Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS) vs. Braze

Using SNS for any notification use case where available is the default and defacto solution. It directly integrates with SES to configure both incoming email and email delivery responses.

Additionally, any notifications, such as CloudWatch alarms, are a good use case for SNS topics and allow us to fan out delivery as needed (pagerduty, email, etc)

Its really well suited to brands with a mobile app. And from what I can glean from the features my org isn't able to take advantage of, its best suited for: - B2C brands that use social media - ecommerce (i.e. CPG) Otherwise, I am not convinced it is the tool I would recommend for users that do not have a mobile app. You're not getting most of the value from it.

Incentivized

• Built in for quicker setup within AWS ecosystem.
• Trusted as you control the users and configuration via IAM and easy access controls.
• Can be sent to S3 simple storage or for long term storage if required.
• Can be used in many regions, same configs.

Incentivized

• Well looked after - Braze itself are always on hand to answer any questions and help us make our work better.
• Great tool - We use a fair bit of Braze but there
• are so many exciting features we're slowly incorporating, Braze is always building on what they have and this keeps us top of our game.
• Fantastic learning - I have advanced quickly in my work in Braze due to their support and learning programs. This has been key for me.

Incentivized

• At times you receive access denied errors which are annoying.
• Rarely do you receive internal failure errors where you can't access the information. It is rare but it does happen.
• You are required to add an MWS Authentication Token every so often. I wish it would pull that information automatically for you so you don't have to go searching for it.

Incentivized

• Enabling GIF/videos to be directly uploaded on to Braze's platform
• Easier way of creating canvases; right now it is too complex for someone new who is starting off in the company to understand what things do and where things are
• Ability to track duplicate user profiles within the entire audience segment
• Automated deduplicating email addresses/phone numbers in each targeting segment; right now it's done manually after extracting csv files

Incentivized

We are on a mission for an omnichannel experience for our customers and are already making good progress with Braze able to fully support and optimise this

Incentivized

It is useful for applications developed using event driven architecture. It helps in tracking and logging the events in a very timely and efficient manner. The dashboards are a little difficult to implement. But overall it is very easy to integrate with other AWS services like Lambda, API GW, S3 and DynamoDB. The permissions to access should be resolved before using it.

Incentivized

It is an easy-to-understand platform, thanks to its design and accessibility. You can, for example, easily find any users and their data, check exact volumes of segments, follow the history of messages sent, and create reports. We can connect Braze with other platforms for analysis or email design (Snowflake, Hightouch, Stripo...).

Incentivized

The AWS documentation is well maintained and has lots of information which makes it easier for developers to refer to and develop applications in a fast efficient manner. It is well documented with examples which is easy to understand and implement. You can also get help by posting into forums from like-minded developers.

Incentivized

Very responsive and helpful on simple questions, but not great other than that. They do not have a way for the customer/user to escalate a ticket. You have to contact your rep and in some cases, they don't respond within 24 hours so you have no idea if they have escalated it. There is no phone number for an urgent issue - you have to rely on email

Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS) is well integrated in AWS and has been there since the early days of public cloud. It is a cost effective and very inexpensive solution to meet the needs of event notifications and custom messaging. Wish to share that there is considerable number of developers who can easily build solutions using AWS SNS. So, training costs are minimal. Other solutions are emerging and we are seeing a great usage especially of Firebase notifications because of its very neat integration with open source cross platform hybrid app frameworks like ionic, xamarin. SNS needs to become better and should have plugin support for the mobile application developers using low code/no code tools too.

Incentivized

Braze has its own strengths and weaknesses compared to Bloomreach and Hubspot. Personally I prefer Bloomreach for lifecycle journey and orchestration however I've felt integration and scaling to be more straightforward with Braze. Other platforms have been reviewed but for value for money at scale and quality of platform, Braze came out as the chosen one.

Incentivized

• Cost of alert calls to the different stakeholders across different geographies have gone down since using Amazon SNS.
• Amazon SNS has saved a lot of time for the employees that they used to spend to call multiple stakeholders so they can now focus more on productive tasks.
• Amazon SNS usage needs prior knowledge of programming.

Incentivized

• We saved a couple of million by switching from Salesforce to Braze.
• We increased our engagement for a limited-time promo by 33% by simply running a 4-variant subject line test.
• We managed to reduce our unsubscribe volume by 18% by excluding dormant users.

Incentivized