Braze vs Iterable vs Plotline | Features, Pricing, and Comparison

Braze, Iterable, and Plotline are highly regarded customer engagement platforms (CEPs) for consumer companies. These platforms provide capabilities that assist B2C businesses in improving customer engagement.

We will compare the three tools to help you make a well-informed decision regarding which platform is the best fit for your business.

Here's a short guide to help you decide between these tools right away:

• All three offer above-average outside-app engagement methods such as mobile push notifications, email, or SMS.
• In terms of segmentation and analytics, Braze outshines Iterable with its shaped filters (rectangle, pentagon, custom-shaped) for location-based targeting and support for advanced multivariate testing beyond basic A/B testing.
• Iterable shines in personalization, surpassing Braze with its unique "catalog" feature that enables real-time, behavior-based dynamic content delivery.
• If engaging users inside the app (with stories, videos, scratch cards, tooltips, etc) is extremely crucial for you, Plotline will be the best choice. It offers the best in-app capability paired with push, emails, etc to give an actual omnichannel experience.

Introduction to the tools

Braze is a CEP that helps businesses gather user data and deliver personalized messaging across various channels. The platform integrates AI capabilities that specifically focus on predicting purchasing patterns and customer churn.

Similar to Braze, Iterable is another popular customer engagement platform. It enables personalized messaging across various channels such as email, SMS, push notifications, and basic in-app messages. Its purpose is to assist marketers in segmenting users based on demographics and behaviors, constructing messaging workflows, and managing large-scale marketing communication efforts.

Plotline, on the other hand, is an omni-channel engagement platform across in-app, emails, push, etc. Compared to the other tools, Plotline stands out for its in-app engagement capabilities. It allows you to create experiences like stories, videos, spin the wheel, etc from their dashboard, without dev effort.

Feature comparison: Braze vs Iterable vs Plotline

Here’s a broad summary of the features of the three platforms.

Outside-app engagement

All three offer multi-channel messaging through email, SMS, and push notifications.

However, Iterable's API allows for event-triggered campaigns across multiple channels with a user-friendly workflow editor.

In contrast, Braze supports triggered campaigns with multiple channels but is limited to one-off messages making it harder to create a comprehensive customer journey. Braze's more advanced multi-channel automation feature, Canvas Flow, is exclusive to annual plan users which is not available in Iterable.

In-app engagement

Over the last decade, the effectiveness of channels like push, emails, and SMS has decreased drastically. Average CTRs have fallen to <1-2%. In this decade, in-app engagement has come up as a new way to drive retention and LTV metrics for mobile app users.

Braze and Iterable only offer basic carousels, modals, and in-app surveys, which are disruptive to the user experience.

Plotline, with its vast UI depth - stories, videos, scratch cards, tooltips, spotlights, floaters, native widgets, etc, is a standout in this space. It helps you engage your users inside the app while always maintaining the user experience.

User segmentation

All three tools provide great segmentation capabilities, allowing you to create highly targeted campaigns based on a wide range of criteria, such as user behavior and demographics.

Plotline is the only tool that allows for real-time segmentation (in <100ms of an event-fire). Other tools in this space may have a delay of up to a couple of seconds.

While a few seconds of delay don’t matter when sending push notifications, it becomes extremely disruptive to an in-app experience. Hence, if your team is focusing on creating in-app journeys, Plotline will be the better choice

Personalization and journey orchestration

All three tools enable personalized engagement and the creation of distinct user journeys based on their in-app actions.

In general, Iterable leverages personalization better than the other two. With the “catalog” feature, Iterable stands unique by empowering to generate real-time content that can be dynamically delivered to customers based on their specific behavior.

For instance, if there are users who have abandoned their shopping carts, you can identify this specific group and design a separate journey for them. By doing so, personalized reminders can be triggered to encourage cart abandoners to complete their purchases, thereby increasing the number of orders placed through the app.

Pricing comparison: Braze vs Iterable vs Plotline

Iterable's pricing tends to be on the higher side, and additional charges are common for essential features such as events, API calls, attribute additions, message sends, data storage, and so on. The monthly starting price is $500, and unfortunately, users do not have the option of a free trial to test the platform beforehand.

Coming to Braze, its pricing is based on data consumption, or “data points. It provides custom pricing with no free trial and is relatively less expensive than Iterable.

On the other hand, Plotline offers MAU-based pricing and its package starts at $500 per month, and they also offer a 21-day free trial.

In general, customers find Iterable to be ~5-10% more expensive than the others.

Braze vs Iterable vs Plotline: How to choose?

When it's decision time, it's all about getting a grip on your business, setting clear objectives, and taking into account things like price sensitivity.

• All three offer above-average outside-app engagement methods such as mobile push notifications, email, or SMS.
• In terms of segmentation and analytics, Braze outshines Iterable with its shaped filters (rectangle, pentagon, custom-shaped) for location-based targeting and support for advanced multivariate testing beyond basic A/B testing.
• Iterable shines in personalization, surpassing Braze with its unique "catalog" feature that enables real-time, behavior-based dynamic content delivery.
• If engaging users inside the app (with stories, videos, scratch cards, tooltips, etc) is extremely crucial for you, Plotline will be the best choice. It offers the best in-app capability paired with push, emails, etc to give an actual omnichannel experience.
• If you’re highly price-sensitive, choose in this order: 1. Plotline, 2. Braze, 3. Iterable

Plotline: For brands looking to give users a seamless experience across in-app and outside-app channels

Ploltine is a full-stack engagement platform that specializes in in-app engagement.

In-app engagement is an emerging space and Braze and Iterable are both extremely limited when it comes to providing customizable UI elements and real-time targeting. That’s where Plotline comes in. We believe the best way to communicate with your users is where they are - on your app - to activate, retain, and monetize your users.

Plotline is an engagement platform that differentiates from Braze and Iterable with the depth of its in-app capabilities. You can configure stories, videos, animations, tooltips, etc from the dashboard without having to rely on engineering.

If you're interested in learning more about how in-app engagement can help you drive activation, retention, and monetization metrics, check us out for a free trial.