Segment Reviews

This CDP is great if you have a plug & play website, more tricky if you have a custom built website.

Comments: The customer service team, while fast and responsive, was not particularly knowledgeable about how to get around these issues we were having with visual tagger, and thus we had to work with a consultant that had the know-how of how to fully integrate Segment with our website through GTM. However, now that we have gotten our custom Segment setup up and running, it is very powerful and we're able to communicate our website event and tracking data with a multitude of analytics and other marketing tools. So overall, it has been a challenging experience, but once you get it working, it is worth the extra effort.

Pros:

Segment was easy to setup and integrate with our website, using the Javascript code they provided. Also the Segment interface is well designed and easy to navigate. The settings for your Destinations are all clear and laid out, so you can make changes effortlessly. The neatest feature is the visual tagger, which allows you to create and track triggers/events on your website without having to code anything at all. It's great if you want to track very basic behaviors like button clicks or form submissions.

Cons:

The most difficult part of Segment was when we wanted to track more granular data, such as user identities/emails. I believe if you have a typical website, built off of WordPress, or Shopify, you might not have these issues. But if you have a custom built website like ours, you will need some technical know-how in order to capture the finer data. For example, visual tagger did not work for us when we tried to use the identify call analytics.js, because our website stored user ID info on our data layer, not the presentation layer, which is only what Visual tagger can see. In order to access fields in your data layer, you'll need to use something like Google Tag Manager (GTM) to trigger and fire those events in Segment (shout out to McGaw.io for helping us with this!). So, if you have a more complex website, triggering certain events or getting fine granular data in Segment is not intuitive.

Flexible user analytics

Comments: We have had a great experience with Segment. Even just a couple of months of data gathering have already turned into actionable items.

Pros:

Set up was trivial, the API is easy to use and the real-time debugger is absolutely excellent.

Cons:

Some capabilities around the events API is not immediately apparent until you get deeper into it.

Data loss and bad customer support

Comments: At first it sounds great, one stop shop for all you analytics needs. What they don't tell you is:
1. Segment API is far less reliable than any of the underlying analytics tools. I've never had any data loss with mixpanel, since I switched to segment I had 3 severe data loss incidents, one was a segment server failure, one was a result of Segment's API and the 3rd is still under investigation.
2. It's literally impossible to get proper support for urgent issues. no matter how much I emphasize the urgency, they'll send 1 reply a day, with the most useless information and ask the same basic questions over and over and over again.

Pros:

Reduce the amount of code that handles analytics and tracking No real alternative

Cons:

Unreliable. Bad customer support.

Great for real time data processing and analytics

Pros:

Analytics capabilities and ease of integration into data pipeline. Very helping for tracking customer behavior

Cons:

There is a learning curve and the pricing is steep too. They can definitely improve on the user interface.

Very useful piece of software

Comments: Positive experience, able to connect up different platforms seamlessly.

Pros:

Enables us to unlock parts of our platform that we couldn't without it, feeding the data into other useful areas. Very easy to implement.

Cons:

Not initially intuitive for a non-technical user, some more guidance on useful features would be appreciated.

The best Customer Data Platform around

Comments: Segment has been pivotal in our startup's journey, helping us to unify customer data and to unlock invaluable customer insights across all our properties. Segment seamlessly integrates with our web app and entire tech stack and simplifies data management, allowing us to focus on our core business functions. Their support and startup program are top-notch. We're customers for life.

Pros:

Easy to use, amazing documentation, unparalleled functionality, and stellar support.

Cons:

It's hard to find something to fault. We had to learn a lot about data structures, but Segment's documentation and resources made this straightforward. We're all the better for it.

Love it!

Pros:

Makes my life as a data scientist/product manger so much easier

Cons:

Nothing to dislike really. Maybe that you have to pay a lot for some of the nicer features such as more control of the data.

Segment - The Data Layer to Have

Comments: Segment solves the problem of add script once. Enable quickly.
Data flows and needs a pipe to steer it in the right direction. Segment makes this easy.
Create a data science team in seconds and connect to a wide and vast number of tools and connections from Adwords to Facebook all the way through to iOS and Android. This covers many bases.

Pros:

Segment have built a best in class data layer and data management tool. The tool is easy to set up and creating destinations and understanding sources is simple. Add the code for Web, Mobile or a data warehouse. Then enable product and marketing teams to enable and disable marketing and product tools easily. The new personas feature is also incredibly powerful. Make collecting analytics .track and .page and .identify easy.

Cons:

Segment does make data easy and because of the quality of the tool it does come at a cost. The benefit is it does scale with you because the price plan works on MTUs. But it really depends on the size of your business. Beware not to over enable and connect too much if you are not using it. This will add un-necessary load which can impact mobile page speed.

#1 tool for used for product analytics

Comments: Excellent experience

Pros:

I like the most that I can collect customer data and create multiple destinations to connect it to other platforms for visualizations like Mixpanel. Moreover, I can just store the customer data and their behavior in my database for further analysis. It is so far one of the best tool, with excellent performance and quick support replies.

Cons:

No cons were identified. In case of any new features, or updates, they provide very clean step-by-step guidelines.

All the info you need. In a snap!

Pros:

It is incredibly easy to install with modules for any kind of source (app, server, API, jacasript). It sends coherent and consistent data to hundreds of destinations (I think there are ~200 and counting, but new ones can be added with very little coding), and new destinations can be added with no intervention by an engineer. Among the destinations, there's also relational Databases: you can really track ALL actions of any single user of your system and having access to historical data with a click. This is amazing! It offers an easy and intuitive privacy mechanism that lets you deleta data of a single users from multiple systems with a single click. It offers common, consistent data to all different areas of a company: marketing, product development, finance, ... (and you can chose what different offices can see).

Cons:

It is pricy: the cost is based on the average number of single users tracked per month and it's not cheap at all. So better to understand exactly how it can help you grow your business (and how you can fully exploit it) before you decide to adopt it.

The best tool to track marketing events

Pros:

Segment allows us to perform multi touch analysis of our marketing channels.

Cons:

I think it would be useful to have an implementation specialist to help in the set up process.

Easily use Segment for telemetry from your Python App

Pros:

* easy to use Python SDK* great multitude of integrations and plugins* easy to define data flows* great plan to get started as a startup

Cons:

* customer support wasn’t as helpful as we would have hoped when we started running into an issue

We could not have conducted marketing without Segment, and their staff is incredibly helpful

Comments: It requires the ability to manage various sources and multiple destinations while maintaining an organized, consistent track plan. A system such as Segment is incredibly valuable for firms with several data sources and destinations that are continually growing.

Pros:

Our major objective is to monitor activity on our company's website(s), particularly user activity. Pre-built interfaces with marketing, data, and analytics systems make it easy for marketers to configure connectors without the need for engineering resources for each integration request. Segment has saved us time throughout the years that would have been spent connecting and syncing data amongst many technologies. Segment is a wonderful tool for us due to its intuitive interface, extensive documentation, and ability to debug events.

Cons:

Some of the destinations and sources held by Segment and its partners can necessitate interaction with support teams (for example, SDKs, missing features, or bugs in functionality).

Key component to populate data between different services

Pros:

Ready made integrations with most critical SaaS services makes it easy to share data between systems.

Cons:

The pricing model is sometimes not the best given how event intense your application is.

Great software to remove the burden of countless API integrations

Comments: Saved a ton of dev time

Pros:

It takes the burden off of our own teams to manage a slew of API integrations. This saves us a ton in developer costs in time, and makes it very easy to vet new tools for our analytics and marketing stacks.

Cons:

Like any abstraction layer, not everything is plug-and-play. As you start to use more integrations, this becomes more complicated in it's own right, and you sometimes need to regress back to a standard API integration.

Useful marketing tool

Comments: great, it helps a lot in collecting customer's information

Pros:

Segment is a great platform that allows a lot of different functions in customer's data collection. The best thing by my point of view is that a lot of marketing tools are ready to use, you have only to connect them to Segment and all the data will flow.

Cons:

if your marketing tool is not on the list you have to code: that is not a bad thing, only you need a developer

Great for integrating product with multiple products and extending over time

Comments: Integrating with multiple other products, it's meant we can add additional products without changing our core product or needing development time. It's meant we can add and test new products and decide if we want to keep them or drop them without needing development to do it.

Pros:

The ability to set and forget it, essentially set it up when you launch the product and then needs very little maintenance or hand holding to do the job, and do it well.

Cons:

Did feel complicated to set up, and to look into the workflows. Having said that once set up they've worked perfectly and we haven't had to keep working on them.

Segment is a great tool, if you can afford it then you should start using it right now.

Comments: Always happy to recommend segment ! A great tool.

Pros:

The last tool to integrate with various apps. Write once and integrate infinitely. Time saving is worthless and make your app load much faster.

Cons:

Pricing is not small businesses friendly ;( Would be great if we can write and view integrations comments from other users. Please share future integration pipeline.

Segment does all the heavy lifting so you don't have to

Pros:

A centralised place to standardise all of your data through ETL, analytics as well as computed traits that create consistency of information across operational saas systems. Segment's investment in protocols roadmap provides the tools required to address the automatic monitoring of data.

Cons:

There aren't many things that come to mind.

Must have software

Pros:

Not sure how one can manage app and web tracking without Segment. It quickly enables you to track millions of events and funnel it to the appropriate tools like advertising, analytics, salesforce ... without engineering power

Cons:

The capacity to decide which events are sent to each vendors to limit data overusage

Segment Data collection

Comments: Very good and solve the key pain point very well

Pros:

3rd party integration is very good , ease of use and whole ecosystem

Cons:

Pricing after free tier is very steep instead of restricting free tier on no of sources it should restrict on number of data points or MAU

A reliable tool for event tracking and syncronization

Comments: In our organization Segment is mostly used to track events from the website backend. There are other feature rich alternatives for frontend tracking but server-side tracking is not a priority for them. Segment really saves a lot of software, devops and data engineer hours alike by reliable continuous data delivery.

Pros:

- Intuitive UI. - Event tester on the UI. - Several client libraries. - You can sync even your backdata, e.g. when setting up a new warehouse. - Pricing is based on users not events.

Cons:

- Custom schedule for synchronisation or event validation is only available in higher packages. - Some integrations just don't support a moderately sophisticated setup. E.g. if you don't want 1 million API calls a day you should construct specific Segment calls to update Salesforce leads.

Lifesaver for growth & marketing tech stack

Pros:

- Implement tracking once, automatically and consistently send data to all downstream destinations - Hundreds of integrations (and, with the recent Zapier integration, millions of possible combinations) - Easy to understand pricing

Cons:

- Integration implementation can vary widely. Documentation is usually thorough, but often confusing / complicated / out of date / (in the case of beta integrations) not accessible or non-existent - At scale, I could see costs spiraling pretty rapidly

Addresses a major use case | requires a data architect to own the implementation and instrumentation

Pros:

The ability to easily connect disparate sources of customer data. The ease of adding sources and destinations with or without native integration with Segment. The ability to insert third-party snippets on our site through Segment. The pricing structure of charging by usage rather than by seat, making it easy to increase adoption across the org.

Cons:

Still requires technical support to map out the integrations and instrument the right tracking events in your app or on your website. Not all connections are intuitive and the UI makes it hard to find payload information and logs. I recommend pairing a business owner with a technical owner at the outset of implementation.

Segment Event Tracking

Comments: Segment does a great job of event tracking for analytics. It integrates well with other tools like Heap and is very easy to explain to others about how to add a new event to track.

Pros:

Segment is great at handling event tracking. Once configured, it's very easy to add new events and also specify data associated with those events. We use the tool across multiple codebases and server provisions. It integrates well with other tools like Heap for further analytics.

Cons:

It can be a bit difficult to debug, but this isn't really an issue with Segment, but rather event trackers in general. The feed of events can be a bit difficult to filter through when testing new events.