How much of a CDP is Braze?

Hey Michael! 

This is a pretty common question from many users who are evaluating/using several MarTech tools, and here's some thoughts I've gathered over the years: 

Braze's main focus is customer engagement. While it does have the CDP capabilities of tracking end user event data, just like Tealium does, I would guess that Braze falls behind CDPs in 2 aspects: ability to share data and costs. 

Ability to share data. Although you can track everything in Braze, what if you wanted to use that user event data in a different platform? How about several other platforms? Sure, Braze has Currents to allow you to connect to your AWS/GCS/Azure, but I believe that process is a bit more complicated than say if you were starting from Segment or Tealium. So I wonder, is Braze the best platform to use as your source of truth for user event data? 

Pricing. I'm not too familiar with the CDP pricing methods, but my guess is that it is much more costly to track a billion data points using Braze vs using a CDP. 

So to summarize, Braze can certainly do the job of a CDP, and from my experience, I've seen many startups with limited MarTech budget use Braze solely for their CDP as well as their customer engagement platform.

However, as we go further along the more established, later-stage/post-IPO companies, it's rare to see a company that doesn't also use Segment/mParticle/Tealium (rising in popularity) within their MarTech stack. 

That being said, please let me know if you have any thoughts/questions/feedback! I'm always learning more about what different teams are doing, and I also realize that you wanted to hear from teams who use Braze as their CDP, and I'm not that person, so I'm also curious what others might have to say. 

Best,

Allan