Segment is a customer data platform that helps engineering teams at companies like Tradesy, TIME, Inc., Gap, Lending Tree, PayPal, and Fender, etc., achieve time and cost savings on their data infrastructure, which was acquired by Twilio November 2020. The vendor says they also enable Product, BI, and Marketing teams to access 200+ tools (Mixpanel, Salesforce, Marketo, Redshift, etc.) to better understand and optimize customer preferences for growth— all integrations are pre-built and…
$120
per month
Zapier
Score 8.9 out of 10
N/A
The Zapier Automation Platform designed to integrate data between web apps. It is scaled for small to mid-sized businesses, with a functional but limited free version of the program.
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
Zapier is perfect for simple integrations and setting up generally low-volume accounts that require very little configuration and maintenance. For a distributed structure where a client/outside party is responsible for billing, it’s easy to create an account, put them on a low-cost plan, configure a simple integration and teach them how to alter the setup. Its webhook-based setup is perfect for many simple use cases and there’s no reason to use a more complex or expensive solution.
However, if you have integrations that are increasingly complex (involve parsing, multiple non-linear steps, the integration of non-native APIs), significant in overall volume/data or require additional features (time delays for API limits), Zapier likely isn’t your best choice. Other integration platforms offer higher levels of customization and capability, though they’re typically significantly more complex and expensive.
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.
Ease of use - multiple people in the organization can set up and run Zaps per their specific use cases without much training.
Connectivity - Zapier is able to connect to multiple applications we use on a regular basis.
Functionality - Zapier provides embedded functionality within the app itself (email, data conversion), but also appropriate triggers and actions for apps it connects to.
Versatile - Zapier can execute complicated and simple tasks and thus has many use cases.
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.
Zapier is very user-friendly. They walk you through each step of the zap-building process in an orderly and easy to understand way. Each step of the zap is tested before moving onto the next step. For simple zaps, you can have them up and running within minutes. For more complicated zaps, it may take some experimentation, but Zapier is there to help you troubleshoot.
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.
Before we purchased Zapier, I contacted support and asked them if Zapier could support my intended workflow (this is actually a selection on their support form - awesome). Within 2 hours, I was contacted by a support team member who seemed sure it would work, but granted me premium access for 2 weeks to try it out for myself. Sure enough, it did! Ever since then, support has replied rapidly to any problems I have experienced and answered my questions within a few sentences.
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).
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.
