Segment Reviews

What I like the most is that, while segment works as an intermediate bridge between the actual site and 3rd party services and platforms, it offers also a real-time monitor so you can see and understand all the process and improve your funnels. Also, it can help you better organize how they work and if everything is in place. Amazing tool.

One of the -unfortunate- dislikes (and this was expected actually) is that in order to keep this flexibility, there's a loss of functionality when it comes to 3rd party platforms working with Segment. But this is a small price to pay, compared with what you get at the end. Also, one other thing is that although they have a great Customer Care department, when it comes to support on the communication between segment and the 3rd party services, the guys usually prompt you to contact the other company. Although this is expected, still, it would be nice to provide a first level answers before forcing you to go to the other service in order to get the answers you're looking for.

You need to make sure you understand the combinations sources <-> destinations. As soon as you understand the way it works, you'll be able to do any kind of combinations. Imho, that's the key for a correct installation and configuration of segment.

Having an intermediate platform like segment when communicating with 3rd party services, means that you can easily switch between 3rd party services, with minimum changes in your actual code. The only thing you need to make sure is that the selected section is supported in segment. But that's one of the great things, the amazing support.

Segment:

- Is very easy to implement

- Has multitude of tools can be then added or removed from their dashboard, from marketing to business intelligence

- Just keeps getting better

One of the best features you can get from Segment is getting your data back; that mean that a lot of analysis can be done manually by someone with some data science experience without having to pay for more expensive business analysis tools. And the data is there for you to keep, and even transform, and then can be send to other tools that might not even exists yet! All because Segment takes care of the integration, retrieval, and delivery of that data.

The pricing can be steep depending on the size of your company and stage. They are very good to work with, though, so properly explaining your use case, what you expect from it, and what budget you have in mind can get you a long way into getting a good price.

Regardless of your company size you should give it a shot; even for personal use is useful, and for large enterprises there will definitely be use cases.

Consulting.com has a small engineering team and an even smaller analytics one, as the sole Product Manager, with Segment we have been able to juggle analysis for business critical decisions; integration of tools required by marketing, sales, etc.; and a growing company doing something different in its usual market.

Segment has allowed us to stay nimble, support most of our use cases, and even build important features from our roadmap in a fraction of the time they would have taken without it.

It took me a little bit to realize the full power of Segment but after I did I fell in love. I always felt a little guilty asking a developer to add a snippet of code so that I could test out a cool new tool that I thought could help our business. When I asked them to install segment I thought I was just asking for another script that I would evaluate and eventually remove. That was the last time I ever sent a script.

I love being able to simply implement different tracking tools in our web app, testing our products and choosing the ones that will help us achieve our business goals all without ever having to send a snippet of code to a developer.

Setting up tracking by logins was a little tricky and the documentation did not help too much.

Additionally setting it up for Staging, Development and Production branches is not too easy and we still do not have it set up properly.

Great product. It's free to give it a try so what is stopping you?

We are able to evaluate how people use the app, where they get stuck how often they are using it, what pages/ features are being used and how often.

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.

Once you have Segment implemented in your codebase, it's extremely easy to add new destinations via their GUI to pass that data to other tools, e.g. Appcues for personalization, Amplitude for analysis, Zapier for automation, or Snowflake for warehousing. Some tools allow you to install via Segment, meaning you don't need to inject any additional JavaScript on your site. Whenever you can get something done without code, it's a product manager superpower.

My main complaint seems to be one that Segment is already aware of and working to address. We have the ability to filter based on events, but it sounds like they want to add filters for property at some point as well. That's the beauty of SaaS—the product gets better over time.

We use Segment to implement our event tracking, which in turn powers our funnel analysis and our persona definitions, among other things. Segment events help populate our sales pipeline and allow us to track key conversions and cycle times as well.

1. Easy to see the raw data from the debugger

2. Easy to disable events from sending to integrations

3. Love the concept of the Personas

1. Don't have integration with some popular tools like Pendo, AppsFlyer

2. Don't provide a way to bulk disabled events for one integration

3. For some analytical tools, still required mini SDK, it's against the concept of Segment, such as integrating with Firebase tool

If you are using several analytical tools in one app, Segment can make it easy!

We usually used several analytical tools to take advantage of their cool features, but it requires to integrate their SDK and this takes much dev effort and make our app size big. With Segment, we only need to integrate one SDK to use most of the analytical tools with easy setup.

It would be great if we can control the raw data by ourselves, we can do further analytics.

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.

Rapid development and implementation of Segment is probably the main feature. The UI is easy to interact with to see all of your sources and destinations, even for very large installs. Being able to quickly validate that data is sending with sample payloads is an excellent feature. Customer service is king and this company has it down cold. Anytime I have a question or an issue, they're ready to help.

Salesforce functionality is currently limited to standard objects. If you need to work with custom objects, you need to use another tool to harvest segment events and feed them into the custom object in Salesforce. The UI is still a work in progress with some small annoyances but nothing that I would consider a showstopper. They're constantly enhancing their UI so I'm willing to live with minor bugs.

Trial and usage data in platform stored in our CRM and analyzed in a few different BI tools. Having all of our data in one place has been a godsend. In the past we had data all over the place and it would take days or weeks to get a good picture of what was happening in our business. Now we have real-time information fed into one place and can analyze it in a BI tool quickly, Amplitude or Chartio.

I started using segment in 2013 when it was called segment.io and was just a better replacement for dozens of js snippets I wanted to add to my web apps. In the course of years, I found it can offer much more including:

- Zero hassle integration especially for eCommerce, multi-touchpoint (say website + app) services

- A true productivity booster especially for developers for debugging what is wrong with a specific integration (say Google Analytics)

- Organizer of tracking plan, adding uniformity and consistency to all events you track

- Simply becoming the core of all analytics data flows you need

Their price is not cheap. However, if you take into account the intangible future costs like developer costs to enable/disable an integration or debug an existing integration then it might be justifiable.

It makes the life of integration with hundreds of services easy but this doesn't come as a black magic. Your developers must read Segment documents well first, understand their integration modes and standards versus custom events.

Following their engineering blog is also highly recommended.

The community is not A-grade yet but you always can ask your questions in the forum.

One more thing: don't think about segment's way: just start by designing a business focused, solid tracking plan that answers your marketing questions. From there you can go backward and apply the best practices recommended by Segment. Don't re-invent the wheel if there is a semantic event (e.g. for Ecommerce) provided by Segment: just use it. Make sure your team read the well-written documents first.

Centralizing all analytics integration in a simple, manageable platform. And with new Segment Personas, it helps a lot by creating much better audiences and feeding those to marketing automation tools.

We use the Connections component of Segment to track the eventstream across our two products. We have two UWP apps, iOS app, web app, our cloud, and marketing website sending data to the majority of our sales and marketing stack. Having one library to maintain on all these sources is super easy for the engineering team to manage and makes metrics components of feature briefs understandable in everyone's language. Not to mention that we can turn on and off data destinations to try them at a whim.

When enabling an integration/destination on a web property, the Segment script asynchronously loads destination scripts, and parameters for those scripts are configurable in the Segment web UI.

Another great element is that Segment pays great attention to the details of each destination, so that the configuration is as easy as possible and we don't have to compromise our usage of the destination because of a 'middle-man'.

I'm looking forward to trying the Protocols component of Segment as we bulk out our engagement events even more, and Personas in the mid-future for dictating user groupings to our end-destinations.

Big fan. I could talk about Segment for days given how much I hear people struggling with this sort of stuff. Thanks guys!

The Segment product team "cannot" turn on and off features like event filtering on a per-customer basis - it must be tied to a new pricing tier upgrade.

As a growing company, we needed to be able to test and try both varying stack technologies and processes as we go. Segment enables us to do that, so that we can continue to move fast.

Segment has also meant that our 25 person team (a product-heavy team), across two software products, can be on the same page with the mechanics around event tracking. We speak the same language.

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.

The number of connections, the ease of setting everything up, and their commitment to keep everything up-to-date. It's a great platform.

Honestly, logging in is annoying b/c Chrome Password Manager and Lastpass don't recognize the form fields, so they won't auto-populate with my credentials. Otherwise - it's great!

I think they have a free trial version - give it a shot. It's easy to setup and manage your data.

We're dumping our marketing data (website, hubspot, UX, ads, etc), sales data, help desk, and finance platform into a data warehouse so we can build a custom DMP for various business functions.

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

Easy to set-up both for server-side event tracking, and client-side. Connects in seconds to various 3rd party tools for analytics, marketing, tracking, support, and more. It's made it super easy for us to test new services by turning integrations on and off without any additional needed development.

When they changed their pricing to MTUs, it made it extremely pricey for websites and apps with anonymous users. It'd be way better if pricing was based on the number of events, and not tracked users. If your website sees a ton of anonymous users, be ready for a high cost.

We do occasionally go back and forth trying to decide if Segment is worth the cost, or if developing an internal service that sends data to any new services would be a better use of time and costs.

We use Segment to track users and send data to various analytics tools, like Amplitude, KeenIO, and a few others. We've removed tracking of anonymous users, and only load up Segment for a specific type of logged in user in order to reduce costs.

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.

The visual query creation tools have made it incredibly easy to create very complex joins across many data sources an step through the logic later on when we want to make changes.

5:35pm downtimes have on occasionally coincided with deadlines where we were crushing to get out some numbers.

Unless you know exactly why you needs something harder and more complex to use for creating charts, you owe it to yourself to give this a try first.

We used Segment to create a huge variety of operational dashboards, including key business metrics for the CEO, user social behaviors, and even to identify users of our platform that built up their own large audiences. Identifying our influential customers has a huge help to the marketing team.

With segment up and running, we've been able to quickly implement and evaluate marketing tools without the need to consult or loop in developers. Limiting that bottleneck has helped us move faster and sleep better know that the data feeding into our tech stack is as reliable as possible.

The initial implementation can be a little tricky, but in the long run, Segment saves a ton of time and headaches.

Syncing marketing and product-specific events/properties to third-party tools. Quickly launching, testing, and evaluating new tools.

Simple, easy to use and a cost per MTU (monthly trackable user) versus raw data. This means we can build deep, rich sets of information about our customers while only being charged based upon the number of customers.

Segment's own dashboard is quickly overwhelmed with so much data and it is really necessary to use another tool to consume and work with the data collected.

Customer behavioral tracking and flow across multiple properties and systems. Insights that we haven't had in the past.

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.

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

It's easy to implement multiple different types of analytics and advertisement solutions into our site. It's less maintenance work for our engineers to deal with issues and keep things up to date. We can use their REST API to send data to their server without needing to host their code on our side, which is great from a security perspective.

- We can only send user removal requests (i.e. for GDPR) with user IDs, not other identifiable information.

- Our implementation of Segment+Mixpanel is complex enough that we need to load the Mixpanel clientside library alongside using Segment's REST API in order to get the appropriate distinct ID in some situations. This is because we use Mixpanel for both logged out and logged in users, and we're trying to connect those user profiles in Mixpanel as much as possible. This is more because of Mixpanel than Segment.

It'd be nice if we could copy integration settings, e.g. mixpanel configuration, from one source/site to another would be great. Sometimes we have multiple sources, one with just Mixpanel, and one with Mixpanel, ad trackers, etc, for certain purposes - part of our site needs ad trackers, the rest doesn't or isn't allowed to from a security perspective.

Tracking user behavior in order to report on and improve user growth, user stickiness, and revenue.

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.

Huge fan of the ability to send product event data everywhere (including sales tools)

No major complaints. Once you're up and running, the product is fantastic!

Sending data from our product and other sources to all of our most important destinations on the sales and marketing side.

I think segment is best for early stage companies who want to test out lots of other services... One integration allows you to pipe your data pretty much anywhere you want. It keeps the codebase organized and uncluttered and lets developers focus on building features. They also have some cool features like self hosted data warehouses that can be pretty powerful too.

My only issue with Segment is that it's not really necessary unless you're trying to remove all implementation decisions away from engineers when building an ETL pipeline... And also, unless you really want to push your data to a ton of places (which you probably shouldn't care about), then there's no reason to use it. Lastly using Segment restrains you to their implementation and you don't always get to leverage more advanced integration features from external services you would get from direct implementation.

I would only invest time in using it if you don't have any engineers on your team with ETL experience, or if you want to test out a lot of data services at once without having to fuss with implementation details.

We use Segment right now to pipe our event based application data to a few different services including google analytics, tag manager, heap, and customerio

Segment is the only analytics event provider that lets you easily and cheaply take your event data into your own environment. Other ones either charge a ton (GA) or make it really hard to export data.

I recommend Segment to every startup I advise.

They need to build more sources. Many of the services they have integrations with could be great sources.

Event tracking and exporting data from other services (example would be zendesk). The event tracking is easy to implement and I love that you can export it to your own data warehouse.

We had started with Mixpanel, and the transition to Segment was really painless. The JS implementation used roughly the same structure, so it only took a couple of hours to re-instrument our whole app.

Very little to dislike here. In some ways there is nothing sexy about Segment, but it gets the job done and stays out of your way.

Particularly if you are starting a new product, or just adding metrics to a product, I recommend starting with Segment.

There are a few things that it doesn't do (for example, Mixpanel.Union and a few others). But, it is easy to implement those calls manually, as Segment just wraps mixpanel code.

We have multiple metrics platforms in operation (Intercom, Mixpanel, GA, and others). Makes it trivial to keep all our metrics unified.

How fast are the technical responses and how complete is the product documentation.

The billing module is not the best. We would like to pay via credit card but wire transfers are ok too.

Use segment to build every analytics around the house. The Redshift Warehouse is a must!

Customer Analytics, Business Intelligence, Product Metrics.

Infinite flexibility. Instead of going to your developer every time you want a new tool installed, Segment can be installed once and new tools can be added as your needs scale.

Being able to measure events in analytics tools AND being able to trigger marketing automation workflows from the same events is powerful. Marketing can focus on what happens and fine tuning the funnel without the involvement of too many development resources.

I do wish the pricing was based more on usage and not on tiers. There are times where the upgrade to a higher tier of Segment will cost more than the integration itself.

Install Segment's client side (analytics.js) library as the first part of any project. The cost may seem a bit high, but if it saves developer time it's worth the cost.

Integrating multiple marketing tools without having to harass my developer every time marketing gets shiny object syndrome.

Quick and easy way to plug any analytics tool into any JavaScript application. My company's marketing people love mixpanel, our devs prefer keen.io, some people are using KISSmetrics, but with segment everybody's happy.

The 2 big problems I've had are that analytics.js doesn't work with react native and that there's no easy way to filter events from segment's UI: if you want certain events to only go to certain sources, you need to implement that in your code.

Use it. Stop copy/pasting tracking snippets.

We now have a central solution for tracking user behavior and app performance, which makes it easy for us to dump data into whichever analytics tool works best - mixpanel, keen.io, amazon redshift, etc.

Segment has a clear value proposition to translate events across the third party tools connected in the marketing stack. It saves a LOT of time.

For some reasons we still spent a lot of time getting to know it and we're still struggling with a couple of apps.

Segment is actually a must if you're running more sophisticated SaaS business. It's going to save you a lot of time but you have to make it right at the start.

Connecting marketing stack tools together.

In less than a minute you can connect a new third party tool to your app – no developers required (in most cases).

There could be more straightforward docs on best practices for setting up sending analytics to Segment.

Segment is a no-brainer for companies building their marketing or analytics stacks.

It now takes us minutes instead of days to try out new tools. We set up analytics track, identify, and page calls once, and Segment takes care of funneling the relevant information to each connected app – including formatting the data properly.

Makes it really easy to track and move some of the most difficult data for analytics.

It can be a bit expensive if you don't plan your implementation well.

Track everything really well from the start, don't take a long time to get started and slowly implement. The longer you wait, the less data you have.

Marketing ROI is the primary reason why I use Segment, but it also achieves most product analytics we need.

Fast and easy solution for analytics task.

Small UI and UX issues in the web dashboard.

Every startup should use it.

- Easy setup

- Turn on and turn off new analytics services in the dashboard

- Real-time debbuger

I can enable and disable integrations with a variety of platforms without having to edit my codebase - it's actually pretty amazing how simple it is.

There is no way to review an integration - it would be cool to be able to say "Segment + Intercom is a great experience, it works as well as integrating directly" or "You lose some flexibility if you integrate through Segment".

We integrate with a variety of platforms, so it's nice to be able to only have to deal with one API.

Benefits realized would be saved time.

One of the simplest, but most effective products we utilize to understand the early growth of our unconventional startup, Segment is an essential ingredient in the mix.

Wait, there is something to dislike? News to me.

A tool like Legalize Trees comes to life by connecting with a well understood community of committed folks. Segment allows us to connect appropriately, in an authentic voice well received by a diverse community of Americans nationwide.

Segment is really easy to integrate. We are using Segment's client side (browser) module and Segment's official NodeJS module which just works, optimized, overall very easy to use.

The dashboard is also really nice. I use the debugger a lot.

Integration with 3rd party analytics is also easy (we use Periscope Data) and straightforward.

The best part of all: I love reading the articles about analytics provided by Segment. It really helps me as a developer to understand more about analytics and the best practices in general. I'd love to see more of this.

Customer support is also great, though I might be a little bit biased because Wesley Robinson answered my questions all the time through Slack.

Not dislike, but maybe just some improvements:

We implemented our own offline-cache analytics wrapper on top of Segment's NodeJS library. I think it'd be great in the future if this is built in directly in the library itself.

I'd love to see more articles regarding analytics best practices in general, and maybe what is possible and what is not possible in general, or maybe some other techinques to solve a specific problem. For example, I currently capture the state of how a user flows through this particular modal. For every interaction, I send to Segment the state of "button clicked" on that modal. I'm not sure if this is a good idea, and I can see this kind of stateful data is hard to analyze in general.

Very easy to use. Multiple official libraries in popular programming languages.

We are sending analytics from our web front end, iOS/Android app, and our Electron app. We are a VR business, so in the future, we are thinking to send analytics directly from the Unity environment itself. Currently, Unity has its own analytics, but not as flexible as we want it to be.