Segment Reviews & Product Details

Make something complicated and messy to simple and organized

handling all duplicates event and retrocompatibility

We follow our customer when they use our product to send to integrations we setup

Simplifies the ETL process to the point where non-technical users can be involved. The event tracking functionality has been helpful for consolidating the identity of a user across multiple platforms into a single source of truth.

Simple data flows like storing data from various tools into a data warehouse is trivial, but we still needed to build a lot of custom infrastructure for more complicated flows (enrichment, syncing data between different tools). Note that we haven't purchased any enhancements. There also seems to be a bit of a tradeoff between simplifying the user experience and transparency. When issues occur, in general it is hard for us to troubleshoot without a Segment rep.

The event tracking has had various issues (not all of which is Segment's fault) which have been difficult to troubleshoot; would not necessarily recommend switching over to that if you already have something in place. The ease of using it as an ETL tool has been a big benefit, especially for non-technical users. If you have dedicated data engineers, a more light-weight cheaper ETL tool may be better.

Segment has a clear value proposition to translate events across the third party tools connected in the marketing stack. It saves a LOT of time.

For some reasons we still spent a lot of time getting to know it and we're still struggling with a couple of apps.

Connecting marketing stack tools together.

Data Quality and User Expeirence is great

There are other other tools as well in the market provioding the same thing at a very much lower rate and much better docs and support

Along with littledata it is helping for identity stitching in shopify and process my ECOMM events in a good manner

Easy to integrate with many sources, easy push and pull data.

no adavanced inbuilts query functions, no inbuilt machine learning pipe lines

For integrating website to own database

ease of use and setup in the code and takes care of alot of things developers don't have to worry about with ad platforms

It's getting better, but not as robust for custom engineering needs. Performance needs work, use web workers or something to get scripting off the main thread!

marketing and data needs, so engineering doesn't have to have a ton of maintnenance to do for ad platforms is nice. takes care of all the tools and data deduping.

What I do like the best about Segment is how easy it's to integrate multiple analytics sources with multiple outputs/apps/websites.

What I dislike the most about segment is first of all the price, secondly their Mobile SDKs lacks of integrations and are not really stable.

We implemented Segment for aggregating multiple analytics tool like mixpanel and google analytics, plus multiple outputs like mobile apps and websites.

Lots of cloud-based integrations, easy to use, best JS instrumentation so far

Hard to integrate with custom destinations, impossible to directly hook up to Hadoop or Oracle (traditional DW solutions)

User data collection, analytics, instrumentation

Product is solid and easy to use. Nothing to complain here.

Pricing structure and add ons make the costs prohibitive for some customers.

Helps us track product interactions with one snippet and send everywhere.

Ease-of-use, great documentation, SDKs and cloud-based integrations

- Can get pricey if you have high DAUs - Lacks support for popular platforms (DataBricks) - Would be great to see some BI/reporting capabilities - JS dependency injection can bloat client-side and impact performance

We instrument our client apps and backend with Segment to send data to various destinations for marketing and reporting (Facebook, Mixpanel, GA, etc). It's great to have one instrumentation for everything, easy to use.

The destination feature is great, allows you to deliver data to multiple destinations easily. Filtering feature is great when designing the data pipeline.

The user interface can be a little unintuitive, also a bit hard to learn about business plan features. The push to get reviews into G2 felt pretty unprofessional.

Having the same data delivered to multiple destinations.

I really the technology segment has. Everything works really well, and has many tools for troubleshooting which are missing in this domain.

The pricing. The jump from free to paid is very big, and as a small startup we don't feel comfortable doing it at all.

We wanted to simplify our dev efforts on everything analytics.

Easy Integration with other third-party applications in order to target user groups. Not complicated to modify. Gives us great insight into the user journey and allows us to analyze events easily.

Hypersegmentation is complicated and not necessarily possible. Difficult to pinpoint issues when integrating with other tools.

Targeting the right customers at the right time. Understanding user behaviour.

The best thing about Segment is how it rallies the team around instrumenting events to make use of the massive amount of money you have spent. If you have a few common tools, it also helps sync those events or SAAS products to your data warehouse, but is overall a much more expensive solution than something like Fivetran, Stitch, et al for that latter use case. As far as data sync goes, it does help with data governance, but I can't help but think how that can be afforded through a conscious effort in a smaller team without such constraints.

During the sales process and throughout the documentation, Segment promises a lot of things by either omitting information or oversimplifying integration. It is very worthwhile to read thoroughly through that documentation to fully understand the integration efforts before you sign a contract, as it isn't always as simple as firing an event to segment and pushing it somewhere else. They are improving this with cloud actions, but they can only do so much to abstract away the complexities and individual requirements of downstream destinations. The Segment UI has a tonne of bugs and lacks documentation or helper text throughout (way better than Rudderstack though), which leaves you needing to reach out to support often for workarounds or explanations that sometimes their team cannot even provide. Segment's BigQuery integration is stuck in 2012, generating a different dataset for each source and a different table for each event, which completely ignores the unique aspect of BigQuery in being able to (and preferring you to) design datasets with JSON-like structures. Even Google Analytics is sending events to a single table, which almost makes it a superior solution for tracking events in combination with its data layer.

Problem: Many different destinations with different named, defined, and described events. Benefits: Rallying the team around a common data governance structure, which we had started anyways. Sometimes spending money can get people to rally around anything.

Segment is a very powerful platform, with core products and additional add-ons that extend that functionality. It seems well designed and engineered. We're getting more actionable customer data than ever before. Also, great tools for ensuring data hygene right at the point of entry into our stack.

As with any integration, there are challenges that vary depending on your entire ecosystem. We are currently only leveraging a small portion of Segment's power because of other legacy systems. So think though your stack holisitically before counting on all the things Segment CAN provide. Not Segment's fault, per se, but an important caveat.

We needed better visibility on customer interactions for both content development and growth marketing. Segment gives us that, and helps us ensure that new data from new sources is clean.

It seems easy to use at face value. Onboarding the new software was not hard as a beginner engineer.

I have not discovered a feature I have disliked yet.

Segment allows us to track the screens our viewers see and perhaps their drop-off points in a design flow.

UI is easy to understand. Customer service is responsive.

There are competitors that are more cheaper and efficient

Trying to get more customers. The lift has been okay at best, could be better

Segment was great when they were an independent company. Since being acquired by Twilio, their culture has changed and they do not treat their customers well.

The way Segment, post Twilio-acquisition, treats its customers is bad.

We use Twilio for back-end API connections.