Honest comparison
Brandora vs spreadsheets
The honest market truth: most influencer campaigns in Kenya and far beyond do not run on any platform. They run on a spreadsheet, a WhatsApp group, and screenshots. It is free, everyone knows how it works, and it genuinely does work, up to a point. This page is about where that point is.
Brandora is
Structured campaign operations: the same brief, roster, approvals, and results, as linked domain objects with an audit trail.
Spreadsheets + WhatsApp is
Free-form tracking: a spreadsheet of creators and deliverables, a chat thread for approvals, screenshots for results.
Feature by feature
| Dimension | Brandora | Spreadsheets + WhatsApp |
|---|---|---|
| Cost | From $79/month. Free 14-day trial on Starter and Growth. | Free. This is a real advantage and the reason it is the default. |
| Campaign brief | Structured deliverables, dates, budgets, and rate cards linked to each creator. | Columns in a sheet. Fine at 5 creators; fragile at 25; unmanageable across 3 concurrent campaigns. |
| Approvals | Versioned submissions; internal, client, and creator comments in separate lanes; clients approve over a guest link with no login. | Voice notes and "approved 👍🏾" messages scattered across chats. Version confusion is routine, and finding who approved what takes scrolling. |
| Proof of delivery | Deliverables marked fulfilled on deterministic evidence, with an immutable trail you can show a client months later. | Screenshots in a folder, assembled by hand the night before the client review. |
| Metrics honesty | Verified first-party metrics labeled apart from public estimates; nothing silently substituted. | Whatever number was screenshotted that day, with no provenance. |
| When someone leaves | The campaign history, approvals, and contacts stay in the workspace. | The sheet has 4 copies, the chat history leaves with the phone, and nobody knows which version is real. |
Choose Brandora if
- You run more than one campaign at a time, or campaigns with more than a handful of creators.
- A client has ever asked "what did we actually get?" and the answer took a day to assemble.
- Approvals get lost between chat threads, email, and voice notes.
- You bill clients for delivery and need proof that stands up to scrutiny.
Choose Spreadsheets + WhatsApp if
- You run one small campaign occasionally with creators you know personally.
- Budget is genuinely zero, and the time cost of manual tracking is acceptable.
- Your client does not require reporting beyond a quick recap.
Fair questions
- We have years of campaign history in spreadsheets. Do we start over?
- No. Brandora imports your creator roster from a spreadsheet, and campaigns are set up from your existing brief structure. Most teams move one campaign first and migrate the roster as they go.
- Will my creators need to learn a new tool?
- Creators get notified over WhatsApp, SMS, or email through Brandora, and clients approve over a guest link with no account. The only people who need to learn the product are your own team.
Run your next campaign on proof
Discover creators, plan the brief, collect approvals, and prove fulfillment. All in one place.