Segment reviews

Pluspunten

Segment have built a best in class data layer and data management tool.
The tool is easy to set up and creating destinations and understanding sources is simple.

Add the code for Web, Mobile or a data warehouse. Then enable product and marketing teams to enable and disable marketing and product tools easily.

The new personas feature is also incredibly powerful.

Make collecting analytics .track and .page and .identify easy.

Minpunten

Segment does make data easy and because of the quality of the tool it does come at a cost. The benefit is it does scale with you because the price plan works on MTUs. But it really depends on the size of your business.
Beware not to over enable and connect too much if you are not using it. This will add un-necessary load which can impact mobile page speed.

Pluspunten

- Intuitive UI.
- Event tester on the UI.
- Several client libraries.
- You can sync even your backdata, e.g. when setting up a new warehouse.
- Pricing is based on users not events.

Minpunten

- Custom schedule for synchronisation or event validation is only available in higher packages.
- Some integrations just don't support a moderately sophisticated setup. E.g. if you don't want 1 million API calls a day you should construct specific Segment calls to update Salesforce leads.

Pluspunten

Easy setup, Easier to collect data and send to warehouse. Integration with other tools is easy.

Minpunten

Not all integrations are seemless. Many integrations require client side app installation, which just reduces the code a bit. Once you start attracting decent users, it turns out to be expensive and need to look for alternative tools.

Pluspunten

It takes the burden off of our own teams to manage a slew of API integrations. This saves us a ton in developer costs in time, and makes it very easy to vet new tools for our analytics and marketing stacks.

Minpunten

Like any abstraction layer, not everything is plug-and-play. As you start to use more integrations, this becomes more complicated in it's own right, and you sometimes need to regress back to a standard API integration.

Pluspunten

The last tool to integrate with various apps. Write once and integrate infinitely.
Time saving is worthless and make your app load much faster.

Minpunten

Pricing is not small businesses friendly ;(
Would be great if we can write and view integrations comments from other users.
Please share future integration pipeline.

Pluspunten

Not sure how one can manage app and web tracking without Segment.
It quickly enables you to track millions of events and funnel it to the appropriate tools like advertising, analytics, salesforce ... without engineering power

Minpunten

The capacity to decide which events are sent to each vendors to limit data overusage

Pluspunten

3rd party integration is very good , ease of use and whole ecosystem

Minpunten

Pricing after free tier is very steep instead of restricting free tier on no of sources it should restrict on number of data points or MAU

Pluspunten

There's no single thing I like most about Segment. The mere power to connect all our web properties, product/platform touch points, and marketing campaigns into a central database is incredible, and that's what Segment is all about. It's the whole package that impresses me. Need to sort email interaction data into your database, while filtering out users who have engaged with your product in the last 48 hours, while tracking inbound clicks on your product pages? Yeah, Segment can do all that at the same time and way, way more.

I don't know how we did business before.

Minpunten

Segment has a steep learning curve. It took weeks to really come to grips with everything that Segment can do and how to do it. This is not a weakness, but just be prepared for a lengthy implementation period.

Pluspunten

- Implement tracking once, automatically and consistently send data to all downstream destinations
- Hundreds of integrations (and, with the recent Zapier integration, millions of possible combinations)
- Easy to understand pricing

Minpunten

- Integration implementation can vary widely. Documentation is usually thorough, but often confusing / complicated / out of date / (in the case of beta integrations) not accessible or non-existent
- At scale, I could see costs spiraling pretty rapidly

Pluspunten

Extreme flexibility with data. because segment is just a loudspeaker for your event tracking and analytics, it can be piped to any other platform. the problem with vertically integrated analytics tools is that they create a walled garden for your data. Segment prevents your data from being hoarded by allowing you to directly pipe it into your own data warehouse, for no extra cost.

Pluspunten

Easy to get all customer together.
Enables to get to own your data in raw format
Accessible via BI Tools like Tableau

Minpunten

Problems with mobile enviornment.
Setup takes time.

Pluspunten

+ works like a hub (midware software) for all you tracking events/properties
+ reliable
+ great monitoring
+ great retry policies if destination is down
+ good documentation
+ great support

Minpunten

- premium features like Event segmentation only on Enterprise plan (expensive)

Pluspunten

Segment is an amazing tool for gathering and data integration among different data sources and consumers. It allows to for easy setting up between multiple platforms with little to no code needed
Good and comprehensive documentation.

Minpunten

The debug tools could use more features and the initial implementation requires a slight learning curve.

Pluspunten

Segment creates a central hub for all of your analytics calls for any website or app. Instead of having to manually configure tons of analytics JavaScript libraries that all step on each other, Segment brings them all together to one place, with one central API for your customer and analytics data.

Minpunten

Segment is powerful but can get expensive at scale. That being said, nothing beats its easy syntax and seamless installation. It works really well all of the time.

Pluspunten

It's an invisible product that you don't interface with often, but it gets your data from one software synced to all the other ones including custom data points. Basically it's the easiest way to sync data from multiple apps and your own product/website.

Minpunten

None really. Some of their integrations are getting older . If you're in the enterprise, their data integrations basically only consist of BigQuery, PostgreSQL and Redshift which may be different than your existing data stack.

Pluspunten

This tool is like none other and is AMAZING...if you are struggling with what analytic tool to use...use this one to implement your events and then skip the data off to any tool with dev involvement. SWEET!!!

Minpunten

There aren't really any cons here...this product hits the mark in every way!

Pluspunten

It’s a great hub to connect all your tooling with each other and manage events and other analytics.

Minpunten

It’s quite expensive. And setting up things might be a bit tricky if you’re a newcomer in the world of analytics/JavaScript.

Pluspunten

The number of integrations it provides both for source and destinations

Minpunten

very expensive for startups specially to use add on products

Pluspunten

Centralise analytics data, both sent by client and server sides of my applications, in a unique data store. Our data science analysts can consume and work on that data easily.

Minpunten

There is not client server library available for Elixir or Erlang, my team need to use a third party library to communicate with Segmento.io analytics API.

Pluspunten

Easy to set up, saves developer time from installing 30 different libraries and maintaining those libraries.

Minpunten

It gets really expensive really quickly. You'll be surprised how quickly you hit your event limit often, the tradeoff means it's actually worth having some technical debt.

Pluspunten

It's quite easy to connect your tools together. UI is very intuitive. For a quick solution out of the box, Segment is almost perfect.

Minpunten

Pricing. It can get extremely expensive and extremely fast. Some basic functionalities seem to be missing (such as "select/deselect all" when choosing what to connect). Support never reached back when I contacted them... It would also be nice to be able to sync all historical data (it seems to be possible but as I mentioned before, support never reached out when I contacted them).

Pluspunten

Segment has some of the strongest and most useful lists of integrations for any SaaS product. Hooking all sorts of data sources into one javascript implementation and then to channel it into your selected analytics system is an oversimplified explanation of what makes this product great.

Minpunten

There are some limitations that aren't on segment's side of things. Make sure you check out each integration as to how it plays with Segment - especially data sources!

Pluspunten

I love the concept of Segment - write data once, funnel it to multiple places for any type of analytics you might imagine. Works seamlessly. Very stable and reliable platform.

Minpunten

At first it can be slighlty overwhelming, but once you get a hang of it - you're not going to regret investing your time.

Pluspunten

Easy to setup, great customer support, excellent choice of services, simply amazing.

Minpunten

Renaming events once they're already sent would be an awesome feature, although I'm not quite sure if it can be done at all.