Alexa Internet (discontinued) vs. Twilio Segment

I recommend Alexa for small businesses where you don't need much customization. Otherwise, I think big companies should implement their own tools.

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

• It sources website analytics for most websites we're interested in tracking.
• Each website's dashboard is easy to understand and pull numbers from.
• We can get very nitty gritty with the numbers we're pulling or keep it simple by just pulling basic website visitor stats.

Incentivized

• 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

• Hidden costs may end up losing lot of money, Pricing model is not good
• API calls fail sometimes
• Website suggestions are irrelevant sometimes

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

It is well structured for Internet analytics and traffic data.

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

If you want to focus only on your own web analytics, then Google Analytics is the way to go as no product will give you more accurate data. However, what Google Analytics cannot do is the competitive analysis functionality, which is where a product like Alexa comes in. It's about on par with SimilarWeb in many ways, they just go about the analytics in slightly different ways. Really, it comes down to personal preference as to which you prefer. Thankfully both offer free trials so you can test out the platforms before fully committing. SimilarWeb may be a bit better in terms of mobile web data.

Incentivized

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).

Incentivized

• I am ready to write a full blown Alexa skill application to make money
• I got exposed to the Web development environment of Amazon web service by learning Alexa

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.