Braze and Hightouch Are Replacing Salesforce Marketing Cloud Together
At Massive Rocket, real-world experience drives every opinion and recommendation we share. As a global agency specializing in deploying both Braze and Hightouch for brands across continents, our expertise is earned, not imagined. With more than 200 successful implementations delivered for major enterprises, we understand firsthand what it takes to create high-performing customer engagement stacks and unlock meaningful business impact. Importantly, unlike many consultants or analysts in the space, we have no outside funding, alliances, or obligations—our perspective is entirely our own, shaped by years on the ground working alongside CRM, data, and marketing teams. We believe that practical, transparent advice is vital in the martech industry, and we’re committed to sharing what we’ve learned so businesses can confidently move forward in transforming their customer engagement strategies.
Salesforce Marketing Cloud is Outdated.
Despite lofty promises, Salesforce Marketing Cloud continues to force businesses into clunky processes that frustrate teams and waste resources. Central to the issue is its reliance on Data Extensions, which act like a basic database but are neither efficient nor intuitive for modern data engineers. Navigating and maintaining these structures is a headache, often requiring time-consuming manual work just to ensure data integrity.
For marketers and CRM professionals, the problems don’t stop there. The automation capabilities of Salesforce Marketing Cloud feel stuck in another era—a platform built long before the rise of the smartphone and the dynamic digital landscape of today. Teams spend more time troubleshooting, working around system limitations, and managing linear, rigid journeys than actually creating value for the business.
The latest buzz about Salesforce AI and Agent Force illustrates another recurring problem: innovation that always seems one step removed from reality. This new suite of features is heavily dependent on the so-called Data Cloud, a half-baked proposition that demands substantial investment for relatively unproven results. Even organizations willing to embrace the roadmap soon find themselves grappling with disconnected tools and fragmented workflows, making it clear that the integrated, data-driven customer engagement of the future lies elsewhere.
For more in-depth analysis on the limitations and real costs of legacy marketing clouds, see our full evaluation of Salesforce and composable alternatives.
Braze: The Best Customer Engagement Platform in the World.
Forward-thinking CRM teams are rapidly moving to Braze, and for good reason. The platform’s journey builder is unrivaled, making it possible to design complex, multi-channel programs that adapt in real time to customer behavior. This isn’t just about clever technology—it’s about unleashing creativity and enabling teams to bring inspired lifecycle campaigns to market faster than ever.
The agility of Braze is apparent from the first campaign launch. CRM specialists can move quickly, creating, testing, and iterating journeys in minutes instead of days or weeks. Changes can be deployed instantly, and updated journeys go live without requiring technical intervention or risky, time-consuming releases. This empowers marketing and CRM leads to remain responsive to customer needs and competitive trends.
A key strength of Braze is its robust support for genuinely cross-channel engagement. Unlike many legacy tools, which silo communication by channel, Braze puts web, mobile, email, in-app, and SMS into a single, coordinated canvas. CRM teams find they can finally orchestrate the right message, to the right person, at the right moment—no more guesswork or inefficient one-size-fits-all campaigns.
Underpinning the platform is a modern, intuitive interface crafted around the workflows of real marketers. As a result, Braze is not just liked—it’s genuinely loved by the teams that use it daily. From startups to global brands, organizations leveraging Braze consistently deliver richer, longer-lasting customer relationships and see rapid gains in both satisfaction and ROI.
Hightouch: The Best CDP in the World.
Where Braze excels in customer engagement, Hightouch sets the gold standard for data activation and management. As the leading Customer Data Platform and Reverse ETL tool for companies building with Snowflake, Hightouch enables sophisticated teams to connect every piece of valuable data stored in their warehousing solution directly to their marketing stack.
The architecture of Hightouch means data remains in the warehouse, eliminating the need for messy data duplication or brittle data pipelines. CRM teams can query vast datasets and construct highly sophisticated segments that combine transactional, behavioral, and predictive attributes, all without leaving the unified workspace that Snowflake provides.
Advanced user ID resolution is another standout feature. Disjointed customer records and fragmented journeys become a thing of the past, as Hightouch ties together multiple identifiers and events, building a unified and actionable customer profile. Most importantly, this approach empowers marketers to activate their best ideas quickly—without coding, massive IT projects, or weeks of backlog.
For enterprises committed to maximizing warehouse investment and enabling their teams to operate at the forefront of modern marketing, Hightouch is a transformative solution. It unlocks the power of your data warehouse, ensures compliance, simplifies workflows, and gives teams the freedom to create.
Hightouch and Braze – Better Together
The real magic happens when Hightouch and Braze are joined in a seamless, composable stack. Hightouch specializes in managing data, building segments, and ensuring everything stays in sync with your warehouse, but by itself, it doesn’t provide a way to actually reach or engage customers.
That’s where Braze brings the data to life. It takes the rich, real-time customer data managed and activated by Hightouch, using it to orchestrate and personalize communication across every touchpoint. This synergy means that data never sits idle—it’s constantly fueling smarter, more relevant journeys, driving impressive business outcomes.
This partnership fundamentally changes the experience of both marketers and their customers. Teams gain the flexibility to experiment, react swiftly to changing market conditions, and deliver campaigns that feel tailor-made for each individual. For brands, the end result is a customer engagement operation that is truly more than the sum of its parts.
Capabilities Overlap
It’s important to understand that while Hightouch and Braze both support segmentation, their purposes and strengths are quite different. Hightouch focuses on the data layer, handling modeling, enrichment, and the continuous integration of customer data within your warehouse. Its segmentation is about surfacing the most meaningful audiences out of all available data, ensuring data is always up to date and accessible to every system in your stack.
Hightouch segments are shared as dynamic audiences that feed directly into Braze, where the real-time engagement can be triggered. Once inside Braze, segmentation shifts to behavioral and journey-based logic: targeting based on actions, lifecycle stage, or campaign context.
Both platforms benefit from continuous innovation; however, their complementary focus—data activation from the warehouse (Hightouch), and dynamic cross-channel engagement (Braze)—is what enables sophisticated, future-proof customer journeys.
Disclaimer
Both Hightouch and Braze are backed by substantial investment and enjoy rapid product development cycles. The areas where their capabilities overlap are evolving quickly, and today’s clear lines may blur or shift in the future. This article reflects the capabilities and integration options available now, in late 2025, but it’s important for decision-makers to revisit product roadmaps frequently and consult trusted partners to stay ahead of changes.
Leave Salesforce Marketing Cloud Behind
Brands seeking agility, innovation, and real ROI should take a hard look at leaving Salesforce Marketing Cloud behind, embracing a composable stack built around Braze and Hightouch on the Snowflake data cloud. The combination promises not just better technology, but new ways of working—ideas are launched faster, teams collaborate more easily, and customer communications evolve as quickly as your market. This is the future of modern CRM, and with the right foundation, it’s a future that can begin today.
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