Oracle Responsys vs. MoEngage: Which Is Better for Your Business?

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When trying to get the best martech for your business, you might not always look to the newest options. Oracle Marketing Cloud (formerly Responsys) is a legacy platform that a lot of brands still use, and it’s good for several things. But when looking at Oracle Responsys vs. MoEngage, which is better for your business?

Let’s explore. 

What is Oracle Responsys used for?

At its core, Oracle Responsys is a cloud-based B2C digital marketing platform. Brands can use it to send marketing and transactional messages like reminders, abandoned cart messages, ads, update emails, coupons, and more. The system works with other tools, like social media management platforms and CRM, to receive data and push out campaigns. That being said, its niche is really email and SMS/MMS marketing. Our clients tell us that it struggles to deliver on the web, ad networks, in-app, WhatsApp, push, and more. Plus, the time to get a campaign live can be more than 10 days (which is lifetimes in the TikTok era). MoEngage allows you to go live with campaigns in minutes.

Who uses Responsys?

Oracle Responsys is still popular with mid to large enterprises that mostly rely on email and SMS marketing or have cumbersome legacy systems they’re still tied to like Airship, OneSignal, or Adobe Analytics. According to Gartner, most of the companies that chose Oracle Responsys campaign management were only ever considering massive legacy brands anyway, like Salesforce, Adobe, or IBM. It’s likely they’re using fully segmented lists based on historical performance and aren’t interested in MoEngage’s advanced tools like our RFM, AI-powered psychographic segmentation, and marketer-friendly code-free campaign setup & channel publishing.

Is Responsys a CRM tool?

No, Oracle Responsys campaign management is not a true CRM. It’s primarily a cross-channel marketing automation platform designed to complement a CRM system by providing advanced capabilities for cross-channel and campaign management. You’d need to invest in their whole CX suite to unlock that level of functionality. In comparison, MoEngage includes a single customer view, and you can connect offline and online data in minutes with 150+ native integrations. That means it can fold right into your exciting tech stack. Use MoEngage with SendGrid, Talon.One, AppsFlyer, Twillio, Microdot, Branch, Attentive, Vonage, Slack, and more, right out of the box.

Is Responsys an ESP?

Since you can use Responsys to send emails, technically, it is an email service provider (ESP), but not a big one. 6sense states, “Oracle Marketing Cloud (formerly Responsys) competes with other products in the Email Service Provider, Cross-Channel Advertising categories. It has a 0.19% market share in the Email Service Provider category…” However, Salesforce, MailChimp, and Hubspot are still the big three, with 12–27% market share. Add to that, MoEngage actually outperforms Responsys email marketing on G2 rankings across several core metrics, including:

• Building and personalizing emails
• Sending outbound emails
• Managing email deliverability
• Automated email responses

MoEngage offers full-stack email marketing. Set up your preferred email service providers in seconds, get a dedicated IP, and receive support to keep your domain and IP reputation for high email deliverability rates. In terms of email marketing features, it doesn’t get much easier than this: you can create templates with a drag-and-drop builder and analyze results from a single dashboard.

How does Oracle Responsys power adaptive marketing?

The company states they make “data from disparate sources actionable by creating precisely targeted audiences and delivering highly personalized messages to those audiences in near real-time.” But that’s what all good customer engagement platforms do. Oracle Responsys might even be a bit clunkier as user lists must be built/imported from Unity or take their Audience Segmentation from other modules. And there’s a real lack of actionable segmentation, too. In comparison, MoEngage offers out-of-the-box segmentation to deliver 1:1 personalization across:

1. Propensity modeling
2. Preferred shopping times
3. Churn modelling
4. Reactivation messaging
5. Uninstall campaigns

And so much more.

How does Oracle Responsys campaign management perform?

Clients complain that Oracle Responsys campaign management lacks omnichannel focus and that mobile and web are real failure points in Oracle Responsys cross-channel capabilities. Then there’s the dependency issue and delays from data sync, which means true real-time marketing is nearly impossible with Oracle Responsys campaign management. Lastly, Responsys email marketing flaws are two-fold. It struggles to bring in data from online and offline sources. Plus, it has made segmentation impossible because you can’t build audiences based on RFM or customer affinity.

MoEngage’s dynamic offers are a real game changer. Allowing you to swaps visible offers on the same homepage, so that, for example, first-time buyers can see rates for home mortgages and business credit card rates for business owners. Oracle Responsys campaign management doesn’t offer any of that or useful features like ‘next best action’ or AI-powered intelligent path optimizations. Nor does it have effective built-in analysis like anomaly detection, ‘best performing’ reports, onboarding, integration or post-account creation reports, or even generative AI for campaign copy improvements. MoEngage has all that as standard with Merlin AI and Proactive Assistant.

Oracle Responsys does have some interesting AI-based features like:

• Predictive Lead & Account Scoring 
• Actionable Recommendations 
• Email & LP Authoring
• Send Time Optimization 
• Subject Line Optimization 
• SMS Message Authoring 
• Fatigue Analysis

These might be useful to companies with large internal IT teams & resources to configure and manage them.

Oracle Responsys vs. MoEngage scalability

Your Responsys login isn’t a one-stop shop. Without 150+ seamless integrations and user-friendly UX, brands need a team of developers to keep the Oracle Responsys campaign management cycle running. That’s fine if you have a large internal IT team with the know-how and capacity to make regular updates and enhancements. But that’s not a reality for most businesses. With MoEngage, you get access to a pool of MoEngage experts, consultants, out-of-the-box customizations, and integrations that make it easier to launch, use, and scale versus Responsys email marketing. That’s important because it means you can get more out of your campaigns without taxing IT resources. Instead, marketers can configure your website elements like page layouts, images, and CTAs with a WYSIWYG editor and enable on-site messages like timers, scratch cards, lead gen forms, and more without needing to write code.

Oracle Responsys vs. MoEngage ease of use

MoEngage is made for marketers first. So, its UI is very easy to use. No coding skills or complex tech knowledge is needed. And that’s not even considering the extra features that MoEngage has versus Oracle Responsys. A Responsys login comes with the below subscriptions: 

• Standard 
• Enterprise 
• Custom 
• Tiered 
• Add on

Oracle Responsys provides features for Web personalization, allowing businesses to customize website content based on customer data & behavior. Additionally, it offers various 3rd party tools for social media management. However, it’s essential to know that these features in Responsys may vary depending on the version, subscription plan & add-ons you have. In contrast, MoEngage pricing is uncomplicated, and you get tons of features, such as advanced Web Personalization (for new and recurring visitors).

In just a few clicks, marketers can set up real-time notifications (within 1-2 seconds) with high deliverability and engagement rates, in-app messages, app inbox/cards, and a whole lot more. If your team does run into issues, there is a huge help database and built-in support ticket system that will get them up and running again. Or, alternatively, they can reach out to the Partner Ecosystem and link up with a GSI or agency to help them with complex campaigns or custom integrations.

Oracle Responsys pricing vs. MoEngage

When looking at Oracle Responsys pricing vs. MoEngage, you’re not just looking at the sticker price. You want to consider time to value realization (TTVR) and total cost of ownership (TCO). On both points, integrated platforms like MoEngage are the clear winner, with a TTVR of 3-6 months versus Oracle Responsys at 8–9 months. For TCO, MoEngage is also 25–35% cheaper than Oracle Responsys pricing over time. This is because you can reduce hidden costs like implementation, upgrades, maintenance, training, ops, IT infrastructure, or vendor management charges. And that’s before you consider the free version of MoEngage that’s available for up to 10k MAUs. Responsys, Oracle, and even their full CX suite can’t compete with all the bundled-in features you unlock with MoEngage.

Pedigree of MoEngage

MoEngage is also highly awarded and reviewed, so you don’t have to take this comparison on faith:

If you’d like to explore more, why not talk to a member of our helpful team about your pain points and how MoEngage could be a simple solution? Just pop your details into this form and we’ll be in touch with some recommendations.