Move from Salesforce Marketing Cloud to Braze
SFMC to Braze Migration
You’re not stuck. In fact, you’re in good company. We’re former SFMC consultants who’ve been helping enterprise brands migrate to Braze since 2022. We know the platforms, we know the pitfalls, and we’ve seen what makes these migrations go well — and what doesn’t.
If you’re evaluating a move, start here.
65%+
of Stitch clients migrated from Salesforce Marketing Cloud to Braze
9 months
average migration timeline — with 3-18 month ranges depending on complexity
4.8/5 stars
on G2 from our SFMC-to-Braze migration clients
The martech landscape is changing
Why brands are leaving Salesforce Marketing Cloud for Braze
For many brands, it’s a natural time to evaluate whether to modernize your tech stack — not because your current one is broken, but because the world (and your customers) have changed.
The martech landscape has shifted
The platforms and architecture that made sense 10 years ago were built for a different world — one where data lived inside the marketing tool and email was the primary channel. Most modern B2C brands have outgrown that model.
Modern data infrastructure changes the math
If your data already lives in Databricks, Snowflake, or Redshift, you’re not migrating a data warehouse — you’re connecting a new engagement layer to where your data already lives. That’s a very different project than it was five years ago.
The gap between what you have and what you need is widening
Real-time triggers, unified cross-channel journeys, AI-powered personalization — these have moved from nice-to-have to baseline expectations. The question is whether your current platform can get you there.
Contract timing creates a natural window
Most teams that move successfully start evaluating 12–18 months before their contract expires. That runway lets you plan properly, overlap during transition, and use the migration as an opportunity to improve — not just replicate.
Building the business case
Getting leadership to approve a migration means translating what you feel every day into language that moves decisions. The challenge isn’t technical — it’s organizational. Here’s what the case typically needs to include.
Quantified capability gaps
2–3 specific programs you can’t run or can’t run well today — with revenue estimates attached to each.
Full cost of ownership
Beyond the license fee: staff overhead, specialist support, third-party tools filling gaps, training drag.
A phased approach
Show that business-as-usual is protected during the transition. Leadership says no to risk, not to change.
A clear ask
Budget, timeline, resourcing, and a named owner. Vague requests don’t get approved.
Why Stitch is the go-to mgiration partner
We left Salesforce for Braze. Now, we help brands do the same.
Our co-founders, Michael and Bobby, built their careers around Salesforce. With over a collective 2 decades working at ExactTarget, Salesforce, and then building one of the top SFMC consultancies in the world, they were “certified fanboys.”
Then, they started to notice a shift. More of their customers were adding Braze to their martech stack to expand capabilities — and making SFMC redundant — and were continuing to struggle with data challenges, despite the promises of an “all in one platform.”
That’s when they realized marketers needed something different: a consultancy that specifically focuses on helping brands modernize their marketing infrastucture with best-in-breed platforms like Braze and Databricks. Stitch launched in 2022, and we’ve been helping dozens of brands make the move ever since.
“During our migration from SFMC to Braze, Stitch was absolutely critical in migrating and subsequently re-designing most of my campaigns due to overcomplexity in SFMC that didn’t work well with Braze. Their massive expertise and ability to take very challenging asks and make outcomes in such a quick amount of time was unbelievable. ” – Jennifer H.
“Stitch helped us migrate off SFMC to Braze in a record 5-6 months. Between the complexity of our business and sometimes-not-so great data infrastructure, we have a lot of unique business cases that they were able to help solution for us. Now that we are on our new platform, this will revolutionize the way we communicate and engage with our Learners.” – Vera H.
Braze + Databricks: The modern CRM stack
The question isn’t just feature parity with what you have today. It’s whether the architecture fits the way the rest of your stack — and the rest of the industry — actually works now.
Why Braze
AI that’s actually in production
Braze has been building ML capabilities for over a decade. Agent Console takes marketers from idea to live campaign in 20 minutes. Braze Operator recommends next campaigns and journey improvements from inside your instance.
Teams become more self-sufficient
Campaigns that previously required specialist support to launch become things the broader marketing team builds. Braze is consistently described by teams post-migration as significantly more intuitive than what they were on before.
Your existing Salesforce integrations hold
Sales Cloud and Service Cloud integrations work with Braze — often surfacing richer, more timely engagement data than teams had before. We’ve done this integration many times across many configurations.
One profile. Every channel.
Every channel — email, SMS, push, in-app, content cards — runs off a single unified customer profile. When a new channel appears, standing it up is fast because the infrastructure is already there.
Often consolidates 4–5 platforms into one
Most brands we work with are running multiple messaging platforms alongside their primary ESP. Braze frequently replaces several of them — one platform, one partner, one place to build and measure.
Real-time is the default
A customer action can trigger a campaign in seconds. Behavioral triggers fire off the SDK or API immediately. That’s not a feature — it’s how the platform is architecturally built.
Why Databricks
Zero-copy triggers
Trigger journeys and campaigns based on data that stays in Databricks — no replication into Braze required. Your warehouse stays the source of truth, and your churn model actually fires a campaign instead of sitting in a dashboard nobody checks.
Cloud data ingestion, natively
Define a query in your warehouse and have it automatically sync into Braze profiles on your cadence. Databricks, Snowflake, Redshift, BigQuery, Microsoft Fabric — all natively supported. No custom pipelines, no engineering tickets.
Your data team’s work becomes live CRM capability
ML models built in Databricks can power segmentation, send-time optimization, and predictive triggers in Braze. The distance between a customer signal and a marketing response shrinks dramatically.
Three areas where brands consistently see ROI after migrating
Meet Switch
Your Salesforce-to-Braze migration assistant. AI-powered, expert-trained on 15+ years of SFMC and Braze experience.
What Switch does:
- Knows exactly what’s in your SFMC instance: And where to move it, when to retire it, and how to rebuild it in Braze.
- Leads migration planning with a clear framework: Rooted in a decade of experience and real client migrations — not generic AI outputs.
- Translates assets faster: Expert logic built into every output so you’re not validating AI guesses with a SFMC specialist.
Go deeper
Resources for every stage of your evaluation
Every question answered
The questions marketers are asking before making the switch
These aren’t corporate FAQs. These are the actual questions we hear on every discovery call — and the honest answers, including the complicated ones.
We’re still under contract. How do we think about timing?
Most teams that migrate successfully start evaluating 12–18 months before their contract expires. Some overlap between contracts is unavoidable — but teams that give themselves that runway use the migration as a chance to reset and improve their marketing operations, not just lift and shift. We can help you think through the sequencing and build the internal business case well before you need to make a decision.
How do we build the business case internally?
The framing that tends to work: “Our current setup is limiting what marketing can deliver, and here’s the cost of that.” Leadership needs to see quantified gaps — the revenue impact of 2–3 programs you can’t run or can’t run well, the full cost of ownership beyond the license fee, and a phased approach that shows business-as-usual is protected during the transition. We help clients build this case. Present it as a series of smaller decisions, not one enormous lift.
We’ve been on our current platform for a long time. Is our data portable?
Generally yes — modern marketing platforms have open APIs and data is extractable. We’ve pulled down large client instances with hundreds of automations running and used AI to audit which ones were actually driving value. The more important question is what to bring vs. what to leave behind. Not everything in your current instance belongs in Braze — some of it belongs in your data warehouse. Migration is the right moment to sort that out.
How long does a migration actually take?
The honest range is 3 to 18 months, depending on the complexity of your business and how many platforms you’re integrating. The most common pattern: teams that expect 18 months land in 9. The single biggest variable isn’t campaign volume — it’s whether your data already lives in a modern warehouse. If you’re on Databricks or Snowflake, you’re connecting Braze to where your data already lives. That’s a significant lift off the project.
Will there be disruption to our sending? We can’t pause campaigns.
The goal is always to keep sends running, and we structure migrations to run both platforms in parallel during IP warming — sending from both simultaneously during the transition. Our approach to scoping a migration is to take a “zero risk” approach — starting with careful, thoughtful planning for resourcing, integrations, seasonality, and other internal initiatives, then activating that plan with tight project management and clear communication.
What happens to our CRM integrations?
Existing CRM integrations — Sales Cloud, Service Cloud — hold. Braze connects to the same APIs, so your customer service agents typically don’t see a difference. Our preferred approach is a Lightning component inside your CRM that pulls engagement data from Braze or your warehouse on demand, giving agents a richer, more timely view than most teams had before.
Do we need a CDP or data warehouse to use Braze?
Not necessarily, but if you already have one — Databricks, Snowflake, Redshift, BigQuery, Microsoft Fabric — Braze is built to work with it natively. You can query your warehouse directly, sync data into Braze profiles on a cadence you control, or use zero-copy triggers to fire a journey based on warehouse data without ever moving it into Braze. Whether you need a CDP depends on your stack and use case — a separate conversation we’re happy to have.
Does cross-channel actually work natively in Braze?
Yes — all channels in Braze run off a single customer profile and a single data model. Email, SMS, push, in-app messages, content cards — one profile, one place to build and measure. As new channels emerge, they’re fast to stand up because the infrastructure is already there.
Our team has deep platform expertise. Will that transfer?
More than you’d expect. The core principles of lifecycle marketing don’t change — audience segmentation, journey logic, KPIs, campaign strategy all carry over. What changes is the tool. A lot of the Stitch team has deep backgrounds in Salesforce AND Braze, and have found that transitioning from focusing on Salesforce to focusing on Braze didn’t result in lost momentum for them — but rather, has helped them learn new platforms quickly.
What questions should we ask migration partners?
Don’t lead with feature requirements — lead with operational questions. ‘We need a dedicated technical contact we can call on mission-critical days. Who is that person, and what does that relationship look like?’ The more specific you are about how you actually need to work together, the faster you’ll find a real fit vs. someone telling you what you want to hear.