Customer.io vs. Localytics

Talking from the perspective of a marketer at a SaaS with average. 50K email subscribers, Customer IO has been an excellent tool for us. Our requirements include sending users newsletters, marketing emails, and transactional emails, running lead-nurturing campaigns, and more. For a comprehensive use case like ours, CustomerIO is great. While it also has a learning curve, when you have such requirements, it’s worth it. I don’t think CustomerIO is the best fit if you have basic requirements like only weekly newsletter emails.

Incentivized

For the price and the features available, Localytics is one of the best options. It is more robust in areas that we don't need it to be and overall there could be simpler flows for sending push notifications or performing actions that you need to do every week. Also, the data it sends back on how push notifications perform is basically useless. There needs to be more explanation on the impact notifications have on users. The data would always say that notifications drove less engagement but we would see engagement go up every time we sent a notification.

Incentivized

• Managing users, attributes and events. You are easily able to modify any user, based on their ID, and add or remove attributes, assign events to them. That makes it very easy to segment later and to assign them to several campaigns based on behavior. Just a warning: this integration isn't so easy (at least it wasn't for us).
• Creating workflows of campaigns is very easy. You can quickly create behavioral campaigns based on attributes, segments and add elements to the workflow. You can send an email, then wait, then send another, then exit the campaign if they converted, etc. The workflow is easy to configure and very powerful for automation.
• We don't use many email templates (we make them in MJML) but it's very easy to add senders, to change templates and in general to test designs.
• Deliverability works very well, at least for us. It sends emails pretty fast and without issues.
• Exporting is very quick and easy. Importing wasn't a feature until recently, but it works well too.
• Seeing activity it's also useful. In general, logs are awesome (be it of a customer, of activity on the site, email sends, etc.).
• We don't use environments, but it might be very useful for a bigger company.

Incentivized

• Great web interface which provides a couple of levels of pivoting and filtering of data
• Straight-forward integration for simpler use cases
• Access to raw data through S3 for use in your own data pipeline

Incentivized

• Price is quite expensive for Premium or once you get into high volumes of contacts.
• Depending on how you'll use it, it may require some help from developers to set up.
• Despite the support being great, you have to email them, there's not chat feature.

• The biggest thing I would like to see with Localytics is the capability for more correlations. The limited amount of correlations available does restrict the type of analyses that could be done with the data.
• An easier interface to move data into Microsoft Excel would be very useful, rather than creating annoying workarounds.
• More/better automatically scheduled reporting, as well as an Excel plug-in to access the data rather than being restricted to the Localytics interface.

There is a lot of competition. I would renew if there isn't anything more exceptional that would justify the re-coding and implementation load costs

Super intuitive and easy interface to start off with. There are not a lot of guides and the documentation is helpful but not super extensive, but even if you're a little technical, you can easily figure most of the things out by yourself. Everything is super easy to start with and the platform does not overwhelm you with a lot of options, or data.

Incentivized

My experience with their support team has always been great. Very quick to respond, have an online chat, and are very helpful. They helped me resolve any issues I've had every time in a professional and knowledgeable manner. We've now switched to another tool, and I can't even compare the service level we get there to customer.io

Incentivized

It would take several weeks to hear back from the billing team. It took 3 months to resolve an invoice last year. Their technical support is very responsive. I would typically get a response in under 24 hrs.

Incentivized

Customer.io was really the first pure, full-featured drip email program on the market and as far as I know, it's still the simplest and best overall for that specific function. SendGrid has also added drip campaign features, but I would seriously evaluate Customer.io against any other drip email provider because they really have all the key elements you need to make it work.

Incentivized

We have not used other products but are going to start exploring making a switch to a new platform.

Incentivized

• Positive impact on the sales side. I'm not sure about the specific ROI (you have to include the designer and the time it takes to set up) but you certainly get back the investment in a few months, once you are able to scale your email marketing.
• Customer experience is way better by having more segmented, contextual and accurate messages sent to them.
• Integration is costly and it will take several days or weeks to be fully achieved. Expect to invest some money on this.

Incentivized

• Was our first provider of user-level event data
• Allows for many users to easily answer their own questions before making requests of the data team
• Raw data dumps gave the data team the ability to provide more in-depth analyses.

Incentivized