Braze vs Intercom: What are the differences?

Introduction

Braze and Intercom are both customer engagement platforms that help businesses interact with their users through various channels. While they share some similarities, there are key differences between the two that set them apart. In this markdown, we will discuss six of these differences in detail.

1. Target Audience and Focus: Braze is primarily targeted towards enterprise-level businesses that require complex marketing and customer engagement solutions. It offers advanced analytics, segmentation capabilities, and automation features to handle large-scale marketing campaigns. On the other hand, Intercom caters to a broader audience, including small and medium-sized businesses, and is focused on providing user-friendly communication tools for customer support, sales, and marketing.

2. Channel Support: Braze supports a wide range of communication channels, including email, push notifications, in-app messaging, SMS, webhooks, and more. It provides comprehensive omni-channel marketing capabilities to engage users across multiple touchpoints. In contrast, Intercom is known for its strong support for live chat and messaging. It enables businesses to have real-time conversations with their users, making it suitable for customer support and sales use cases.

3. Data and Analytics: Braze emphasizes sophisticated data tracking and analysis, offering a robust set of analytics tools for measuring user behavior, campaign performance, and conversion rates. It provides customizable dashboards, funnel analysis, cohort analysis, and A/B testing capabilities. Intercom, on the other hand, focuses more on providing real-time user data and activity tracking within its platform, allowing businesses to monitor user engagement and segmentation.

4. Integration Ecosystem: Braze offers a wide range of integrations with other marketing and analytics platforms, enabling businesses to connect and orchestrate data between different systems. It has native integrations with popular tools like Salesforce, Segment, and Google Analytics, providing a seamless workflow for data exchange. Intercom also provides integrations but primarily focuses on enhancing its platform's core functionality rather than extensive third-party integrations.

5. Pricing Structure: Braze follows a custom pricing model and typically requires businesses to request a quote based on their specific requirements. The pricing is usually tailored to the enterprise-level needs of larger organizations. Intercom, on the other hand, offers transparent pricing plans, ranging from basic to more advanced features, with tiered pricing based on the number of users and additional add-ons.

6. Automation Capabilities: Braze offers advanced automation features like multi-channel workflows, triggered campaigns based on user behavior or events, and personalized messaging using AI algorithms. It allows businesses to create complex customer journeys and automate their marketing strategies. Intercom also provides automation capabilities, but focuses more on simple workflows and targeted messaging for customer communication rather than detailed campaign automation.

In Summary, Braze is geared towards enterprise-level businesses with a focus on advanced analytics, extensive channel support, and complex marketing automation, while Intercom caters to a broader audience with a primary emphasis on user-friendly communication tools, live chat, and real-time user data tracking.