See how we helped build real, innovative marketing solutions with Braze
Register for the Braze Innovation Series >
Salesforce and Braze were both named leaders in 2025 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Multichannel Marketing Hubs. While both have proven to be powerful solutions for customer engagement, shifts in the martech landscape (especially when it comes to AI and data unification), paired with major changes within Salesforce’s product strategy, have made this comparison more relevant than ever.
Stitch was founded as a team of former Salesforce consultants turned Braze specialists, so we have hands-on experience in both ecosystems. Using that perspective — plus the latest market and product developments — we break down how to evaluate Salesforce Marketing Cloud (now with Agentforce Marketing) versus Braze, when to use both, and how to make the right decision for your business.
We're going to start with the big one. AI has rapidly become one of the biggest battlegrounds in customer engagement platforms — and Salesforce, in particular, has made AI the centerpiece of its product strategy. But the maturity, usability, and real-world impact of AI varies significantly between Salesforce Marketing Cloud and Braze.
Salesforce is heavily investing in an AI-driven future for marketing, centered around Agentforce — their vision for autonomous agents that can build journeys, analyze data, personalize content, and help marketers scale execution. This includes the introduction of Agentforce Marketing, which is designed to bring autonomous agents into the marketing workflow.
Agentforce Marketing is packaged as an ecosystem of autonomous AI agents designed to transform traditional channels into two-way conversations and act as always-on collaborators behind the scenes. These agents are designed to go beyond just assisting marketers and actually take action. That includes campaign creation, content personalization, journey orchestration, and ongoing optimization. The promise is not just faster output, but better outcomes driven by continuous AI-led improvements.
However, despite the bold positioning, much of the AI story is still early in real-world adoption:
In short, Salesforce has a big vision for AI, but for most marketers, the path from “AI promise” to “AI impact” may require additional investment, configuration, and time.
Braze’s approach to AI has traditionally been more pragmatic and directly tied to everyday marketing workflows. At Forge 2025, Braze unveiled major advancements under the BrazeAI™ umbrella, showcasing how AI will become an embedded, actionable layer across the platform. This included the announcement of BrazeAI Agent Console™, BrazeAI Operator™, and BrazeAI Decisioning Studio™ (previously known as OfferFit).
In our opinion, this was the standout announcement at Forge 2025. BrazeAI Agent Console™ introduces AI agents directly into Braze workflows, allowing marketers to automate decisions that have traditionally required manual logic, experimentation, and segmentation.
You’ll first see AI agents appear in two areas: Canvas Flows and Catalog Data Syncs, where they will be focused on making real-time decisions inside a Canvas and enriching incoming data feeds.
This is designed to be Braze’s AI integration layer, providing the foundation for plugging AI agents anywhere across the platform and allowing for a ton of brand-specific customization (even allowing you to bring your own AI models — OpenAI, Gemini, Anthropic, etc. into Braze).
We like to think of Operator like ChatGPT for Braze, designed to help marketers work faster and more intuitively inside the product. While it’s not yet widely available (the beta begins in January 2026) — it represents a major evolution in how teams will interact with Braze.
Operator will allow marketers to conversationally ask Braze to do the work for them, such as:
Operator will become even more powerful when paired with Agent Console, where Operator handles requests and agents handle execution.
Previously known as OfferFit within the Braze ecosystem, Decisioning Studio is Braze’s new reinforcement learning engine — built to optimize personalization at the individual level. Rather than picking a single “winning” variant, it continuously learns and decides the best message, offer, channel, and timing for each customer, based on their ongoing behavior.
This moves beyond classic A/B testing and beyond predictive rules — it adapts automatically as customer behavior changes. Unlike Braze’s other Forge 2025 AI announcements, Decisioning Studio is fully baked and ready to go today.
Braze also has predictive and generative tools outside of agents that help marketers take smarter actions immediately:
Because Braze’s platform is unified — and because it processes data in real time — these AI features can be activated quickly without requiring a standalone data layer or multiple integrated products.
It depends on your appetite for innovation vs. immediate value, and your existing infrastructure.
Where Salesforce leads with a bold, long-term AI vision driven by autonomous agents, Braze leads with AI that marketers can use today — practical, embedded, real-time, and built to connect directly to existing workflows.
And unlike Salesforce, Braze’s AI is built on a single, cohesive platform — not on multiple stitched-together products — allowing it to deliver value faster and with less operational lift.
If your team values experimentation, agility, and quick impact, Braze’s AI capabilities are more readily accessible. If your organization is deeply embedded in Salesforce and prepared for the time and investment required to adopt Data Cloud and Agentforce, Salesforce’s future-state AI roadmap may hold appeal — though the tangible benefits are still emerging.
The explosion of data across marketing, product, and digital interactions has forced brands to rethink how their tech stacks scale.
SFMC is built on a relational database model, which can be powerful for complex data environments — but also requires heavy configuration, maintenance, and specialized skills (SQL, AMPScript). Salesforce’s broader strategy is increasingly tied to Data Cloud, their CDP-like layer that aims to create a unified customer view. But implementations are long (often 12+ months) and expensive, and many marketers report difficulty activating Data Cloud data in real time.
Salesforce has also introduced a consumption-based pricing model, which has surprised many brands with unexpectedly high bills, in some cases burning through three years of credits in a single year.
Braze’s event-based, real-time streaming architecture is flexible, fast, and marketer-friendly. Data ingestion via SDKs, APIs, or Campaign/Canvas-triggered workflows happens in real time, enabling more experimentation and personalized experiences without extensive technical overhead.
Braze is also built to integrate seamlessly with modern tech stacks — CDPs, data warehouses, analytics platforms, and more.
It depends on your priorities.
Given the current market shift toward modular stacks, Braze often wins in agility, extensibility, and time-to-value.
.png)
For modern marketers, cross-channel orchestration is table stakes. Your customer engagement platform should empower you to deliver cohesive, personalized experiences across every touchpoint — quickly and at scale.
Historically an email-first platform (dating back to ExactTarget), Salesforce has expanded its channel reach through incremental acquisitions. Today, their offering includes email, basic SMS/push, and web personalization through Interaction Studio (now Marketing Cloud Personalization). However, most “omnichannel” workflows require stitching together multiple separate products: Email Studio, Mobile Studio, Journey Builder, Personalization, and others — each with different interfaces and sync cadences.
Salesforce’s mobile capabilities remain limited, with customers often turning to third-party providers for push and in-app due to outdated SDKs and security concerns.
Braze was built for mobile from day one — offering modern, secure SDKs; real-time eventing; and deep channel support across push, in-app, Content Cards, SMS, email, and more. Braze’s email capabilities have matured rapidly and now rival Salesforce, often surpassing them in usability and template flexibility.
Braze, decisively. Its mobile and real-time capabilities are unmatched, and its channels live within one cohesive platform rather than being distributed across multiple stitched-together products.
Salesforce has built a massive ecosystem around the specialized talent required to operate its tools (Trailhead, certifications, partner network). While powerful, SFMC is widely viewed as complex, clunky, and slow to implement — especially given the number of individual products required to unlock true cross-channel orchestration. Even basic personalization often requires SQL, AMPScript, or support from technical specialists.
Braze is consistently rated as intuitive and fast to operate. Marketers can build segments, launch campaigns, update content, and optimize journeys without heavy developer involvement. Canvas offers in-feature reporting and real-time insights at every step.
While expert support (like Stitch) is still important for maximizing the platform, Braze is thoughtfully designed to reduce day-to-day dependence on technical teams.
Braze. Hands down. Faster time-to-value, easier to maintain, and more intuitive for non-technical marketers.
Many brands operate large Salesforce footprints and are not ready — or contractually able — to sunset SFMC immediately. In these cases, pairing Braze with SFMC can offer a strategic “best of both worlds” approach.
This hybrid model allows teams to unlock Braze’s real-time and mobile strengths without immediately overhauling existing Salesforce infrastructure. The two platforms integrate cleanly via APIs, custom activities, and webhooks.
The good news is that both platforms are powerful solutions that offer marketers robust customer engagement capabilities. Deciding which one is right for you likely ultimately comes to your business goals and what type of marketing organization you have.
Braze is particularly strong for industries like e-commerce, fintech, streaming & media, QSR, travel, hospitality, subscription services, and any business with a high volume of digital interactions.
However, keep in mind: Salesforce’s innovation has slowed, pricing has become more complex, and mobile capabilities lag the market. Many brands are reevaluating long-term fit.
Because our team has deep experience with both Braze and Salesforce, we are uniquely positioned to help brands:
If you're exploring how investing in Braze can impact your business — or whether maintaining both platforms makes sense — we’d love to talk.
.png)
.png)
