Airbrake vs. Twilio Segment

Airbrake is very good at what it does, I don’t really have any criticism at all on that front. It’s less well-suited when bugfixing goes beyond the immediate error and means looking at a lot of context (particularly asynchronous context) like logs.

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

• Integration with most of languages and frameworks as well support via existing logging configs.
• Aggregations on occurrences which helps to understand and analyse issues better.
• Web UI displays all error related parameters which I never could have figured out in manual debugging.

• 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.

Incentivized

• We use Airbrake in conjunction with OpsGenie, but I feel like there could be more room for integration between the two.
• I think it would also be nice if there was a GitHub integration that would comment on recently merged error-prone PRs, currently, we need to dig into the error to find the commit.
• Generally, more integrations would be nice as people often forget about Airbrake when they are stressed out about an issue.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

I love to use Airbrake and New Relic in conjunction. New Relic has better metrics and data that you can really dig into (especially for optimizations), but the error part has always been kinda meh. I fee like Airbrake has done an awesome job at this

We chose Twilio Segment for the good API integration and node resources, I would use Ontraport again, particularly if I didn't have the requirements for API and development/platform integration. Certainly the set up and management is easy and seamless with both the API and the user interface to use depending on circumstances and requirements.

Incentivized

• Hugely reduced frontend errors in devices we don’t often test: means more conversions and sales
• Lets us know immediately when there is an error: shorter error durations also means higher sales
• Ultimately once we’ve solved all the most common bugs: more time for developers to focus on other things

Incentivized

• 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.