Mautic (open source) vs. Twilio Segment

Mautic is not Salesforce or Dynamics of course; it is hard to install, still buggy and you have to know what you're doing if you want to use it. But that is your admission fee to an always free system that does essentially all the same things as the pricey alternatives, does it effectively and gives you total control. Mautic was acquired by Acquia, the company behind Drupal, and has been making substantial upgrades since that seem to be accelerating. The system has an active user community, active development and will only get better, making it an excellent choice to grow with and build your own systems around and never be dependent on third parties

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

• Marketing email organization
• Email tracking
• Email automation
• Contact management
• Open rates
• Delivery rates
• A/B testing
• Email sending
• Unsubscribe management
• SMTP management

• 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

• Setting up the email templates has required hiring a professional. The templates that are provided are not fully responsive.
• More responsive form templates are needed.

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

Infusionsoft, at the time I tested it, had a crazy editor--very unintuitive and not very clean. Mautic (open source) makes it much easier to build up campaigns. Besides that, it didn't provide what we needed to justify the lack of possibility to self-host it and the requirement to pay for it.

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

• We made our ROI back within a year.
• Fulfills our needs and our client's needs, our clients love it.
• I would just add more templates to the email construction selection, other than that, it is just perfect.

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.