LiveRamp vs. Twilio Segment

For marketers or advertising agencies who are trying to find better ways to activate first party data to improve advertising performance, LiveRamp is the industry leading data onboarding platform. Once data is onboarded, it can be segmented in granular ways to create unique audience segments using boolean logic. LiveRamp is also well suited for identity resolution. LiveRamp will be a key player in the post-cookie world for advertisers and agencies. LiveRamp is an enterprise product for brands and agencies who invest heavily in paid media - if you aren't investing heavily in paid media and aren't investing in ad tech, LiveRamp probably isn't a good fit.

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

• The interface makes sense and is usable.
• Automated cleansing.
• Can assist in revenue generation for website.
• Great customer support.

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

• Better UI
• API connectivity
• More complex ETL processes

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

LiveRamp has become the industry leader in data onboarding, identity resolution, and data management. LiveRamp has grown faster than Neustar and the business model is more specialized than Neustar. LiveRamp has chosen to just focus on identity resolution, data onboarding, and data management, whereas Neustar has several business units and is less focused. For these reasons, we prefer using LiveRamp's technology over Neustar.

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

• Has helped us to be able to monetize website.
• Saves us a lot of time and thus money.

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.