Adobe Campaign Vs MoEngage – What’s the Best Fit for Your Organization?

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When looking for an omnichannel marketing platform, it makes sense to compare Adobe Campaign vs MoEngage. What’s the best fit for your organization and how well will it integrate with your ecosystem? Let’s do a deep dive, looking at pricing, ease of use, and scalability to give you a better sense of what it can do versus MoEngage.

What is Adobe Campaign used for?

In their own words, “Adobe Campaign lets you coordinate the creation of conversational marketing campaigns. It has innovative features to model, streamline, and automate marketing and customer communication processes.” It can bring your customer data into a single view, just like MoEngage, and help you make cross-channel campaigns that are personalized to the end user. However, that connectivity may require other paid add-ons or integrations – which you should be aware of.

What are the benefits of Adobe Campaign?

One of the main benefits of Campaign is that it plays nicely with their other products. So if you already have Creative Cloud or Analytics, for example, you might look to add Adobe Campaigns too. It leans hard on its email marketing optimizations, with some clients seeing a 200% jump in open rates and CTR. But, however powerful it might be, many users find it hard to use, stating: 

Adobe’s documentation is rarely helpful. Lots of 404 pages. It’s poorly organized and either gives you not enough information or too much uber technical Adobe jargon that means nothing.” – G2 review

The steep learning curve can be a deterrent especially if one has not previously worked on an email marketing platform. Besides this, the support team is pretty much nonexistent as it takes days to get a reply. It’s a shame especially if you are paying such a high cost for the platform.”- Gartner review

So, who is the ideal user?

Who uses Adobe Campaigns?

According to Enlyft, “The companies using Adobe Campaign are most often found in the United States and in the Information Technology and Services industry. It is most often used by companies with >10000 employees and >1000M dollars in revenue.” That’s likely because of existing legacy integrations with other Adobe products and these companies boasting workforces with enough technical acumen to get every ounce of productivity out of these tools. If you’re smaller or more mid-market, it’s unlikely you’ll be able to enjoy full functionality from Campaign.

MoEngage’s modular capabilities make it suitable for both small, mid, and enterprise clients, ensuring access to all necessary features based on business requirements. It’s trusted by brands you know like SoundCloud, Poshmark, Loblaws, Domino’s, Unilever, and Citibank.

What is the difference between Adobe Analytics and Adobe Campaign?

While not the same thing, Analytics has a connector that can hook into Campaign via the web analytics connectors add-on. That lets you feed the specifics of email campaigns delivered by Adobe Campaign to Adobe Analytics. It’s not compatible with Message Center messages but it does work to send email “indicators and campaign attributes to the connector, which in turn forwards them to the Web analytics tool.” This helps put your data from email campaigns into the same place as your other web stats.

In comparison, unlike Adobe Campaign, MoEngage allows you to run campaigns and analytics within the platform. There’s no need to switch or add one more platform, making it easier to manage and get analysis and insights from your email as well as all other channel campaigns within one view.

Freecharge, a popular Indian digital payment and financial company, saw Adobe as an outdated stack with insufficient agility for real-time experiences. They said that there was usually a 15-minute delay in data synchronization between Adobe Analytics and Campaigns products, which hurt campaign performance. If they wanted to provide real-time engagement, they would have needed to buy Adobe’s RT-CDP.

Is Adobe Campaign a CRM tool?

No. It can talk to them though. According to the company, “Adobe Campaign provides various CRM connectors for linking your platform to your third-party systems. These CRM connectors enable you to synchronize contacts, accounts, purchases, etc. They make for easy integration of your application with various third-party and business applications.” However, getting the full suite of their own-branded products or creating enough workable links between another CRM and their tool is more costly and time-consuming than using MoEngage’s unified view. 

And you might find working with them as a partner more inflexible, as evidenced by this quote from the Senior Associate Campaign Specialist at a top global bank:

We struggled with flexibility with Adobe Campaign, and MoEngage’s ability to offer this and adaptability is a game changer and the highlight for us.”

Is the Adobe Campaign free?

No. Campaign pricing depends on the channels you use, the active customer profiles you have in the last 12 months, and the number of add-ons you need.

How does Adobe Journey Optimizer work?

According to the Experience League, “Integration between Adobe Campaign and Adobe Journey Optimizer allows you to orchestrate customer journeys in Adobe Journey Optimizer and send emails, push notifications and/or SMS using Adobe Campaign Transactional Messaging capabilities.” But it’s not always easy – sometimes even requiring you to write JSON payloads. You can see more of that here.

Maybe that’s why the largest bank in the US switched to MoEngage from Adobe Campaign for better personalization and in-the-moment messaging. MoEngage’s AI engine helps to determine the ideal time, channel, and message to deliver for transactional cross-channel use cases, which Adobe could not provide.

Adobe Campaign vs MoEngage scalability

Both products are wildly scalable with their own ecosystems and loads of integrations as standard. The main consideration is the time to go live and the number of moving parts. MoEngage is more user-friendly and better documented, so the time to go live for something like a cart abandonment email is under 2 minutes with MoEngage and over 2 weeks (spanning 4 modules instead of a single user interface) with Adobe.

Adobe Campaign vs MoEngage ease of use

Where MoEngage really comes into its own is with ease of use. Everything is intuitive and editors are WYSIWYG so even non-technical users can build a winning campaign. However, this ease of use is unfortunately one of the more frequent complaints amongst Adobe users:

It’s overly complicated to use, and it is a challenge to find AEM developers that can easily do dev work on the site. It takes more resources to run it and the cost of the tool is so much that it makes it challenging to hire those additional resources.” G2 review

Dreadful implementation; links between different modules didn’t work; sophisticated segmentation never worked in 2 years. An extremely expensive white elephant.” – Capterra review

Does Adobe Campaign require coding?

While it says you don’t need to know how to code, support documentation and forum answers all suggest languages like HTML, CSS, JavaScript, XML, and SQL basic knowledge is required if you want to perform advanced configuration. And that’s before you think about the time needed to learn how to use just the system itself which the head commentator suggests is at least a week, just across the product role introductions. 

In comparison, MoEngage is truly user-friendly and allows you to:

• Publish custom campaigns at scale via a no-code WYSIWYG editor
• A/B test campaign designs spanning page layouts, images, text & colors 
• Localize product recommendations based on behavior & geographies
• Personalize pages & CTAs in sync with cart items, frequency & purchases
• Recommend products to customers who viewed but didn’t buy
• Harness AI-powered recommendations based on past interactions 

And it’s also ideal for mobile-first businesses that need app engagement and conversions, not just email clicks:

Adobe Campaign pricing vs MoEngage

Adobe Campaign is unfortunately usually more expensive than MoEgage due to its lack of single-platform unification and costly add-ons. In comparison, most businesses find the total cost of ownership for MoEngage 25-35% lower than Campaign and that it speeds up time to market by 30% on average. Add to that, there is a free starter plan for up to 10,000 Monthly Tracked Users (MTUs) for you to sink your teeth into.

Is MoEngage a good Adobe Campaign or Adobe Experience Cloud alternative?

Yes. And people like it more, at least according to G2, “Campaign rates 4.1/5 stars with 348 reviews. By contrast, MoEngage rates 4.5/5 stars with 462 reviews.” Across nearly every single metric from data filtering to journey optimization, MoEngage outperforms. Just hear it from this Verified G2 User in the E-Learning space:

MoEngage brings us better analytics than its competitors with data-oriented features, user-centric components, multiple design features, and campaign [customization].” – Hafsal M.

It’s trusted by large and small businesses alike to handle every type of message imaginable: