Hull CDP, from MessageBird vs. Signal Open Source Messenger

Hull is definitely the leading CDP for the small to mid-sized business in which the marketing team wants or needs to have a fair amount of autonomy from engineering, or when it's unrealistic or cost-prohibitive to use internal engineering resources to maintain the marketing database. It's also a great choice for companies who are trying to bring newer and smaller best-of-breed elements into place in their marketing--enabling you to sync customer data records to CTAs/ Chat scenarios/ Email Service Providers, or any type of 3rd party campaign tools. It's probably not the best fit for companies trying to stay in a larger Marketing Cloud Ecosystem, e.g. Adobe/ Oracle.

Incentivized

Signal is great for high-security applications where privacy is a concern, perhaps because of the sensitive nature of the materials being communicated. For instance, if you are sending sensitive information about a film that hasn't been released yet, and you want to make sure that paparazzi and fans don't get access to spoiler information, Signal is a great way to communicate.

Incentivized

• Slack integration - we revolve around slack as our central comm hub and having our customer information surfaceable is just gold.
• Making back-end data easy to read and digest - there is a lot of data that gets generated by our customers and it's impossible to sift through without Hull consolidating that information for us.
• Customer support - we have only had a couple issues in the many months using Hull and it's always been a quick resolution. They use Slack to support BTW which I love.

Incentivized

• Encryption end to end
• Audio quality
• Ability to permanently delete messages and history

Incentivized

• Needs a deduplication engine
• Needs to be able to perform bulk and automated data cleansing (unified data is messy)
• Needs to integrate with more tools
• Needs to be able to be tailored to different use cases, such as a retail/ecommerce use case, with RFM metrics

Incentivized

• Update Hassle - While this is also a positive in added security, every time they release an update to the app, you have to update. Since I only use the app occasionally, I have to update probably 1-in-4 times I open the app. It feels laborious as I will sometimes want to send a friend or colleague a message, who only uses Signal, and I open the app to message them and suddenly have to wait 2-4 minutes to update and install the new version.
• Not Getting Messages - You also no longer send and receive messages until you update. So if you have an outdated version of the app, nobody can get ahold of you and they might not know why you aren't responding.
• Re-Sync Via QR Code After Update - Every time I update, I have to re-sync my mobile app to the desktop. So it adds another added step. The forced updates and forced resync steps are quite laborious.

Incentivized

You don't really need support as the app just works. In the two plus years I've been using Signal, I've never needed to even look at support documentation to learn how to do something or have the app work. It just does. The best support is not needing to use it, and Signal meets that standard.

Incentivized

We had initially identified Segment as a solution due to the number of integrations they supported. The problem is that with Segment we would have still had to build and maintain a database along with query tools. Overall Hull emerged as a better starting point for us

Incentivized

The closest competitor we've found for Signal is Telegram. We do use Telegram with some clients and individuals who prefer it. Unfortunately, in this climate where there is no clear winner and a lot of diversity in applications, if you work with a lot of clients you're going to have to install a whole suite of instant messaging apps. Still, given the choice, we prefer Signal over its competitors, specifically for applications where high security is a concern.

Incentivized

• Positive: No longer asking engineering for customer activity data
• Positive: Allowing additional data integrations for where our customer activity data can be seen

Incentivized

• I reach people who I need to more quickly.
• It is a free service.
• It provides my clients confidence in keeping things confidential that need to be.

Incentivized