Segment Reviews

At its core, the promise is unified user-level analytics. And that's delivered.

On top of that though, is a product that technical leads are usually ok with, since it saves them time and resources as well. It's hard to argue against the cost/benefit, and the possibility of building your own with their open source repos is always there.

I think the pricing model is an issue for businesses with a lot of anonymous traffic if they want to use the managed analytics.js though Segment.

There are other options in terms of products you can pay for, but doing it yourself using the open source tools made available by Segment is also an option.

Paying for Segment is still a great choice, and a no brainer for businesses past a particular size.

Segment is great when you have a way to identify your users. If you have a lot of anonymous traffic you will not get the most benefit out of Segment.

As a consultant, it's a very interesting tool because it brings business, marketing and technical teams together.

The core promise to each of those groups is already a huge benefit ( Business: unified analytics & data, Marketing: faster/better/more relevant personalised comms, Technical: the last 3rd party API you'll integrate).

But, apart from that, a lot of synergies and catalysts for growth have come from these teams being able to work together and have a common ground for making/discussing/weighing up decisions.

The language specific APIs are very well documented and once your app is hooked up properly, the plug and play nature of destinations is super useful for piloting different tools. I really like how clean segment can keep code compared to implementing 3 or 4 tool-specific APIs.

I wish the debugger kept track of more history so I could go back further than 40 events without using a destination to record it. Some of the tool-specific features are not supported compared to using their tool-specific APIs.

For most use cases, Segment will be great. However if you choose an analytics tool and then decide to implement it using Segment, make sure that the features you chose the tool for are supported. For example, one of our tool-specific APIs supports real time logged in users/time in app, but Segment's API does not.

Once you need more than one tool that relies on events from your application, segment makes sense. The single API for multiple destinations keeps the code clean. And the turnaround from deciding on a tool to the tool providing value or realizing a tool is not useful becomes very small.

I like the way it integrates with any other analytics and marketing tools and seemingly collect and pass on the full customer data. I was also impressed by the price and ease of implementation.

For the purpose that Segment fulfills, i don't see any faults or lack of features. All that was needed is there pre-packed and ready.

You have to try Segment, it is the tool to tie all your user data.

I needed to tie user data with its session data in an easy way and have it passed on to other analytic tools and marketing tools to properly analyze conversions, the path to conversions, session details and so on. Segment was essential in tying user data with session, now each session corresponds to a specific user with all its historical data and not just an anonymous number.

segment is great to have .a standard API to have the dev team build tracking against. It handles it all for you. It also support server-side tracking instead of loading a dozen sdks client side!

segment's cloud mode means it uses API calls to send data to your destinations (like salesforce), so be careful with your API limits!

Billing is based on tracked users, even anonymous ones, so it is a lot more costly to use it for sites/apps with a large portion of anonymous users since that will inflate your costs. Our usecase is mainly handling logged-in user activity so we derive a lot of use from it.

de-coupling dev implementation from data ETL processes.

The core value of Segment is the ability to write one integration and have it pipe to any analytics tool you want to use now, and easily sub in and remove new tools in the future.

I am not responsible for looking at the costs but I have heard that it is very expensive once you hit scale.

Evaluate if Segment is only needed for providing a level of abstraction over multiple analytics tools, if it is there may be less expensive ways of achieving the same outcome. Their advanced functionality (SQL based personas) are uniquely valuable though.

We are using segment to send analytics events to legacy data warehouses as well as a new data warehouse and some data viz tools. Having one integration reduces engineering resources needed to hook up all integrations for every new feature, and only worry about sending events to Segment, everything else will flow where it needs to after that.

Only have to code once and then you can toggle on/off integrations. It's awesome! Nearly ever major product is incorporated into it so it very helpful. They also have some really great debugging tools for figuring out what events are firing and what aren't.

It's can be pricey for B2C sites or high traffic sites since they look at visitors. A high number of unidentified visitors can add up in terms of price. Also, New features always seam to be costly add-ons instead of included in core product.

Look at the number of site visitors because that dramatically affects pricing. Also, look at the number of integrations you want to setup. Before implementing highly suggest a data plan and event naming convention.

It is very useful if you are using multiple services and don't want to constantly update site code. From a developer perspective and data consistency perspective, it's an amazing tool!

I've integrated Segment into multiple projects in different languages and environments. It is incredibly easy to use both their snippets and libraries; the documentation for their platforms has also improved significantly over the last two years. The customer support has also been incredibly responsive, even with very technical/implementation specific queries. I appreciate that we can get all the raw events in our own Redshift cluster, letting us perform powerful internal analysis separate from their data analytics integrations.

Not so much dislike, but I would like to see more support for tracking non-user entities (e.g. an action taken by an organization, which would also have organizational identify calls). Group calls help work around this use case, but feel like a band-aid. As many of their integrations don't support this entity concept though, it's an understandable deficiency.

Piping analytics events from mobile apps, web apps, backend APIs, websites. Tracking key events across our infrastructure and identifying users at both the known and anonymous level. We don't have to expend engineering resources for every new integration we'd like to try, in many cases, it is as simple as flicking a toggle. We also use Segment to pipe and format events into chatops (Slack) that are high priority, which would otherwise take custom engineering work and deployments.

If there is an integration for a service, segment is a huge time saver. I don't need to implement any additional javascript snippets or change any other code in order to add new services.

I wish there were more options for plans, somewhere between the team plan (max. 7 seats) and the big enterprise plans.

Though the API documentation is easy to read some more explanations and examples could be of help.

Google Analytics integration could be explained a bit more.

Check available integrations first. In case of Google Analytics do some research first if every use case and features you wish to use with Google Analytics is supported and ask segment for support.

No changes in the code are necessary to integrate new services. Just activate the integration and you're done. Plugging in a data warehouse is very simple, this way we can provide all tracking data to our analysts.

Easy integration with dozens (hundreds?) of services and they continue to add valuable features to improve the core product without making it bloated. It's clear they listen to their customers and pay attention to their own metrics. Because of their attentiveness to their roadmap and customer value I have confidence in using the product going forward.

Initially when we were setting it up some variable assignments were tricky to align between various third party products, but that's been more a learning challenge than any fault of Segment.

Try it out and you'll likely not go back to having multiple includes in your app

Since late 2015 I've used Segment to easily test and implement a variety of services that normally would need to go through the team's sprint cycle one-by-one just to be able to evaluate them. This has allowed our marketing automation and funnel optimization efforts to be super-nimble and responsive to user activity.

The onboarding process - Segment has clearly spent a lot of time perfecting the process of getting up and running with multi-platform analytics & data warehousing. In a matter of a day I had integrated analytics into an application, shared that with multiple services, and routed it to our data warehouse.

The Team plan is fairly priced for what you get, but it's a big jump up for the (our) simple initial use case of setting up multiple environments for a single application, or sending analytics data from multiple related platforms.

For a startup, Segment allows developers to focus on building the application without costly distractions. Segment's data warehousing has saved us a ton of what would have been costly data systems architecture time. The flexibility to leverage any existing analytics platform as our needs evolve is an excellent value. The analytics.js API is very well designed and has been painless to incorporate into our React / Redux app (thanks to the redux-segment library).

Huge, huge time saver to deploy event analytics, and they get all the details right.

Nothing. This is one of the best single-service offerings I've seen in a long time.

If you have a wide top of funnel and cost is an issue, try omitting the javascript snippet from your main landing page.

Segment has totally nailed it. It just doesn't make sense to do this yourself anymore.

Here's some of the things I used to have to build for clients before Segment.

- Native, rich event collection libraries for Web, iOS, and Android.

- Asynchronous tracking that doesn't slow down page loads, is gentle on mobile links.

- No crashes. Ever. This gets its own bullet.

- Reliable & low-latency event collection servers. Cache controls, CORS. Dealing with spoofing, bot nets.

- Sensible schema for warehousing, synchronization/ETL.

Now I just set up Segment.

Incredibly easy to set up sources and destinations, and then funnel them appropriately. No coding required on my end, minimal coding required on the developer's ends. The documentation is amazing and well thought-out. Huge, huge time saver in deploying almost any kind of analytics.

It takes a while to wrap your head around how Segment works when you first get started.

Google Analytics documentation could be better - it's by far one of the most puzzling integrations (no fault of Segment; GA just has whack terms).

Segment just nails it. I don't have to keep annoying a developer to program stuff for me,.

Here's some of the things we used to do manually before Segment.

- Asynchronous tracking that doesn't slow down page loads, is gentle on mobile links. Gentle on most links, to be honest.

- No crashes. Ever. This gets its own bullet. There's been some concern about a single point of failure with Segment, but it's never failed on me and the one time there was a call delay, Segment offered free replays to everybody who suffered from it.

- Sensible schema for warehousing

Now the developers just set up Segment sources, and I set up the destinations.

Segment is great for quickly getting analytics data from your app, to wherever you need it to be. My favorite aspect about it is that you can rest easy knowing that you'll always be able to pivot to a new analysis tool or integration down the road, without having to rewrite any code

The setup process was poorly documented for single page apps. Once I got everything connected, it ran great, but setup ended up having more hoops and hurdles than I expected

If you're using Segment in an Angular project, I suggest using Angulartics: https://github.com/angulartics/angulartics2

It is great being able to take data from one source and instantly use it in multiple tools. My teammates are able to stick to their favorite tools with no extra setup on my end

We can try and switch to new tools without having to manage tons of different integrations/snippets/libraries.

As a software engineer segment allow us to really implement separation of concerns as we don't need to mix our code-base with different integration.

The marketing teams are free to do what they want with this tools, that's a pretty big win !

Basic use of all integrations are covered but when you want to delve into more advanced use it can be tricky.

The debug tools could use a more features.

We are sending events from our back-end and front-end. We use this events to feed multiple marketing tools to track and identify users. We also use segment to trigger action on some events like sending email with customer.io.

Over the past few years I've implemented segment with 3 different companies. Each time I've been very pleased with the ease of setup and maintenance. On top of all of that, Segment has continued to add more robust and valuable features (e.g. warehouses) with great customer service/help when needed.

I wish there was a 'native' analytics experience in the web product, at least as a baseline. I think there could also be some value in a workflows/transformations feature as well.

We are using segment to track user behavior in a centralized way while also making the data accessible to various tools we rely on. It has also been really valuable to use to consolidate user interaction data from multiple sources into a single warehouse.

We can bring information in from our application and send it out to a variety of sources to track metrics, usage, communications, conversions and more. Instead of littering our code with a dozen javascript libraries, links and other maintenance and loading headaches, we can consolidate it into calls that do what we specifically want.

Most of the integrations don't let you set filters for what events to send through without paying a lot for their business plan (not great for startups). For example, we don't always want to include our developers in analytics, but we need to write the filters on the app side as opposed to the segment side in order to facilitate this. In addition, integrating it into your app requires coding on your app side. It would be nice if you could feed selected info to segment and then create rules on the segment side as to what to do with it.

Unless you can do some scripting/coding, this product isn't for you. However, if this doesn't frighten you, Segment is a very powerful tool for spraying information across a variety of destinations.

We have improved page load time for our app while simultaneously allowing more systems to get our data, and to get the data in a structured way that we define.

Implement code once, and pass data to all kinds of destinations

It can get pricy depending on your business model

We use Segment to route data for analysis, workflow automation, experience personalization, and sales/marketing operations. Without Segment, we'd have to implement and support half a dozen (at least) other third-party tools in our code. Segment lowers the barrier to entry for using other tools.

The ease of integrating so many 3rd party services into one unified interface. everything is very well documented and "it just works"

The lack of dashboards to visualize and work on the data. although most of it is "fwd" to the specific integration which is built for the specific data, it's still something I would love to use as high level overview of the events

Just try it, it takes very short time for on-boarding. In addition, they are very friendly to SU coming from accelerators so it's worth checking

it is solving the many integrations that we have for many kind of analytics/marketing/emailing etc. it simplifies code management and unifies event tracking

If you quickly want to get started with connecting multiple tools together, Segment can help you get this done.

Some of the integrations that Segment supports don't follow the best practices of the specific vendors.

We're able to more quickly analyze data because the setup of Segment takes less time with multiple tools in your toolset than it would with a different setup.

Segment is a single key to many doors. Integrating segment to a website, you get 100+ ready-made integrations with all sorts of tools one may need to optimise the website using data-based approach

The G2 crowd wants me to write 40 symbols of what I dislike but I can not add any single word here. Just not applicable. =)

Do not just "consider", but go on and try!

A couple of years ago we realized that besides Google Analytics we want to use another analytical system, and after a thorough research we had a list of tools to try (Mixpanel, Kissmetrics, RJMetrics, Heap, Keen.io and others). But we had to try them all and choose the best one within the shortest possible time. Although all the integrations were quite straightforward, we would have spent months to implement them into our complex infrastructure..

Looking for a solution we stumbled upon a system called Segment. During the next month, we tried all the analytics tools in our list, which, as we thought, could improve our website’s conversion rate and thus significantly boost profits. All through Segment. Without a single line of integration code written.

-we created a conversion funnel with Mixpanel

-we made scroll and heat maps with CrazyEgg to visualize users’ behavior on our website.

-we made A/B testing with Optimizely, which allowed us to experiment with the website’s interface.

-We also tested different types of chatbots and finally chose the best one — UserVoice

-We went on to make some more well-thought improvements based on the data collected.

You know what? We were amazed at the results. www.x-cart.com conversion rate increased by 320%. Sales — by a factor of 3.

We have been so inspired that we have even written a case-study about this in X-Cart blog:

https://www.x-cart.com/blog/partnership-with-segment.html

- Customer support folks: they're just amazing, always willing to go as further as possible with good advises and problem-solving skills to tackle pretty much any doubt, problem or issue that a team might have when integrating Segment into a platform.

- SDKs available: most of the (if not all) web-oriented programming languages are included here, that's simply amazing and is really desirable when analyzing possible solutions for a platform.

- SDK Ruby: Simplicity has was always been an important goal of mine when dealing with web applications and third-party libraries, and I can attest the same from Segment products (E.g.: "analytics-ruby" ruby gem). From it's core instance methods to their API endpoints, once you read the Docs, you'll find all the information you need about how it should work and what to expect about it.

Sometimes I would go into Segment's Debugger tool to check some specific logs that I need, and whenever we have a lot of requests being triggered really close in time within each other, it's difficult to spot the right request to investigate since the debugger only stores the last X logs made from the platform, the rest of them are just not shown within the debugger.

Business problems solving with Segment: keeping track of Users and Companies and their actions from the moment they signup into the platform to every event triggered: Membership upgrades/downgrades, Purchases, Emails sent out, etc.

Benefits: Using Segment as a "universal proxy" across a wide variety of analytics/tracking tools is one of the best choices we made for our platform, primarily because it allow us to keep adding tools with a plug-and-play feel sometimes. Also Intercom's collaboration with Segment has been a game changer for us since we have all the data we need in 1 place and we can start extracting valuable information from that data.

The time you save & flexibility you gain from using Segment is really good - of course if you're running a very lightweight analytics stack (few 3rd party tools) it's not a software for you necessarily, but as your company grows and you add these tools Segment becomes invaluable. So i'd say invest early and reap the benefits later in either case :)

Not much tbh... maybe it'd be nice to cache the last 10 (20?) events per event if i wanted to look into them in the "debugger" mode instead of having to wait for new events to trickle in

We use segment with to pipe data to different apps (track/identify calls) plus their ETL product to load event data into redshift. Having a uniform way to implement analytics track calls is nice, and getting the ability to "turn on" data streams into pretty much any 3rd party app on the fly from the segment dashboard is very powerful

Helped us easily switch analytics vendors when one of them jacked up the prices on us to an unsustainable level. Within a matter of minutes, we were up an running with a new provider without having to deploy any code.

I wish the event replay feature was available without needing an enterprise plan. We lost over a year's worth of our data when we switched providers.

Give it a try, it is easy to set up and use and decide for yourself during the trial phase.

Easier to write maintainable analytics code; avoids lock-in with any particular analytics vendor; allows us to easily experiment with new analytics offerings

I use Segment in nearly every single one of the my analytics projects because it makes it easier to control where we send our data.

In a typical project, we will send event data to tools like Google Analytics, Mixpanel, Intercom, Facebook Ads, etc and Segment saves us the hassle of having to code these implementations individually.

It would super useful to be able to send that data to a service like Zapier which would then let us send that to another universe of tools like Google Sheets, CRMs, etc.

I would encourage any company to run the numbers on Segment.com. For most companies, this will be an added expenses on top of Mixpanel/Intercom/etc but the expense will be a small investment in options for the future.

-Ownership of our analytics data

-Reduce the cost of switching tools

-Simplify implementations by having a central API to interact with.

Nice debugger web-based tool, very helpful in my case. Simple API, at least there are no any issues to work with Segment from Drupal 8 application.

Actually, there are no any negative points to write about.

Pretty simple analytics tool to integrate with, pretty clear API, has an ability to communicate via JS or other high-level languages, including PHP. Very useful web-based debugger, nice design. I recommend choosing this product.

Basically, I'm a developer and I worked on Segment integration for the Drupal 8 site that we are developing for the client. They use Segment data to make some analytics investigations.