Engineering teams often face challenges when using marketing automation platforms for transactional and product notifications, as these tools are primarily designed for marketing purposes like promotional campaigns and lack the flexibility and technical capabilities required for advanced messaging needs. Marketing automation platforms prioritize usability for non-technical users such as marketers, offering features like dynamic segmentation and visual template editors, but fall short in managing user-specific data, supporting advanced delivery functionalities, and providing isolated testing environments. In contrast, notification infrastructure platforms are tailored for engineering teams, allowing them to programmatically manage cross-channel notifications with speed and reliability, and offering features such as multi-channel orchestration, developer-first API support, and production-grade observability. These platforms are ideal for organizations that need to handle both marketing campaigns and critical transactional messages, as they integrate seamlessly into the software development lifecycle, support real-time delivery, and enable sophisticated preference management. Choosing between the two depends on the organization's requirements, but many companies find that dedicated notification infrastructure platforms offer a more comprehensive solution for modern communication needs, avoiding the pitfalls of using marketing automation tools for non-marketing purposes.