Salesforce is buying Braze for $5.66 billion.
But here’s what I find interesting. Salesforce has spent years building Marketing Cloud, so why does it need to spend another $5.66 billion on a company doing much of what its own platform was supposed to deliver?
Salesforce acquired ExactTarget for $2.5 billion in 2013, followed by other investments in marketing technology, including Datorama and Evergage. More recently, it’s been developing Marketing Cloud Next and positioning Agentforce as the future of AI-powered customer engagement.
And yet, it’s now acquiring Braze, a company that built its business by offering marketers a different way to manage customer engagement.
So what did Braze figure out that Salesforce hadn’t?
I started looking at what people who actually use these platforms were saying, and their reactions made this acquisition even more interesting.
Sometimes the challenger gets there first
A number of our clients at Core dna use Braze for customer engagement, so it’s a platform we’re familiar with.
Braze built its technology around real-time customer behavior, allowing brands to respond to what customers are doing across apps, websites, email and other channels.
Salesforce offers many of these capabilities too, particularly with its newer Marketing Cloud products.
But what’s interesting isn’t just the difference in technology. It’s what people who have worked with both platforms say about using them.
In one discussion following the announcement, someone who had led a migration from Salesforce Marketing Cloud to Braze described how much easier it was to set up their data schema. Their creative team also appreciated the Figma integration.
Braze was slightly more expensive, but they were spending less time working inside the application and more time analyzing data and improving campaigns.
Another practitioner mentioned having worked at three different companies that migrated from Salesforce Marketing Cloud to Braze.
Of course, these are individual experiences, not evidence that everyone prefers Braze. And Marketing Cloud Next is a newer product than the versions many customers migrated away from.
But I think they highlight something important.
Having the same capabilities doesn’t necessarily mean you’ve built the same experience for your customers.
It’s something we see across the software industry. Large platforms tend to become more complex as they grow, supporting more products, customers and use cases.
A younger competitor can focus on solving a particular problem well, without having to accommodate everything that’s already been built.
Braze also invested heavily in AI decisioning, including its acquisition of OfferFit in 2025. It’s moving beyond helping marketers create campaigns towards continuously optimizing which messages, offers and experiences customers receive.
That fits rather neatly with Salesforce’s ambitions for Agentforce.
Salesforce is offering $47.50 per share for Braze, around a 58% premium to its closing share price before the announcement.
That’s a substantial price to pay for a company operating in a market you’ve already invested billions in.
I don’t think Salesforce is buying something it was incapable of building. It’s buying proven technology, expertise, an established customer base and a product that some marketers have already chosen over its own.
And perhaps that’s the bigger lesson here.
Sometimes it’s not about how many capabilities you have. It’s about how well people can actually use them.
When the challenger becomes part of the incumbent
There’s also an irony to all this.
Some businesses moved to Braze because they wanted to move away from Salesforce.
Now Salesforce is buying it.
One reaction I came across was from someone who said they’d moved away from Salesforce Marketing Cloud specifically to get away from Salesforce.
Another had been considering migrating to Braze and was suddenly relieved they hadn’t made the move.
There was even a Salesforce practitioner joking that anyone experienced in Salesforce and Braze would now be working in the same ecosystem for the rest of their career.
It’s funny, but you can understand the frustration.
Imagine spending two years selecting a new marketing platform, migrating your data, training your team and rebuilding your customer journeys, partly because you wanted something different from Salesforce.
Then you wake up to the news that Salesforce is acquiring it.
And competitors have been quick to recognize the opportunity.
Bloomreach CEO Raj De Datta posted on LinkedIn announcing that his company had NOT been acquired, using the moment to emphasize its independence and interoperability.
It’s a clever response, but it also says something about the market.
When an independent platform is acquired by one of the industry’s largest players, remaining independent suddenly becomes a competitive advantage.
Of course, new challengers will emerge. They always do. Companies like Bloomreach, Klaviyo and MoEngage may benefit from businesses looking for alternatives.
But what happens to the customers who already chose Braze?
Will it continue working just as well with competing CRMs and commerce platforms? Will its pricing or product roadmap change? Will its development increasingly prioritize Salesforce’s own ecosystem?
Salesforce and Braze have said that Braze will continue operating and developing as Braze, with a commitment to an open, composable approach.
That’s encouraging.
And there are certainly advantages to being part of a much larger company, including access to resources, expertise and customers.
But the real answers will come over the next few years.
Salesforce has acquired plenty of software companies before. Slack, Tableau and MuleSoft are just a few examples.
Buying successful technology is one thing. Preserving what made customers choose it while integrating it into a much larger business is another.
This is bigger than marketing automation
Salesforce completed its acquisition of Contentful in September. Now it wants Braze.
Look at what it’s bringing together: customer data, content, commerce, marketing, real-time engagement and AI agents.
That’s a powerful combination.
For a retailer, imagine connecting what a customer is browsing, what they’ve purchased, the content they’re seeing and the next action an AI agent should take, all within one environment.
There’s a genuine opportunity to make customer experiences better and reduce the complexity businesses deal with today.
At Core dna, we see that complexity firsthand. Businesses are often managing too many disconnected applications, each with its own integrations, costs and workflows.
Bringing related capabilities together makes sense.
But I think there’s an important distinction between making technology work together and making customers dependent on one company’s technology.
Integration should make your business easier to run. It shouldn’t make your technology harder to change.
Let’s say you’re a retailer using Salesforce for CRM, Contentful for content, Braze for customer engagement and another platform for commerce.
Today, you can make decisions about those systems individually, even if changing one requires integration work.
But if their data, workflows and AI agents become increasingly dependent on Salesforce’s wider ecosystem, how much freedom will you have to change one part of your technology stack?
Can you replace your commerce platform without rebuilding your customer journeys? Can you use an independent AI agent? Can you move your customer data without reworking everything connected to it?
These questions become more important as AI agents start making decisions and coordinating actions across systems.
And they’re not just theoretical.
Some of the people reacting to the acquisition are already questioning what will happen to Braze’s integrations, pricing and independence.
They’re asking whether the freedom to choose the technology that works best for their business will remain.
I’m not suggesting integrated platforms are a bad thing. Quite the opposite. Businesses need fewer disconnected systems, not more.
But there’s a difference between having everything connected and having everything locked together.
The real test comes after the acquisition
I can see why Salesforce wants Braze.
It gets a proven real-time customer engagement platform, AI decisioning capabilities, an established customer base and a team that has approached marketing differently.
Braze could also benefit enormously from Salesforce’s resources, distribution and broader technology ecosystem.
But acquisitions don’t automatically create better products.
And I think the reactions from marketers and technology teams make that clear.
Many aren’t questioning whether Salesforce has the money or the technology to make this acquisition work.
They’re questioning whether the experience they valued in Braze will remain.
Will it still be easy to use? Will it remain flexible? Will it continue to work with the tools they already have?
Those are the things that matter when you’re the person actually using the software every day.
And there’s a broader lesson here for businesses choosing their own technology.
Are you selecting a platform because it works best for your needs, or because it’s convenient to buy everything from the same vendor?
Sometimes those two things align. Sometimes they don’t.
Salesforce has spent years investing in Marketing Cloud. Now it’s paying $5.66 billion for a company that some of its own customers moved to.
Salesforce has shown it can buy the technology. Now it needs to show it can preserve what made customers choose it in the first place.
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