Appsee Mobile App Analytics vs. Twilio Segment

Appsee was a great choice and addition before their struggle with Apple over user screen recording. Now that that's gone, its insights are rather basic and not worth the price point. This would be a perfect analytics platform for a company looking to increase its user experience, new on-boarding, or going through a redesign to see user activity and reactions, but not anymore.

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

• User session recordings of individual users
• Touch heatmaps and unresponsive gestures

• 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

• The user screen recording was quickly shut down on Apple devices after about a week of us using Appsee. Now it's just basic boxes which aren't nearly as helpful or insightful in bettering our user experience. If we would have known this would happen, or that Appsee didn't have that feature, we wouldn't have gone with them.
• No integration with Branch (the world's best and probably biggest attribution platform).

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

Appsee set itself apart from competitors with the user screen recording, but since that is no longer a good feature on iOS, it makes Appsee's competitive advantage obsolete. Its data analytics, funnels, and crash reporting are relatively basic or haven't lead to any breakthroughs. I would stay away from Appsee, save your money, and go for a platform like Mixpanel if possible, which has analytics, attribution, and engagement for the same if not cheaper price.

Incentivized

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

• Better conversion rates
• Less bugs/crashes
• Better user retention

• 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.