Segment Reviews

Overall: 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.

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.

Pros: We use segment to collect and send data in different destination, it's easy to use and to implements

Cons: Options are quite expensive, if you want to add Personna / protocols, the price grows quickly

Pros: Love the range of applications Segment can be integrated into

Cons: Notifications if there is any abnormality with the events usage

Overall: 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.

Overall: 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.

Alternatives Considered: mParticle and Tealium Customer Data Hub

Reasons for Choosing Segment: It was free to start and easy to set up. Costs seemed reasonable compared to competitors. Is widely compatible with many marketing tools in the industry.

Overall: 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.

Overall: Overall, it helps you to start really fast. We at www.quiznext.in use segment to collect data from our app and send it to warehouse, firebase, fb etc.

Pros: Easy setup, Easier to collect data and send to warehouse. Integration with other tools is easy.

Cons: Not all integrations are seemless. Many integrations require client side app installation, which just reduces the code a bit. Once you start attracting decent users, it turns out to be expensive and need to look for alternative tools.

Overall: 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.

Overall: - Great experience, easy integration, saves a lot of time when working with multiple analytics services

Pros: - easy integration - can work with many analytics Saas vendors

Cons: - can be better with some data visualization capabilities

Alternatives Considered: Mixpanel and Amplitude

Reasons for Choosing Segment: Integration to many services

Overall: 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.

Pros: There's nothing out there that even comes close to Segment. With just a single integration we can funnel our data to all the essential tools that we use to run out business (Intercom, Amplitude, Google Analytics and many more)

Cons: Nothing specific. Everything works great.

Overall: One of the tools that we recommend has the possibility of data quality with the "protocols" which is very interesting too.

Pros: It is a very easy-to-use tool that with minimal training you can add/configure third-party tools, accessible to many user profiles.

Cons: We have previously been working with tag manager tools, we miss the possibility of have modifications before sending the segment to 3 party tools. The "functions" are somewhat complex, a UI environment would be nice. Possibility of alerts with ML, for example; if we normally send 1000 events of one type each day, wait that day for those approximate events, intelligent alerts not only when a violation fails.

Reasons for Choosing Segment: especially for the "protocols".