Braze vs Salesforce Marketing Cloud: Which Marketing Platform to Choose?
With so many marketing automation platforms available in 2025, comparisons are inevitable. Last time we compared Braze vs Adobe Campaign and this time it won’t be any different in our comparison between Braze and Salesforce Marketing Cloud — two marketing automation platforms that take very different approaches to customer engagement.
Every time we faced a decision about which marketing automation platform to use in an enterprise setup, it almost always came down to Salesforce Marketing Cloud or Adobe Campaign. However, Braze has steadily evolved into a serious contender — offering enterprise-grade scalability while maintaining the agility it’s known for.
What is Braze?
Braze is a customer engagement platform built for real-time, cross-channel communication. Known for its strength in mobile push, in-app messaging, and event-based personalization, it helps brands connect with users at the right moment across apps, email, web, and SMS. Its modern, composable architecture makes it a favorite among digital-first companies that value agility and fast experimentation.
What is Salesforce Marketing Cloud (MCAE)
Salesforce Marketing Cloud (SFMC), on the other hand, is a mature enterprise platform designed for large-scale automation, segmentation, and data-driven personalization. Deeply integrated with Salesforce CRM, it offers a suite of tools for email, mobile, advertising, and journey orchestration — making it especially powerful for businesses already invested in the Salesforce ecosystem.
Let’s compare the most used features that marketing automation platform should have to the point.
Segmentation
When it comes to segmentation, Braze and Salesforce Marketing Cloud take very different routes.
Braze was built around real-time event data, making it simple to create segments based on user behavior — such as web visits, product views, or abandoned baskets. These data events can be sent directly from your website, app, or backend, and instantly used to trigger campaigns or personalize content. Segmentation in Braze feels natural for marketers who want to react to what users do right now, without needing to design complex data models.
Salesforce Marketing Cloud, on the other hand, approaches segmentation from a more data-centric and enterprise perspective. While you can segment audiences using Data Extensions in the Engagement layer, the most powerful capabilities emerge when SFMC is paired with Salesforce Data Cloud. Data Cloud unifies CRM, web, and offline data into a single profile, allowing marketers to build deeply personalized segments that can be activated across Marketing Cloud. It’s not as instantly reactive as Braze out of the box, but it offers unmatched control and scalability once your data model is in place. To achieve the same level of real-time responsiveness and behavioral targeting that Braze provides natively, SFMC typically needs to be integrated with Marketing Cloud Personalization or Data Cloud.
Beyond drag-and-drop audience filters, SFMC also includes Automation Studio, which gives marketers and developers far more flexibility. It allows SQL-based segmentation, reusable filters, and relational data models within Data Extensions. This database-like structure makes SFMC extremely adaptable for enterprise data setups where every field, key, and relationship can be customized. You can bring in product data, purchase history, or any dataset that enriches your segmentation logic — effectively turning SFMC into a mini data warehouse for audience creation and reuse across campaigns, journeys, and analytics.
While both Braze and SFMC manage segmentation within their own ecosystems, it’s worth noting that Google Analytics 4 (GA4) — particularly in its GA360 enterprise tier — can also complement this process. GA4 allows marketers to build behavioral segments based on site and app interactions, then export those audiences directly to advertising or marketing platforms, including Salesforce or Braze, via native integrations or custom data pipelines. In this way, Google Analytics can serve as an external segmentation layer that feeds ready-to-activate audiences into your automation stack, bridging the gap between web analytics and engagement platforms.
Journey Builder / Orchestration
Both Braze and Salesforce Marketing Cloud offer visual tools for building automated customer journeys, but they approach orchestration from very different directions. Braze Canvas was designed for speed, agility, and real-time behavior. It allows marketers to react instantly to user actions — like an app open, product view, or checkout abandonment — and trigger personalized messages across channels within seconds. Each Canvas can branch dynamically based on user events or attributes, letting you experiment with paths, timing, and content without needing developer support. This event-driven structure makes Braze particularly strong for reactive campaigns that depend on user intent and timing.
Salesforce Journey Builder, on the other hand, is built for scale and complexity. It’s the core orchestration layer of Marketing Cloud Engagement, enabling marketers to map out multi-step, multi-channel experiences that often run for weeks or months. Journeys can be triggered by CRM data, API events, or Data Cloud segments, and they connect deeply with Salesforce Sales and Service Clouds — something Braze doesn’t replicate. Journey Builder excels in large, data-heavy environments where marketing automation needs to align closely with customer lifecycle, service workflows, and enterprise processes. On top of that, Salesforce allows developers to extend Journey Builder with custom activities, making it possible to trigger webhooks, connect to external APIs, or integrate entirely new communication channels. This extensibility turns Journey Builder into a powerful automation framework that can reach far beyond the native Salesforce ecosystem.
That said, SFMC’s Journey Builder requires more setup to handle the same kind of real-time reactivity Braze provides out of the box. To trigger journeys based on live behavioral signals such as a website visit or cart abandonment, Salesforce typically relies on integrations with Marketing Cloud Personalization or Data Cloud. Once connected, those systems can feed events into Journey Builder, making it possible to launch automated flows based on what a customer does in real time.
In short, Braze Canvas gives marketers a lightweight, immediate, and event-driven experience for designing journeys, while Journey Builder offers a broader, enterprise-grade orchestration framework that connects marketing automation with the entire Salesforce ecosystem. One prioritizes agility — the other, depth and governance.
Personalization and Dynamic Content
Both Braze and Salesforce Marketing Cloud offer extensive personalization features, but they approach them in different ways that reflect their overall design philosophies.
Braze treats personalization as a natural extension of its event-driven architecture, powered by the Liquid templating language. Dynamic content is built directly into messages, allowing marketers to tailor emails, push notifications, or in-app messages based on real-time user attributes and custom events. With Liquid, you can reference user data like first name, last purchase, or current location, and apply conditional logic to adapt messaging on the fly. For example, if a user views a product but doesn’t buy it, Liquid can automatically insert that product’s image and price into a follow-up email or push notification — no extra configuration needed. This makes personalization in Braze highly responsive, contextual, and easy to scale across channels.
{% if ${country} == "Slovakia" %}
Shop our offers in EUR 🇸🇰
{% elsif ${country} == "Czech Republic" %}
Shop our offers in CZK 🇨🇿
{% else %}
Check our international store 🌍
{% endif %}
{% for product in ${last_viewed_products} %}
<p>{{product.name}} - {{product.price}}€</p>
{% endfor %}
{% connected_content https://api.yourstore.com/offers/{{${user_id}}} :save offerData %}
<p>Your exclusive deal: {{offerData.discount}}% off {{offerData.product}}</p>
{{${order_total} | times: 1.2 | round: 2}} → adds 20% tax
{{${last_purchase_date} | date: "%d %B %Y"}} → formats date nicelySalesforce Marketing Cloud approaches personalization from a more modular and data-driven standpoint. Within the Engagement layer, marketers can use scripting languages like AMPscript or SSJS for simple personalization Dynamic Content Blocks can be used to adapt email or SMS messages based on profile data, preferences, or behavioral triggers. For deeper, real-time personalization — such as reacting to a web visit or product view.
AMPscript
%%[
VAR @FirstName, @Product, @CartValue
SET @FirstName = AttributeValue("FirstName")
SET @Product = AttributeValue("ProductName")
SET @CartValue = AttributeValue("CartValue")
]%%
Hi %%=IIF(Empty(@FirstName), "there", @FirstName)=%%,
You left %%=v(@Product)=%% worth %%=v(@CartValue)=%%€ in your cart.
Grab it before it’s gone!SSJS
Where AMPscript starts to fall short — for example, when you need to loop through JSON data, call APIs, or perform more complex logic — Salesforce allows you to switch seamlessly to SSJS (Server-Side JavaScript). SSJS runs on the same backend that processes emails, landing pages, and automations, and it’s essentially ECMAScript 3, a JavaScript standard from around 2011. It may feel dated compared to modern JavaScript, but it’s powerful enough to handle dynamic data retrieval, conditional rendering, and even external integrations. Developers can use it to query Data Extensions, manipulate arrays, or make REST calls directly inside Marketing Cloud emails or CloudPages. This dual-layer approach — AMPscript for quick inline personalization and SSJS for heavier logic — gives SFMC flexibility that few enterprise tools can match, though it often comes at the cost of complexity and maintainability compared to Braze’s cleaner Liquid-based syntax.
<script runat="server">
Platform.Load("Core","1");
var firstName = Attribute.GetValue("FirstName") || "there";
var product = Attribute.GetValue("ProductName");
var cartValue = Attribute.GetValue("CartValue");
Write("Hi " + firstName + ", you left " + product + " worth " + cartValue + "€ in your cart.");
</script>With Automation Studio, those same scripting capabilities extend even further. You can integrate with external APIs through Script Activities, schedule automated data imports or exports, and build complex workflows that synchronize information between Salesforce and other systems. This makes the platform highly customizable and adaptable to almost any enterprise data architecture — though it often requires a strong technical team to maintain.
Braze is built for marketers who want to move fast and focus on user experience, while Salesforce Marketing Cloud is designed for enterprises that prioritize data governance, scalability, and integration depth. Choosing between them isn’t about which is better — it’s about whether your organization values speed and simplicity, or control and extensibility.
Pricing & Cost Considerations
Pricing for marketing automation platforms tends to be complex, especially at the enterprise level, and both Braze and SFMC fall into the “custom quote” category for many large customers. Nonetheless, there are some published benchmarks worth highlighting.
Braze
Braze does not publish a simple starter-price publicly; instead pricing is tailored based on usage (number of users/events/messages), channels, support, and feature set. For example:
- One estimate suggests Braze pricing starts at around US $60,000 per year for a typical enterprise setup.
- Another source notes the same figure of US $60,000–$100,000+ per year depending on volume of users/events/data.
- It’s also noted that Braze’s pricing model can be unpredictable if you heavily use event-data or very high volumes of messages/data points.
Implication: Braze offers a strong “real-time engagement” and agile stack, but it comes with a significant baseline cost for enterprise usage. Smaller companies may find it less favorable unless volumes/requirements are modest.
Salesforce Marketing Cloud (SFMC)
SFMC’s pricing is somewhat more publicly scoped though still highly variable depending on modules, contacts, users, add-ons. Some pointers:
- A recent article states that for SFMC Engagement (core marketing cloud) pricing starts at around US $1,250 per organization/month for the “Pro” tier.
- The “Corporate” tier is cited at US $4,200/month and enterprise will require custom quote.
- One broader overview notes that for full enterprise engagements you could be looking at US $10,000 to US $85,000+ per year, again depending on data/contact volumes, channels, and add-ons.
- Important: Many of the advanced capabilities (e.g., real-time behavioral triggers, Data Cloud, Personalization) require additional licensing or modules beyond the base SFMC package.
Implication: SFMC can scale from moderate to very expensive; the base cost may seem lower than some Braze quotes, but once you begin adding real-time data infrastructures, more channels, higher volumes, and add-on modules, the total cost can grow substantially.
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