Segment Reviews

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.

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.

Alternatives Considered: Tealium Customer Data Hub and mParticle

Reasons for Switching to 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.

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

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.

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.

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).

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 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.

Very useful to collect data

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

Powerful system!

Pros:

Love the range of applications Segment can be integrated into

Cons:

Notifications if there is any abnormality with the events usage

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.

Alternatives Considered: Tealium Customer Data Hub and Salesforce Sales Cloud

Reasons for Switching to Segment: Easier to use and implement

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.

Good tool for startups

Comments: 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.

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.

Alternatives Considered: Workato

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 for analytics integration

Comments: - 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: Amplitude and Mixpanel

Reasons for Switching to Segment: Integration to many services

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.

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 - the best system to control and analyze your customers!

Comments: I integrated Segment with the Drupal 8 site. I’m supporting it and improve.

Pros:

The great debugger web-based tool. The tool to create audiences to group users by some properties or events.

Cons:

All if fine. I can’t even be thinking about cons. Probably would be great to have the ability to copy data between sources.

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

Modern data consolidation solution

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.

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

Segment help turn your data into dollars

Comments: My overall experience with Segment has been incredible. Never before have I

Pros:

There's no single thing I like most about Segment. The mere power to connect all our web properties, product/platform touch points, and marketing campaigns into a central database is incredible, and that's what Segment is all about. It's the whole package that impresses me. Need to sort email interaction data into your database, while filtering out users who have engaged with your product in the last 48 hours, while tracking inbound clicks on your product pages? Yeah, Segment can do all that at the same time and way, way more. I don't know how we did business before.

Cons:

Segment has a steep learning curve. It took weeks to really come to grips with everything that Segment can do and how to do it. This is not a weakness, but just be prepared for a lengthy implementation period.

Integration and journey

Comments: Its really good but not extreme.

Pros:

This will be very simple to integrate with any website in short time. The clear understanding of user activities via your api calls. This event module will helpsl us to analysis what user did in the page and what they are trying to make it. If something's broken when user browse, we could pretty much identify easily by debugging via segment instead of searching our code base log files.

Cons:

User funnel is not much as per the exception. When I want to compare the multiple user journey, I couldn't feel much.

Easy to use and powerful tool, recommended if you work with third-party tools.

Comments: 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.