Amplitude Analytics vs. Twilio Segment

Amplitude Analytics is well suited for scenarios where you have multiple data points to understand customer behavior and journeys and utilize simple to medium complexity graphs/charts. It may not be suitable for scenarios where you need to slice and dice data into highly customizable dashboards as that requires significant effort from technical teams.

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

• Feature analytics - measuring frequency of usage
• Time taken by users to convert in funnels
• Actions that drive certain user behaviors in funnels via correlation
• Actions that lead to user drop off in funnels via correlation
• Comparing behavior of two custom user cohorts

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

• Some more clarity and examples of implementation with GDPR in mind
• Some segregation inside user properties can be difficult to implement
• Splicing information inside funnels could be more intuitive
• User support for the cheaper tiers is hard to access
• Pricing transparency really needs to be improved

• 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

I haven't used the Amplitude support other than their training docs so I can't speak too much to the in-person support but the docs are serviceable. Nothing too crazy but between the user tips, email notifications, and the decent number of docs I was able to get the support I needed to ramp up on the tool.

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

It's the best in class with all the bells and whistles. Other options could suit you just fine at a lower price point, but you need to be sure of what you are not getting and the switching cost associated with when you do need it.

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

• It collects data of great importance which allows to make product improvements.
• It easily identifies problems a user may have with the product.
• The flow of users who have used the product has improved, thus being able to generate more income thanks to the improvements and new functions.

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.