Segment Reviews & Product Details

- do 1 integration with Segment and then scale it to 10 more integrations with less effort - best startup program from what i saw - a lot of integrations - very useful webinars from founders (How to grow your StartUp)

Its hard to write minimum characters about what i dislike in Segment because service is beautiful :)

Segment is money saving in a lot of integrations.We do integrations with Intercom, Fullstory, Amplitude much faster.

The combination of a great way to gather data on users and their actions, with the massive list of other tools it integrates with. It allows us to simply and quickly try out different tools, as the time to set them up is so low, as they can get all the data from Segment. This also allows us to be more flexible in changing the set of tools we use.

Like many SaaS tools, the pricing goes up real fast for all features, even for a small startup, and so we have had to rely on other tools for things that we could have used Segment for had the price for the full functionality been more reasonable.

1) Allowed us to develop a consistent method to get data on users from their first web site visit to deeper interaction in our app. 2) Enabled us to reuse this method across many different tools, and thus reduced the switching cost between such tools.

Segment describes itself as Customer Data Infrastructure and excels in providing that often neglected foundation for achieving the much sought after 360° view of the customer. In short, they live up to their brand's promise and offer just the right portfolio of functions.

They're growing fast and responses from customer service can suffer from it. Yet, there's always a willingness and drive to perform at its best.

Integrating disparate databases, fine-grained analytics. Savings on engineering time.

As a SaaS founder I have dozen of tools I pay monthly , and Segment sits very silently in the middle and give us a freedom to connect different tools to our tech stack. Before using a segment we used our internal development resources and it was always much more expensive and much longer.

Still there are some tools that we need to connect via Zappier

We transfer all the user behavior information around our tools

The software is simple to use, saves a tonne of time and has unbelievable integrations. However, it is the service offered by the Segment team that stands out the most.

Nothing. There are just a few things that can be improved from a UX standpoint between the sheet based tracking plan and the Segment tracking plan.

Scaling our data infrastructure fast and enabling intact teams to use the best tech stack to achieve their desired use cases to ultimately impact their KPIs. We have seen many benefits: 1. the ability to run fast, 2. the wide range of integration, 3. impactful use of our data within a few weeks of kicking off the Segment project internally.

Segment, like Google Tag Manager, let us manage many different sources of data but is also includes a wide range of destinations. Therefore, it has a better data instrumentation management, best organization and a clear guideline of name conventions (https://segment.com/academy/collecting-data/naming-conventions-for-clean-data/).

Some of the things I miss from the previous tools we used (Google Tag Manager) is the feature of having releases. For example, after we made a set of changes we would like to version it with a description so we can have a better traceability of the changes.

Segment helps us integrate all our analytics tools in one single place. That let us have more tools and not worry about the integrations of those with all the data infrastructure we built with Segment.

Full disclosure: I'm an ex-Segmenter. Despite that, you can certainly trust my opinion. Undoubtedly, Segment has led the CDP space since the category's inception. It's the simplest and quickest way to standup a marketing stack and it has an infrastructure that's unmatched in the industry (i.e. If you send the data to Segment you can rest assured that the data is delivered - if not, Segment even lets you know why via Event Delivery panel). Layer on Protocols and you now have guaranteed data quality at the API layer. Layer on Personas and you know how a single place to build and maintain audiences, which is a major timesaver and a fabulous way to maintain audience-equivalence across tools.

The UI could use a bit of freshening up, but the underlying infra is really what you need - and it's rock-solid.

1. Enabling a tech stack with the flip of a switch post-implementation. Data analysts, marketers, and product managers get value extremely quickly. 2. My current company uses Protocols to ensure data quality, which is an issue every single company has. We can now trust our data from the start, which is a very important step along the data-driven organization journey. 3. ETL customer data to our warehouse + grabbing data from Salesforce and Marketo. ETL is not trivial by any stretch of the imagination and Segment's ETL service is absolutely best-in-class (Believe me, I was there when it was launched and I know first-hand the value it brings)

The fact that we can adjust the analytics sources and destination on the fly is very valuable. It also makes CCPA a breeze.

So far the tools have provided a great experience. No complaints.

We have discovered new methods and tools to gather and analyze data from our customers.

Segment solves a problem that has plagued almost every team I have worked on previously. The constant requirement to integrate a new customer tracking system gets in the way of more important work. Segment enables us to look like all stars when another team asks us to "integrate" a new tool into our ecosystem.

Nothing comes to mind. They do the exact thing I want them to do and they do it well.

Segment removes the need to constantly spend development time integrating new tools into our ecosystem. The also provide a great library of tools to search through and identify ways in which we can improve.

I love how many destinations and sources segment supports. I can easily send data from websites, backend and frontend web applications to wherever I need it to go, even if it's multiple places. Excellent for setting up user analytics, admin dashboards, etc.

Sometimes it can be challenging to configure services like intercom or mixpanel on the frontend when the configuration options are obfuscated by the analytics library, but it's a small learning curve that's worth doing.

Data warehousing of user data, building admin dashboards and aggregating data from multiple sources with ease

The guidance they give on best practices for instrumentation, and the ease with which you can set your data up to go to new destinations.

There are certain limitations on how the data needs to be structured for downstream destinations.

All in-product tracking for our digital product (across Android, iOS, Web). It has allowed us to generate insights about how people use our products that would have been impossible before.

Love the simplicity and reliability of the service. With just one integration, you can control and manage how your data flows into various services.

So far there is nothing that we dislike. At times, the integration with third-party services gets outdated (deprecated), so it might take a while to reflect on the Segment (but, we can't really blame segment for this)

We needed a unified and reliable source of data for all the services that we used. With Segment, we're able to achieve that. Segment sends data to the services we care about reliability. And zero effort required on our end for any new integrations. We can constantly test and learn by trying out new services.

I love it that Segment has integration with, well, almost every worthy service on this planet

Sometimes some of the events don't go through all the integrations. I assume this may be a problem with the integrations themselves.

Pushing analytics events to all external services to my product

I like to only have to integrate 1 SDK to my app and be able to send the data to different products such as Mixpanel, Customer.io, Branch and so on.

I would say that the only thing I dislike is the documentation that can quickly become outdated, comes a new Swift update or a new product changes. It can be frustrating to be facing an outdated documentation, or the docs display code that won't compile.

We're analyzing how our users use the app, we're sending data to Mixpanel, we're tracking views, events, etc. The benefits are that we're not clueless about what people do with the app! I think it's quite obvious benefits.

Using Segment is not only time saving in terms of dev-ops, but it gets your smarter by asking yourself the right questions. What to use and how to generate actionable insights. Do I need to mention documentation is great.

I wouldn’t talk of downsides. In order to make it work, you need to plan ahead.

Building and tweaking a marketing stack that works for whatever it is you need to do.

Segment removes engineering requirements from connecting data to new products and managing the flow of data in your organization

Cost - many of the great features are behind the Business tier which is materially more expensive that the Team tier.

Centralized data structure, available to relevant tools, sync with data warehouse, ability to route data to new tools.

At its core, the promise is unified user-level analytics. And that's delivered. On top of that though, is a product that technical leads are usually ok with, since it saves them time and resources as well. It's hard to argue against the cost/benefit, and the possibility of building your own with their open source repos is always there.

I think the pricing model is an issue for businesses with a lot of anonymous traffic if they want to use the managed analytics.js though Segment.

As a consultant, it's a very interesting tool because it brings business, marketing and technical teams together. The core promise to each of those groups is already a huge benefit ( Business: unified analytics & data, Marketing: faster/better/more relevant personalised comms, Technical: the last 3rd party API you'll integrate). But, apart from that, a lot of synergies and catalysts for growth have come from these teams being able to work together and have a common ground for making/discussing/weighing up decisions.

I think the Personas product is a game changer to help in alleviating the reliance on developer involvement for Customer Journey Optimization

The pricing can be a little challenging for non-enterprise companies

The key to the methodology I employ with my clients is to empower non-technical team members to experiment and iterate without developer involvement. Segment is core to this strategy as once the data is pushed to segment, it can be pushed to anywhere else without developer involvement.

Once you install Segment you can send choose your downstream services in one slick and remove engineering from the mix as you add on more tools and services.

Some of the best features are only available on the business plan which is much more expensive than the team plan.

Unifying all of our user and analytics data transmission between tools, allowing us flexibility to choose the right tools with limited spin-up time, making it much quicker to add tracking and test before deploying.

I love how clean and simple the interface is. Setup is so easy, I got up and running within minutes. Without segment, our CRM platform would have no real idea of the difference between customers and leads. It allowed us to connect our WooCommerce store to our Intercom customer engagement platform.

The MTU limit is a bit too low. Also, there's no mid-tier pricing for less than 10,000 MTU, and therefore the first payment package (Team, up to 10K MTU) is a bit too high for my needs. It's the only reason I've not been able to buy it yet. I don't need spaces for 10 people, there's just me, so I feel like I'm being forced to pay $120/m for features and seats I honestly don't need.

The MTU limit, too low for the Developer version, and there's no solo package for Segment, as far as I see. Pricing is my biggest, and only issue, with Segment. It locked my workspace because I exceeded the MTU limit more than twice in the last 6 months, but what am I to do? I can't stop users from coming but I've only had 549 users over the last month. I don't see why I need to upgrade to a plan that caters to 10,000 of them. I suppose that's my main difficulty with the product.