Braze recognized as a strong performer in The Forrester Wave™ for Email Marketing Service Providers, Q1 2026

We’re proud to announce that Braze has been named a Strong Performer in The Forrester Wave™: Email Marketing Service Providers, Q1 2026, which we see as a testament to the value brands realize by using Braze as their email marketing platform. Brands like Papa Johns, Canva, and Peacock use Braze to power sophisticated email journeys and deliver messages that feel human, personal, and effective.

Today’s email marketers need to do more than just “send”—they need to earn a place in their consumers’ inboxes. In an era where shrinking attention spans, crowded inboxes, and AI-filtering are altering the game, the brands that win are those that can shape customer experiences in real time, building trust through every interaction.

Why did Braze stand out as an email marketing platform?

Forrester evaluated 12 email marketing service providers across comprehensive criteria covering current offering and strategy. In this year's evaluation, Braze received the highest possible scores in ten criteria:

• Message Composition
• Dynamic Messaging
• Accessibility
• Deliverability
• Queries and Segmentation
• Portfolio Messaging
• In-email Innovation
• Responsible AI
• Globalization
• Community

For email marketers, we believe these criteria represent the shift from “batch-and-blast” tactics to a real-time engagement strategy, where success is defined by the ability to turn complex data into instant, accessible, and personalized inbox experiences. Using a customer engagement platform which excels in these areas means marketers can finally eliminate the technical friction and data lag that typically prevent them from delivering the high-conversion, globally-scaled campaigns that 2026 consumers demand.

According to the report, “Braze has one of the strongest current offerings in this evaluation” and customers praise Braze for its “ease of use, personalization, and development speed.” Beyond our platform’s strength, Forrester also notes that our Braze Bonfire Community “outshines competitors: At 4,700 members and growing, Bonfire offers best-practice sharing, networking, a job board, certifications, and online and live events.”

What does the future look like for email marketing?

The Braze vision for email is to continue evolving this channel from a static broadcast tool into a dynamic, intelligent, and interactive medium that builds lasting relationships between brands and customers. We envision a future where every message is powered by real-time context, every campaign adapts instantly to use behavior, and every marketer feels empowered by tools that amplify creativity.

While we are honored by this recognition, we remain focused on email marketers’ needs in an ever-changing landscape, empowering them to do more with less, and removing technical friction that often stands in the way. Hitting send on a generic email that goes out to millions is so easy, but sending an email that looks like it’s crafted for the individual, delivered at exactly the right time, that’s an art form. Braze continues to make investments to ensure that your emails don't just look great—they're also easier to create than ever, and land with recipients just as they should.

• Intuitive and flexible UI: Currently, Braze marketers can harness their creativity with drag-and-drop, HTML, or AMP editors. They can scale personalization with Content Blocks, Catalogs, Connected Content, and Liquid, build precise audiences with extensive filters and SQL, and orchestrate end-to-end, cross-channel journeys in Canvas. However, we know many email marketers work in different tools to create assets and emails. Manual asset workflows are slow, frustrating, and prone to error. This friction leads to misaligned branding, back-and-forth between teams, and delayed launches. We're looking into native integrations with design tools to turn your approved, on-brand email designs into production-ready campaigns.
• BrazeAI™ for end-to-end email creation and dynamic messaging: Marketers will find practical AI features are embedded across Braze, allowing for easier planning and segmentation, generating on-brand copy and templates, automating QA and accessibility checks, and decisioning and analysis insights. With powerful tools such as the BrazeAI Operator™, we continue to build BrazeAI™ to help you get things done. Marketers can use natural language to generate not just copy, but complex Liquid syntax and on-brand imagery and entire email templates, dramatically reducing the time it takes to go from idea to execution. BrazeAI Decisioning Studio™ dynamically personalizes every aspect of an email (e.g. offer, content, subject line, imagery, etc) using available first-party data, and agents continuously learn to optimize for relevance.
• Doubling down on deliverability: To help email marketers understand deliverability and make it less of a “blackbox”, the Braze Deliverability Center integrates with Google Postmaster and Microsoft SNDS, providing visibility into sender reputation, bounces, and deferrals, while Inbox Vision enables spam testing and cross-client previews to identify deliverability and WCAG accessibility issues before launch. Braze Email Deliverability Services provides hands-on support for customers like Rightmove and creates bespoke plans to ensure emails get into inboxes. We’re continuing to focus on deliverability with new features like Automated IP warming to take the manual guesswork and stress out of onboarding new IPs. Now, Braze is designed to automatically prioritize your most engaged users and adjust sending schedules based on real-time deliverability signals, helping you build a pristine sender reputation from day one.

Our key takeaway

This recognition from Forrester reinforces what we’re building toward: A future where email is not a static channel, but a dynamic, real-time extension of the customer experience. The brands that succeed won’t be the ones sending the most emails—they’ll be the ones creating the most meaningful interactions.

As we look toward the future, we remain dedicated to evolving the email landscape, moving away from just hitting “send” and toward truly meaningful, real-time engagement.

Ready to see why Forrester recognized Braze? Access the full Q1 2026 Forrester Wave™ report or request a demo to see our email innovations in action.

*The Forrester Wave™: Email Marketing Service Providers, Q1 2026, Shar VanBoskirk, March 2026.

The Forrester Wave™ is copyrighted by Forrester Research, Inc. Forrester and Forrester Wave™ are trademarks of Forrester Research, Inc. Forrester does not endorse any company, product, or service included in its research publications and does not advise any person to select the products or services of any company or brand based on the ratings included in such publications. Information is based on the best available resources. Opinions reflect judgment at the time and are subject to change. For more information, read about Forrester’s objectivity here.

Forward-looking statements

This blog post contains “forward-looking statements” within the meaning of the “safe harbor” provisions of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995, including but not limited to, statements regarding the performance of and expected benefits from Braze and its products and features. These forward-looking statements are based on the current assumptions, expectations and beliefs of Braze, and are subject to substantial risks, uncertainties and changes in circumstances that may cause actual results, performance or achievements to be materially different from any future results, performance or achievements expressed or implied by the forward-looking statements. Further information on potential factors that could affect Braze results are included in the Braze Annual Report on Form 10-K for the fiscal year ended January 31, 2026, filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission on March 25, 2026, and the other public filings of Braze with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. The forward-looking statements included in this blog post represent the views of Braze only as of the date of this blog post, and Braze assumes no obligation, and does not intend to update these forward-looking statements, except as required by law.