Salesforce to buy Braze for $5.7 billion to boost real-time customer engagement

Salesforce is set to acquire US-headquartered customer engagement software provider, Braze, for $5.66 billion in an effort to help enterprises personalize customer interactions in real time.

Founded in 2011 as Appboy and renamed Braze in 2017, the company’s offerings include the Braze Customer Engagement Platform that enables businesses to track customer behavior across digital channels and coordinate interactions through mobile apps, websites, email, push notifications, SMS, and WhatsApp.

Braze differentiates itself from other customer engagement platforms through its event-streaming architecture, which processes customer interactions in real time and enables businesses to trigger personalized communications across channels as behavior changes, the companies said in a joint statement.

That real-time processing capability will bolster Salesforce’s existing data and AI platforms, including Data 360, Customer 360, Agentforce, and SIForce, by enabling enterprises to act on customer signals as they emerge and use AI to deliver more relevant interactions across marketing, sales, commerce, and service use cases, they added.

Braze’s acquisition could reduce engineering work

The ability to act on real-time customer signals directly within Salesforce products will reduce the need for enterprises to build and maintain complex engineering pipelines to connect customer data, AI-driven decision-making, and engagement systems, said Bhupendra Chopra, chief revenue officer at IT consulting firm Kanerika.

“Most enterprises today still move customer data from the CRM into a warehouse and then batch it into an engagement tool through reverse-ETL jobs. Those jobs add hours and break often,” Chopra said.

“With Data 360 holding the unified profile and Braze acting on events directly, a customer’s action can trigger a response within minutes,” Chopra added.

That, in turn, could improve customer experience and retention by enabling enterprises to identify signs of customer dissatisfaction sooner and respond with targeted offers, timely support, or personalized recommendations before customers disengage, echoed Pareekh Jain, principal analyst at Pareekh Consulting.

The reduction in engineering work is also likely to reduce integration costs while helping CIOs consolidate technology vendors, Jain added.

Product overlap and vendor lock-in could complicate integration

However, the extent of those benefits will depend on how smoothly Salesforce integrates Braze’s capabilities into its existing products and whether enterprises can avoid greater dependence on a single vendor.

“Overlap is the first risk. Data 360 and Braze both store customer profiles, and Journey Builder and Braze Canvas both orchestrate journeys. Without one clear owner for each, profiles drift, and customers get conflicting messages,” Chopra said.

Also, Salesforce already offers Marketing Cloud, which could create further overlap with Braze’s engagement capabilities and complicate product integration, said Manoj Chandra Jha, principal analyst at Nord-IQ Research.

Therefore, CIOs will need to watch how the acquisition affects pricing, APIs, product roadmaps, and support for third-party platforms, he added.

Moreover, the acquisition’s promise of reducing the number of vendors an enterprise relies on for customer data management, marketing automation, and engagement also comes with risks around vendor dependence.

While tighter integration could simplify operations, it could also make it harder for enterprises to switch vendors or retain flexibility in how they assemble their technology stacks, Jain said.

That dependence could deepen even without Salesforce explicitly discontinuing a product or changing a contract.

“Many Braze customers use the platform alongside data warehouses such as Snowflake and Databricks, or customer data platforms such as Segment. If Salesforce prioritizes native integrations over those third-party connections, enterprises could face higher switching costs as their workflows become more tightly coupled to Salesforce,” Chopra said.

“Bundled pricing could also make it more expensive to move away from the platform when contracts come up for renewal,” Chopra added.

To preserve flexibility, CIOs should retain control over their data architecture rather than making Salesforce the only route through which customer data can be accessed or activated, Chopra further added.

The acquisition is expected to close by January 2028. Until then, Salesforce and Braze will continue to operate as separate, independent companies, and integration of their products will not begin until the deal closes, Braze wrote in an SEC filing.