Segment Reviews & Product Details

Title says it all, the tool allows us to a pass and control data flows on a level outside of code, and is extremely valuable to our core business, but the team that we have been able to work with to this point have been phenomenal. Our CSMs, AMs, and Solution Engineers have all been extremely knowledgeable and incredibly responsive.

The only thing that I would say here is that if you set this tool up incorrectly, it has the potential to be difficult to fix. Make sure that you are documenting everything and have an idea and plan before implementation on what you need and want.

It is our CDP. All of our event streaming data flows through it and it is working so well for our product that we are expanding it to our marketing. It really allows visibility and customization on a level that is outside of code, which is incredibly useful for our non technical team.

Very easy to configure and add new sources and destinations. The integrations Catalog is impressive, many options.

The pricing model especially for anonymous users. They will also count on your MTU usage, if you add the JS on landing and marketing pages, this number can go up pretty easily.

We're solving the classic marketing stack problem. Marketing team wants to use and explore many tools and now they can do that easily through segment, since my dev team only needs to add the Segment JS to the website and from there it's pretty much self-service for the marketing team.

The various speakers especially from IBM. A strong panel explaining exactly the process to implement, and why CDP are so important moving forward and scaling.

I'm absolutely gutted I didn't win a pelaton. jk. Fabulous event .

scaling a startup doesn't happen without strong analytics, segmentation and a CDP like Segment.

It's one of the most important, but least sexy tools in the stack. If you've ever had to manage ETL in a large organization where there are constant demands for new downstream tools getting Segment instrumented is a lifesaver. They have a huge library of sources and destinations. The documentation is very good. Their customer success teams are highly responsive and often willing to set up dedicated slack channels.

Instrumentation is not a straight forward thing. It's a mix of data, product, and engineering expertise and typically organizations don't have those all in one place (or even more rarely one person). So for start-ups and the tech world, it's a no brainer, but for enterprise, Segment really needs a strong professional services team. Also, Segment could really use a better solution for the on-prem legacy systems that bottleneck big companies. If they're already a redshift/snowflake/react shop - awesome - but most big old companies aren't.

Helps solve the data teams need for a consistent approach to user behavioral data (product data). Helps solve the need to quickly warehouse and use the data. Helps solve the evolving ETL headaches of downstream tooling. If the marketing team wants Google Analytics, the engineers want DataDog, the product team wants Mixpanel, and the data team wants Looker? No problem.

Segment provides one API that allows you to plug in with hundreds of different services, greatly increasing the amount of data and the ease at which you are able to collect data. Without having to spend hundreds of developer hours learning and implementing different APIs for each data, tracking, or marketing software, you can still integrate with so many services. Additionally, the payload of the JS loaded on the client is greatly reduced. Segment gives you the ability to playback data to a new service you want to integrate with as though you've been already sending that service data for 6 months. I think Segment is an invaluable part of a modern data and marketing stack.

The cost of Segment makes it hard to use as a startup.

Segment makes it way easier to integrate and consistently track data.

The Visual Tagger for sure. It takes out a lot of pain associated with writing individual code for event tracking and then go through versioning-review-deployment cycle every time that you'd want a slightest modification. With Visual Tagger, I have been able to capture 30+ events within 2 hours (learning curve included) and that too without writing a single line of code. Capturing the same events, by writing custom code for each event and then firing some actions based on the same would have taken at least 4-5 days of developer effort, which I have been able to save.

Frankly speaking, I have yet to encounter any such stuff, except for the price point which could be a bit steep for small organizations. I did tried to get the Persona tool for my company, however, the cost appeared to be prohibitive without any upfront benefits. This could be because the costing is based for US market and thereby becoming prohibitive for India and APAC.

Capturing all the events for the user journey and firing up actions for assortment of analytics tools would have been a very time consuming task and it would have also made our pages slower as it would have to fetch multiple external JS dependencies. We're a very lean team and can't afford having a dedicated set of people working just on integrating analytics code with the application. Segment takes that effort and pain away. From my experience of working with it, I have been able to capture 30+ events within 2 hours (learning curve included) and that too without writing a single line of code!

The interface is easy to understand and use. For me, as a developer who has to set up different data sources, there are some great tools for testing. Compared to having to build something similar in-house choosing Segment is simply a better solution.

There are some limitations to using Segment for ETL jobs for non-standard data sources at the moment, as you can run get calls or pull data from an FTP server etc at the moment. After having talked to Segment it does sound like they are working on adding these capabilities in the future.

We are connecting all of our different data sources, so all systems and departments has a full overview of all customer data. We are also using Segment to send data to our data warehouse and doing customer segmentation across our different channels.

Segment.io is a very great tool, you can integrate all your analytics platforms with just segment.io You don`t need to insert a lot of analytics scripts on your Application or Website, just insert the segment.io snippet, and then you just need to connect other services to segment.io, like Google Analytics, HotJar, MixPanel or Amplitude. Another thing that is very cool of Segment.io, is that you can use Segment.io to track your Mobile App, your Website, your Web Application with the same tool, and deliver this data to all your services connected. And you can transform some data before send to an 3rd party-service.

I would like to test Personas Feature of Segment.io, would be very cool if have an "free" level of Personas Feature. I

The main problem that Segment.io solves is don`t need to insert a lot of snippets on my website/application, just insert the segment.io snippet, and the segment.io acts like an gateway or a hub, integrating with all my other services destination

We have saved thousands of hours of development by using built-in integrations with vendors like Adjust, Leanplum, and BQ.

Platform can only receive events that are pushed into it. There isn't a good way to pull in data. Also, the destination filtering is cumbersome and it's tough to maintain filters across dev/qa/prod environments. I've started to use the API's, but this is not my preference for administration. Would be nice to have a better UI.

Real time integration is possible with both built-in tools and custom integrations with web sites and apps. We've saved a huge amount of development time by using out-of-box integrations, and benefited from Segment's excellent up-time and support.

Our clients inevitably need to configure a couple analytics tools, communications tools, monitoring tools, and more, and Segment helps keep that process simple and manageable. Being able to hook up financial data from Stripe, and other sources and pipe it all into a BigQuery warehouse to build dashboards is incredibly valuable. Even for smaller projects which might only need an analytics tool and a chat/comms tool, the reduction in overhead installing those tools, and piping the right data to each one makes Segment absolutely worth it. I've even discovered some of my now favourite tools by digging through the Segment catalog.

I honestly have difficulty finding anything I dislike about Segment. Some of the smaller clients we've worked with find the pricing a bit steep once you're off the free plan, but that plan is quite generous, and I don't find it particularly expensive myself. I guess the one other thing I can think of is that there are a couple integrations that are missing, in my opinion, but really their catalog is really good, and you can use webhooks to pipe things to other destinations if necessary.

The core problems we solve with Segment are managing data flow to external tooling, and aggregating analytics/BI data: - Segment makes it simpler to pipe normalized data into various tools - Segment makes it easy to aggregate data from various tools into a data warehouse

With Segment it's really easy to plug many different tools to get data in and out of them. The catalog contains 99% of the tools we use making Segment our default choice to connect those tools. Customer Support is also very efficient making it easy to solve issues once we reach out.

For some tools not all features are supported, this forces us to build workarounds making the system more fragile. On top of that the documentation on the downstream tools is not always up to date.

Segment is extremely helpful to avoid reimplementing tracking snippets all over the code. The engineers can simply define an event once using Segment's code and then that definition is applied to all the other downstream tools.

- The variety of integrations, and possibility to create custom ones either through Source Functions or a combination of Cloud Function + HTTP source - The reliability of the platform: I trust Segment 100% with my data flow, it also has great reporting, still need to try Protocols but looks very promising - The flexibility of the tool: selective syncs are a nice feature, Source Functions as well - The great support - The API

- The HubSpot source needs improvements in my opinion: selective sync at the source, better handling of deleted objects -> if it could be based on webhooks from the HubSpot app instead of recurring updates I think it would not only be more efficient in terms of sync schedules with the database, but also in terms of HubSpot API rate limit usage - Personas: the identity resolution needs improving, as well as the format of the json payloads sent as webhooks (entered audience for instance, doesn't contain much data and forces the receiving endpoint to perform another call to the Profiles API to fetch more insightful data)

We have built our entire growth stack around our Segment organization. It is the #1 integration I look for when prospecting for new tools, and if they don't have a native integration I build it myself through webhooks. Using Segment enables smooth & efficient tracking of users, events, page views, accounts, and takes care of the translation of the data between tools - I don't know what else someone could ask for. If a stack does not contain Segment, then it's highly probable that the tracking is not efficient, and most importantly missing data points - and I'm not even mentioning what the data pipeline between tools would look like...

Segment is incredible simple to integrate, and then pushing the data into your tools of choice (and in turn integrating those into your stack) is so simple.

It is a little unclear that Segment implements downstream tools (like Hubspot or Intercom) for you! It makes things almost too easy!

It helps us understand how our software is being used, and what our customers care about.

Brilliant concept for a platform technology. Also super impressed with the support for startups.

We initially struggled with the javascript integration within our Chrome extension, but we've been find since moving to server side analytics.

Simple analytics that helps us grow our business with minimal incremental engineering effort.

Segment is great to have a standard API to have the dev team build tracking against. It handles it all for you. It also support server-side tracking instead of loading a dozen SDKs client side! It also has (almost) seamless integration with all kinds of downstream destinations.

Segment's cloud mode means it uses API calls to send data to your destinations (like salesforce), so be careful with your API limits! There is (currently) no way to transform incoming data before sending it out to destinations (aka send "leadSource" to Marketo but "LeadSource" to salesforce). The one issue is with the pricing model based on monthly tracked users which includes anonymous visitors. If you have a website where a large portion of the traffic is anonymous, using Segment here becomes prohibitively expensive and while its features for anonymous traffic are great (ad platform integration, single sdk, combining anonymous and known user data) it is hard to justify the significant extra cost.

de-coupling dev implementation from data ETL processes, managing data flows. Data-warehouse implementation, data governance

We use the Connections component of Segment to track the eventstream across our two products. We have two UWP apps, iOS app, web app, our cloud, and marketing website sending data to the majority of our sales and marketing stack. Having one library to maintain on all these sources is super easy for the engineering team to manage and makes metrics components of feature briefs understandable in everyone's language. Not to mention that we can turn on and off data destinations to try them at a whim. When enabling an integration/destination on a web property, the Segment script asynchronously loads destination scripts, and parameters for those scripts are configurable in the Segment web UI. Another great element is that Segment pays great attention to the details of each destination, so that the configuration is as easy as possible and we don't have to compromise our usage of the destination because of a 'middle-man'. I'm looking forward to trying the Protocols component of Segment as we bulk out our engagement events even more, and Personas in the mid-future for dictating user groupings to our end-destinations. Big fan. I could talk about Segment for days given how much I hear people struggling with this sort of stuff. Thanks guys!

The Segment product team "cannot" turn on and off features like event filtering on a per-customer basis - it must be tied to a new pricing tier upgrade.

As a growing company, we needed to be able to test and try both varying stack technologies and processes as we go. Segment enables us to do that, so that we can continue to move fast. Segment has also meant that our 25 person team (a product-heavy team), across two software products, can be on the same page with the mechanics around event tracking. We speak the same language.

Spares engineering from having to repeat similar integrations over and over. Empowers marketing teams to easily evaluate multiple tools in any given category, and select the one best suited to their needs. Makes it trivial to get all data into a warehouse for use with BI tools.

Need to dive deep into specifics to set up for full impact. Requires some technical acumen to deploy.

By integrating our marketing stack via segment, we gain quick access to a broad range of best-of-breed communications and analytics services. This helps us evaluate martech vendors thoroughly, and keep chosen systems well integrated.

There are many features I love, but the two that stand out to me are analytics.js and the debug console. Analytics.js eliminates duplicate code, lesses the possibility of errors, and ensures all of your analytical platforms are consuming the same events. The debug console is the first place I visit if there is an error. It gives you a single interface where you can filter events in real-time, see the data object, and review any consumption errors.

Sometimes the documentation is not correct and debugging custom events that are not firing correctly.

Implementing advanced analytics can be a tedious job. And when you add multiple platforms (ex. FB Analytics, Google Analytics, Marketing Automation Tracker,...) the complexity begins to become unmanageable. This problem is what Segment solves very well. With one library a customer can send correctly formatted information to all the platforms at once. One system to setup, one library to integrate, one service to debug.

We at X-Cart use Segment since it's earIy days. I really like how simple is to enable a new system just to try. I don't remember when we spent time on new integration.

High cost for new users (and those who wanted to upgrade from archive plans). But this is business, I understand.

Time from an idea of attaching new system to integration is reduced from weeks to hours.

We've used Segment to collection stats from multiple sources and send them to multiple destinations. The best part is that I can configure sources and look at the "debug" log to see records coming through without having to configure a destination. I also like how the destinations have different options for transforming and filtering the records before sending them through.

There isn't much that I dislike. If I had to choose something, I think that it would be some of the confusion in selecting destinations and what will be supported before configuring the destination.

We're using Segment for collecting analytics from web, server, cli, and mobile applications. We're able to see what features users are using and determine if there are things we need to modify, add, or remove based on real usage.