Salesforce is paying $5.66 billion for Braze. I read that as an admission.
Salesforce has been building Marketing Cloud for more than a decade. It paid $2.5 billion for ExactTarget in 2013, then bought Datorama and Evergage. Today it’s developing Marketing Cloud Next and telling customers Agentforce is the future of customer engagement.
If that strategy were giving customers what they wanted, Salesforce wouldn’t need to buy Braze.
Why marketers moved to Braze
Several of our clients at Core dna run Braze, so we see it up close. On paper, Salesforce can do most of what Braze does. Marketers who have used both tell a different story.
After the announcement, one person who had led a migration from Marketing Cloud to Braze said the data schema was far easier to set up, and their creative team liked the Figma integration. Braze cost a little more, but the team spent less time inside the tool and more time improving campaigns. Another said they had worked at three companies that made the same move.
These are individual experiences, and many of them involve the older Marketing Cloud products. But the pattern is hard to ignore. The features were there in Marketing Cloud. Braze was simply easier to use.
Salesforce’s own announcement points the same way. It singles out Braze’s real-time engagement, mobile capabilities and AI decisioning, built up through its 2025 acquisition of OfferFit, as the pieces that will strengthen Marketing Cloud.
Marketing Cloud hasn’t failed. It has an enormous installed base. But after more than a decade and billions of dollars, Salesforce has decided to buy that experience, and it’s paying a 58% premium on Braze’s share price to get it.
This has happened before
In 2013, the big suites bought the email challengers of their day. Salesforce bought ExactTarget. Oracle bought Responsys. Adobe bought Neolane.
A new generation of challengers grew up in their shadow, Braze among them. They were built for mobile, moved faster and were easier to use, and plenty of marketers moved to them from the suites. Some moved to Braze specifically to get away from Salesforce. Now Salesforce is buying it.
The suites are buying again. Salesforce has bought Informatica and Contentful, and agreed to buy Braze, in under 18 months.
When it completed the ExactTarget deal, Salesforce promised “a world-class marketing platform across email, social, mobile and the web.” In its Braze announcement, it says Braze will “strengthen Marketing Cloud’s cross-channel personalization.” Thirteen years apart, the two pitches are remarkably close.
I expect the cycle to keep turning. Every time a suite buys the challenger that was beating it, it opens the door for the next one. Bloomreach CEO Raj De Datta was quick to post that his company had NOT been acquired. It made me laugh, but he’s right to say it. Independence just became a selling point again.
Is this really a data play?
This time, there may be more to it. Salesforce says Braze will plug into every layer of its platform, including Data 360, its customer data platform.
Braze handles trillions of messages and journey actions a year, and it sees what people do in apps and on websites as it happens. Every session, every tap, every purchase. That’s some of the most valuable customer data there is.
Data 360 is billed on usage and on the number of customer profiles. Run Braze’s event stream through it and Salesforce gets more than an engagement tool. It gets a large share of its customers’ real-time behavioral data running through its own platform, where it’s billed and where its AI agents can act on it.
I can’t say that’s the plan. But it would go a long way to explaining the price.
It matters for Braze customers too. Many keep their customer data in their own warehouse, in Snowflake, Databricks or BigQuery, and use Braze to act on it. For a lot of them, that separation was part of the appeal. If Braze’s best features start to depend on Data 360, that choice gets harder to keep.
At Core dna, we believe in bringing these capabilities together. Most businesses we work with run too many disconnected tools. But connecting your systems and handing one vendor your customer data are two different decisions.
What I’ll be watching
Salesforce now has two marketing products doing overlapping jobs, and it hasn’t said how they fit together. Does Braze stay separate? Does it become the engine behind Marketing Cloud Next? Will customers be nudged from one to the other? And where does all that customer data end up?
Marketers chose Braze because it made their work easier. If Salesforce folds it into something more complex, it will have paid $5.66 billion for the one thing it’s most at risk of losing.
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