The Acquia Digital Experience Platform is an "Open DXP" with its two core pillars being content and data. Built on top of one of the largest open-source content management systems, Drupal, it aims to provide the flexibility and interoperability a modern organization needs. With its customer data platform, it allows organizations to understand who their customers are and deliver personalized experiences. Acquia's DXP offers variety of other tools including digital asset management,…
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Twilio Segment
Score 8.7 out of 10
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Segment is a customer data platform that helps engineering teams at companies like Tradesy, TIME, Inc., Gap, Lending Tree, PayPal, and Fender, etc., achieve time and cost savings on their data infrastructure, which was acquired by Twilio November 2020. The vendor says they also enable Product, BI, and Marketing teams to access 200+ tools (Mixpanel, Salesforce, Marketo, Redshift, etc.) to better understand and optimize customer preferences for growth— all integrations are pre-built and…
Acquia Cloud is well suited for organizations and teams without the ability to support their own hosting, such as on AWS, Digital Ocean, etc. If a team has the ability (and desire) to manage it themselves, I'm not sure I would recommend it. However, if your team needs reliable, hands-off Drupal hosting, I would definitely recommend Acquia Cloud. Once a deployment pipeline is configured, it's very nearly set-and-forget as far as server configuration is concerned
Best suited: - Merging emails coming from: Facebook leads forms, Unbounce or landing pages forms, Google forms, any other kind of lead generation tool and bundling all that information together for a single user "profile". - Passing events generated in multiple applications by the same user (product selected in web, product discarded in cart, etc) and delivering those events into other applications (like a CRM) Less appropriate: - Reading/updating data directly from segment from a frontend application
Multi-platform. Segment has easy integrations in many different web, backend, and app platforms/frameworks. We use the Segment SDK in Android and iOS as well as our node.js backend.
Segment is fairly affordable for early-stage companies that are trying out different analytics software. The "developer" plan is free and is suitable for most companies with products that have a small user base.
The UI is great! It is extremely intuitive and easy-to-learn, and this made it take very little time to integrate this software into our analytics and marketing workflows.
the support portal can be hit and miss. sometimes there are very helpful people who get back to you in a timely manner, but more often there's a lot of lag time for the ticket to get picked up and in between responses, which can also be less than helpful.
it seems like the different departments within acquia (support, management, build teams) don't communicate with each other.
because features are so dense and granular, sometimes the workflow or how they are connected can be really complex to access.
More and richer sources. For example, MailChimp is a source but the data you get from MailChimp is quite limited. I ended up writing my own scripts to take better advantage of MailChimp's API because Segment's integration was lacking.
Better examples on how to set up event tracking. Pageview tracking is easy enough, but it would be nice if they had a sample app and corresponding code for it and showed you, via Git commits, how to add various kinds of events.
We're moving away from Drupal as a platform. Drupal 8 and 9 were simply too overburdened and difficult to maintain compared to other offerings. PHP seems like a dying language so we are currently in the process of migrating all of our Drupal 7 functionality and custom modules to a Python/Django/Wagtail platform. This doesn't mean Acquia isn't a great service, they are professional and top-knotch, but the only way we'd say with them is if I didn't complete the migration.
They are absolutely fabulous and have never dropped the ball in 8 years of us being on the platform. If it wasn't for Drupal 8/9 being unrealistically complicated compared to other offerings like Django/Wagtail we'd be still with Acquia and Drupal.
Over the period it took us to set up, we kept going back to their enablement team to help us with the setup, and they were always ready and were very helpful in the entire process. Even with their documentation, they took the time out to help us work through the process. We've never had a message/email unanswered for more than an hour on working days.
We use AWS (a variety of services inside AWS) to host our less than mission-critical sites. These are great options for sites that are relatively simple, technically, and/or that can tolerate occasional problems. However, Acquia Digital Experience Platform does provide a level of concierge service that I have appreciated when it comes to running a highly available web application.
I'm not sure these are "official competitors" (or alternatives) to Segment, but we use them in parallel for different goals. We use Datadog for logging and monitoring and we use Mixpanel to perform data analysis based on the data we gather using Segment (and other sources). I don't think we ever evaluated any other service vs. Segment. I think we got a recommendation on Segment, liked it and decided to use it (and we're happy with it since).
Since the beginning of the website rebuild project, our agency gathered our needs and expectations. We also shared several technical or SEO specifications, and they have been able to fully adapt the software to our needs, in order to create a custom interface that we can easy use on a daily-basis.
It's done a really nice job of allowing us to focus on business-specific needs as opposed to infrastructure/security issues. The platform is rock solid from a support and security standpoint.
The ability to add automation and levels of personalization without having to break the bank has been a big boost to clients.
Unfortunately, our adoption of Site Studio was short-lived due to some inherent restrictions that limited the level of customization we were able to do.
Segment has enabled us to get a full view of our front end activity, join it to our back-end activity, and get full visibility into our funnels and user activity.
Segment lets us send events to ad tools with a full audit trail so all the numbers line up.
Segment also brings data from other sources into our data warehouse, saving our data engineering time from building commodity connectors.
