Segment Reviews: 4.6/5 — Highly Rated

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.

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.

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.

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 pretty easy to setup, easy to connect new sources, good documentation. It had most of the sources we needed. We did not use the full spectrum of their tools.

Mainly pricing. they had no flexibility with pricing post-covid when our revenue dropped significantly. They basically said: you signed a contract: pay up! (We have been very compassionate to our client base that have had trouble with covid giving discounts as needed.) But even pre-covid the pricing was not good for us because we are B2C and their pricing is MTU based not event or row based.

Collecting data on our retreat marketplace. The main benefits are: super easy to connect new data destinations. We are planning to switch to a professional stack, investigating snowplow, Stitch/Fivetran, DBT, Snowflake/Big Query and then Mode/Looker.

Easy to set-up both for server-side event tracking, and client-side. Connects in seconds to various 3rd party tools for analytics, marketing, tracking, support, and more. It's made it super easy for us to test new services by turning integrations on and off without any additional needed development.

When they changed their pricing to MTUs, it made it extremely pricey for websites and apps with anonymous users. It'd be way better if pricing was based on the number of events, and not tracked users. If your website sees a ton of anonymous users, be ready for a high cost. We do occasionally go back and forth trying to decide if Segment is worth the cost, or if developing an internal service that sends data to any new services would be a better use of time and costs.

We use Segment to track users and send data to various analytics tools, like Amplitude, KeenIO, and a few others. We've removed tracking of anonymous users, and only load up Segment for a specific type of logged in user in order to reduce costs.

Out of box integrations for event forwarding

When things go wrong, debugging is a pain. Support requires painful documentation, unwilling to help beyond standard template.

Event forwarding from multiple sources - frontend / backend /web / app to multiple places without building own pipelines.

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.