MoEngage vs. Adobe: Which is Better for Customer Engagement?

Both platforms let you deliver personalized campaigns across multiple channels. Both Adobe Marketo Engage and MoEngage offer advanced marketing automation, analytics, and the ability to orchestrate customer journeys.

Like Adobe, MoEngage offers robust email marketing capabilities, making it a powerful solution for enterprises that need to build complex marketing workflows.

But that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Deep down, you can clearly see the differences between MoEngage vs. Adobe Marketo Engage.

From content management systems and analytics suites to creative software and engagement platforms, Adobe Marketing Cloud offers a vast range of marketing and business tools. For customer engagement alone, you might find yourself switching between Adobe Journey Optimizer for customer journey orchestration and Adobe Marketo Engage for marketing automation. Oh, wait, let’s not forget Adobe Campaign for setting up omnichannel campaign workflows.

This can make it harder for teams to remember which tool handles which part of the workflow. As a result, longer onboarding and more complex campaigns might become a day-to-day habit.

As if that weren’t enough, some channels in Adobe Marketing Cloud need extra integrations, and certain features are locked within journey flows. In that sense, going live with campaigns can take longer than expected.

In contrast, MoEngage is an omnichannel Customer Engagement Platform (CEP) that offers 10+ native channels, advanced targeting like Most Preferred Channel, and more, all built in a single unified platform and ready from Day One.

Apart from MoEngage, you’ll find many other alternatives to Adobe Marketo Engage to help you engage with customers and automate your marketing efforts. Nonetheless, let’s break down the differences between MoEngage vs. Adobe to see which platform can deliver what you need.

Both MoEngage and Adobe Marketing Cloud support a wide range of channels, signifying the ways you can reach and re-reach your customers.

While Marketo Engage supports just email, mobile push, Vibes SMS, and in-app messages, Adobe Journey Optimizer covers a good spread: email, mobile push, WhatsApp, SMS/MMS/RCS, content cards on websites and in mobile apps, in-app messages, LINE, and even direct mail for offline campaigns. These channels let you easily connect with your customers across digital and physical touchpoints.

But for many B2C lifecycle marketers, a big piece is still missing. Hint: it’s about direct re-engagement outside the inbox or app without waiting for the customer to return to the inbox or app.

That’s right. We’re talking about web push notifications, which Adobe doesn’t support natively. This means that if a customer leaves your website without buying anything, you have to rely on slower channels like email to bring them back to your website. As such, you’re missing touchpoints that can boost conversions where buying intent is the highest — right after a customer leaves your website.

On top of that, WhatsApp on Adobe needs a full setup via Meta’s Cloud API, which slows down your go-live speed and just adds to maintenance costs. And without paid ads, you’ll need external systems to retarget customers on Google and Meta networks.

MoEngage, on the other hand, natively includes all the core channels Adobe offers, plus:

• Web push notifications: Send browser-based push notifications to desktop website visitors without extra tools to capture their attention minutes after abandonment. No more waiting for customers to open their inboxes or open and read your emails.
• On-site messaging: Trigger on-site messages like real-time pop-ups, banners, forms, or surveys while the visitor is still on your website. Zero third-party widgets or workarounds.
• Facebook Ads and Google Ads Audience: Retarget high-value customers or lookalike audiences on Facebook and Google directly from MoEngage’s customer engagement platform, without CSV exports.

For B2C marketers like you, speed and coverage matter most. With MoEngage, you can cover anonymous website visitors and opt-in users in real time without any gaps in your re-engagement strategy.

Adobe Journey Optimizer’s Send Time Optimization uses Journey AI to predict when a customer is most likely to open or click a push notification or an email. Analyzing past interactions, it picks the best hour to send within a journey.

But there’s a catch. This capability works only for emails and push notifications. It’s available for neither standalone campaigns nor other channels, like SMS. Also, to implement Adobe Campaign’s predictive send time optimization, you need Adobe Consulting services.

On the other hand, MoEngage’s Best Time to Send (BTS) doesn’t limit optimization to certain campaign types. It works natively for not just email and push, but for SMS, too. Whether you’re running a periodic campaign or a one-time blast, BTS helps you identify a certain time slot when an individual customer is most likely to interact with your campaigns.

Curious how it works? MoEngage analyzes up to 60 days of historical customer interactions separately for email, push, and SMS campaigns. Then, MoEngage’s Merlin AI identifies the most active time for a customer by aggregating customer interactions (open, click, and other behavioral events) by the day and the hour. The result is the best time to send email, push, and SMS campaigns each. These values are automatically updated weekly for each customer.

But what happens if a customer has no SMS or email history, for instance? MoEngage simply uses the best time to send push notifications to that customer.

As part of the Deutsche Telekom Group, one of Europe’s largest telecom networks, Telekom Macedonia increased its campaign CTR by 132% using MoEngage’s AI capabilities, including the Best Time to Send feature.

Adobe Marketo Engage and Journey Optimizer let you send campaigns across multiple channels. However, Adobe lacks a built-in method to determine which channel an individual customer responds to or interacts with most. In that case, you either send messages on every available channel, risking fatigue. Or you guess which channel will work best.

MoEngage’s Most Preferred Channel (MPC) capability removes the guesswork. MPC is a user-level attribute that shows you the single channel where each customer is most likely to engage.

How does it work? MoEngage analyzes every customer interaction with your campaigns in the last two months. It then measures how engaged a customer has been with each channel, based on the frequency (the number of times an SMS was opened) and the depth (the number of times the SMS was clicked) of the interaction. Data from recent interactions are automatically prioritized more than that from previous interactions.

If a customer has interacted more with push notifications than with emails over the past two months, the algorithm will suggest sending push notifications to that customer. But in the following month, if the customer engages more with SMS messages, SMS will take priority.

Because of MoEngage’s MPC capability, you’re more likely to increase overall impressions, clicks, and ultimately, conversions. Rather than sending unnecessary campaigns, you can optimize your marketing spend by following a focused outreach strategy.

Both MoEngage and Adobe take data security very seriously. Adobe Journey Optimizer masks customer data in messages, while Adobe Experience Platform and Adobe Campaign encrypt data in transit and at rest. Together, they protect sensitive data from being exposed inside your campaigns and keep data secure.

Despite these safeguards, there’s a risk. Sensitive data can still be stored inside your customer engagement platform until a campaign is triggered. The more data your platform stores, the greater the possibility of compliance and security breaches.

With PII Tokenized Sending, MoEngage adds another layer on top of PII masking and data encryption. Instead of storing PII inside the system, MoEngage converts that data into anonymous tokens. Those tokens only unlock the real values in real-time when a campaign is sent.

For marketers, this means:

• You can fully personalize your campaigns without ever storing sensitive data inside the engagement platform.
• You instantly lower the privacy risks, in keeping with strict privacy regulations.
• If you work with multiple teams or agencies, you can ensure only approved team members can trigger campaigns that use tokens.

It’s great that Adobe masks and encrypts vulnerable customer data. But MoEngage also ensures that there is no data to expose in the first place.