagement. 

Salesforce (Marketing Cloud) is mostly geared toward traditional marketing teams that work closely alongside sales. It’s also a popular option for companies that require seamless coordination between marketing and sales functions.

Go hybrid?

Some organizations even use both platforms together—leveraging Braze for engagement and Salesforce for CRM—maximizing the strengths of each while minimizing their weaknesses. 

This hybrid approach often emerges as the most strategic solution in any comparison between Braze and Salesforce. Here’s why:

• Avoids Costly Migration: Sidesteps the prohibitive expense, time, and disruption of fully migrating from an existing large Salesforce Marketing Cloud (SFMC) footprint.
  
• Leverages Existing Investment: Capitalizes on a company’s established Salesforce infrastructure, integrations, and internal expertise, minimizing wasted resources.
  
• Mitigates Technical Debt: Allows businesses to bypass the challenges of heavily customized or legacy SFMC setups, rather than undertaking a complete overhaul.
  
• Optimizes Channel Specialization: Enables each platform to excel in its core strength (e.g., Braze for mobile/web orchestration, SFMC for deep email/CRM integration), creating a “best-of-breed” tech stack.

If all this rings a bell, you shouldn’t shy away from a hybrid solution. 

Wrapping up

Whether you value marketer-friendly tools or full-stack enterprise solutions, understanding the differences between Braze and Salesforce is crucial. The right platform is the one that aligns not just with your current marketing goals, but also with your long-term vision for customer engagement. 

Whether you prioritize speed, scale, personalization, or platform breadth, the decision should empower your team to build smarter, more connected customer experiences.

Still unsure which platform suits you best? 

We’ve helped hundreds of brands successfully implement both Braze and Salesforce. Whether you’re leaning toward one or considering a hybrid approach, our certified experts are here to help. Book a free 30-minute consultation with one of our email marketing experts!