Custom Events Vs Custom Attributes

In Braze, Custom Events truly do hold a lot, a lot of power. So many things (reporting, conversions, triggers, etc.) are based on Custom Events, and Braze has come a long, long way with being able to implement custom event properties in your messaging (e.g. canvas_entry_properties for Canvas steps). Also, another huge plus is that event properties don't incur any data points, so they are very flexible from a consumption perspective. 

With the improvement of Segment Extensions, event properties are becoming more accessible for segmentation as well, but it's not quite perfect yet; there's SQL limitations, Extension Regeneration limitations, or Event Property 30-day Look back limitations. I'm sure Braze is working towards improving all these features though. 

A few more limitations with custom event properties: 

1. It's just so dang hard to see these properties inside the dashboard. The best way to see the values populated in these properties are through the event user logs, which every team NEEDS to setup if they haven't already (blog post coming soon 😅).

2. In the case you want to split users at the first step of the Canvas based on custom event properties, you won't be able to do this bc you can't make Audience paths based on custom event properties, and Action Step requires one more action. There was actually a post in The Forum with this exact use case. There's also a workaround for this where you can use the User Update step for this use case. 

Like I said, I think the accessibility of Custom Event Properties has come a super long way. But sometimes, you have a valid use case for wanting to store data as a custom attribute. And those, you can easily see in the dashboard which just makes your daily operation so much easier. 

Hope this helps Raj!