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Segment vs RudderStack: Features, Pricing, and Reviews

As a SaaS company, you’re probably already familiar with Customer Data Platforms (CDPs) by now. As I had mentioned in a previous article (where I compared Segment to mParticle) CDPs are essential for large businesses that want to have accurate and consistent data, and for businesses that don’t have enough time or resources to build an in-house warehouse from the ground up.

However, most businesses have trouble selecting the right CDP as each company requires different kinds of features and integrations. While Segment may be one of the more popular choices for SaaS companies, there are several alternatives you could consider, such as RudderStack. Though RudderStack is less than four years old, it has proven itself to be a trustable and affordable tool for various businesses.

In this article, I’ll outline both Segment’s and RudderStack’s advantages and disadvantages so that you can make an informed decision.

Segment

Founded in 2011, Segment helps businesses understand, analyze and manage customer data from various sources. Segment is made to serve B2B service providers’ data analytics needs while helping them to get a holistic view of customer behavior on different platforms. By using this data, businesses can measure and work on important SaaS marketing metrics including customer lifetime value, cost of acquisition, and customer engagement. For this reason, Segment is one of the most popular CDPs for cloud-based apps.

Segment’s features are categorized based on three needs (marketing, product, and engineering) and four product types, which are:

  1. Connections: include the features designed to collect, unify and analyze data from multiple platforms. This category includes features such as Data Debugger, Replay and Functions.
  2. Protocols: include the features designed to ensure data accuracy, such as the Automatic Data Validation feature.
  3. Personas: include the features designed to create customer profiles and personalize interactions, such as the Journeys and Identities features.
  4. Twilio Engage: similar to personas, this category includes features that can customize marketing campaigns according to the channel and customer base. It’s the result of the combination of the Customer Engagement Platform Twilio and the CDP Segment.

Note that some of these features are only included in Segment’s Business plan, which is the most expensive of the three plans that it offers.

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Segment’s Features

Though Segment has a long list of features, the most popular ones are:

  • Functions: this feature allows you to connect new platforms with the minimal amount of code, transform data in the form of webhooks into events, and use built-in templates to make custom integrations faster.
  • Journeys: this feature lets you create customized journeys for your customers. This is especially useful when you’re trying to optimize customer engagement for your platforms.
  • Privacy: the controls under this feature make it possible for you to make a risk assessment based on data safety, making GDPR compliance easier.

Here are some other features of Segment that make it a popular choice:

  • Account Based Marketing
  • Data Capture, Transfer, Integrations and Masking
  • Data Connectors
  • Engagement Tracking
  • Experience Management
  • Match & Merge
  • Recommendations
  • Relationship Mapping
  • Reporting/Analytics
  • Target Account Identification
  • Website Personalization

Segment’s Reviews

Segment has 53 reviews and an average of 4.6/5 on Capterra‘s review page. This tool was rated 4.4/5 based on its ease of use and 4.3/5 for its customer service.

Reviews from customers state that:

The ability to centralize all data in the same tool is the best. You can forget about setting so many different tracking tools and pixels in your web or app.

“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.”

…third parties implementation sometimes lack some essential feature that would become a hard blocker during the integration.”

Segment Pricing

Segment offers three different pricing plans, including a free plan for up to 1000 visitors per month. The other two plans are called Team and Business: the Team plan includes a free trial and starts from $120 per month, and the Business plan, which has customized pricing, includes a demo.

Screenshot from segment.com

RudderStack

A customer data infrastructure founded in 2019, RudderStack is a new data management solution in the industry. This CDP only needs to be integrated once it’s possible to route data from different platforms with ease from then on.

RudderStack is also open-source and self-hosted, meaning that developers and data engineers can see how RudderStack is working behind the scenes. While Segment is UI-based, RudderStack is API-based. This makes it a more attractive solution for data managers who want to integrate this tool into their existing workflow.

Similar to Segment, RudderStack was designed for large businesses with the aim of helping with scalability. The features of RudderStack have one of these three functions:

  1. Collect: RudderStack has real-time event streaming. It’s also possible for businesses to create their own data pipelines and collect data from their cloud based tools and databases.
  2. Transform: one of the problems Segment’s customers dealt with was working with bad data. RudderStack enables businesses to manipulate their data as necessary, which includes masking and blocking data for privacy purposes.
  3. Activate: This label is for the integrations of Rudderstack, which include Google Analytics, Android SDK, HubSpot, Zendesk, Heap, and more. Similar to Segment, RudderStack has a long list of integrations.

RudderStack’s Features

The features of RudderStack that really make it a good Segment alternative are:

  • The transformations feature: Segment requires an extra fee for the data transformations feature, but RudderStack provides users with this solution for no additional payment. The custom JavaScript functions of RudderStack help customers ensure that events go to the right destinations, and let them improve customer profiles once they’ve been created.
  • Comprehensive dashboards: you can view your real time event stream on the dashboard, and this is possible even for large businesses that work with countless different platforms and destinations. However, you have to have some data engineering knowledge to fully grasp all of the information on the dashboard which is why you should probably look into dashboard software if that’s important for you.

A list of RudderStack’s features includes:

  • Event Tracking
  • Segment API Compatibility
  • Unlimited sources and destinations
  • Docker/Kubernetes Install
  • Community support
  • Event replay
  • Multi-node Cluster
  • Live Debuggers
  • Multiple Hosting Options (Self/Managed)
  • Grafana dashboards

RudderStack’s Reviews

Since RudderStack is a fairly new data management tool, there aren’t many reviews from long-time users, though there’s an overall positive look on this new tool due to its budget-friendly pricing plan. Small businesses prefer RudderStack for this reason, as I will also point out below in this tool’s advantages.

RudderStack’s Pricing

RudderStack has three different plans, one of which is free. The free plan includes up to five million events/month, and the Pro plan includes a demo. For the prices of the Pro and Enterprise plans, you’ll need to contact RudderStack directly.

Screenshot from rudderstack.com

What are Some Advantages of Segment?

Here are some reasons why you might want to consider Segment over RudderStack.

Minimizes the Amount of Code Needed

Most of the features of Segment are easy to use because of the minimal amount of code that’s needed. For example, the visual tagger, which enables you to track customized events on your different sites, requires no code. Another example is the Debugger tool, which saves businesses time that would be spent looking through code by quickly identifying problems with the UI. Certain features do require code, but Segment makes it possible for customers to write the code once and use it for other integrations later.

Wide Range of Integrations

Segment has a long list of integrations. Thanks to this list, integrating Segment to the data platforms you’re using takes little to no time. When compared to RudderStack, Segment also has more marketing tools included on its list of integrations. Since many analytics SaaS vendors are on this integrations list, this is a big advantage for large SaaS businesses that do not have dedicated data engineers.

Requires Little Maintenance

You can just set up Segment and let it do the data validation and accuracy control for you. Since Segment is able to collect and send data to destinations automatically, it doesn’t require you to consistently check on it. Also, historic data is easy to include, so you don’t need to worry about checking the tool every time you make changes with your platforms.

What are Segment’s Disadvantages?

Steep Learning Curve

Just like many other businesses with a wide range of features, you need to be prepared to spend a few weeks understanding this tool. The initial implementations will take time, and since the UI and “functions” features are a bit complex, making the best use of them is hard at first.

Pricing

If you’re on the Team or Business plan, the price increases based on the number of monthly tracked users on your sites. This means that the price can increase very fast, and it’s hard to keep track of it if your site gets a lot of anonymous users. This is also the reason why Segment is not used by small businesses or individuals.

Custom Integrations Are Hard to Work With

If the integrations you need are not on the list, they may require client-side app installation, and if you add more third-party integrations, management can become complex.

What are RudderStack’s Advantages?

Let’s take a look at some advantages of Rudderstack.

Higher Sync Frequency

If it’s important for your data warehouse to be up-to-date at all times, RudderStack is a good tool. While Segment syncs data daily on the Team plan, RudderStack is able to update your data as often as every thirty minutes. This is useful if you’re looking for a tool that’ll help you build campaigns that use near real-time data.

Event-based Pricing Plan

One of the main differences between Segment and RudderStack is in their pricing plans: Segment charges customers based on their monthly tracked users while RudderStack scales based on number of events tracked per month. For businesses with a small but active customer base, Segment may be a more affordable plan, but for most small businesses this is not the case. These businesses usually attract more visitors with time, but they struggle with customer engagement and don’t have a high number of monthly events. For these businesses, RudderStack is a more affordable option.

Data Governance and Privacy

Unlike Segment, RudderStack does not store customer data on its servers. While this makes intermediate event storage impossible with this tool, it also means that you have complete control over your business’s private data (you can also self-host RudderStack’s open-source services.)

Image from SHERPA project

What are RudderStack’s Disadvantages?

Onboarding Documents and Guides are Not Very Helpful

While both tools have some sort of learning curve, RudderStack is less mature in terms of the onboarding experience. Segment’s user guides and UI-based software make implementation a bit easier, but RudderStack users will need data engineers to navigate the tool.

Supports Fewer Services

Segment offers more than three hundred one-click third-party integrations: when compared, RudderStack has fewer integrations. RudderStack’s integrations especially lack when it comes to supporting tools used by sales or marketing. However, as a newer customer data solution, RudderStack is often adding new services and integrations onto their list.

Requires Maintenance and Data Engineering Knowledge

One of the downsides of having API-based software is that it is better suited to more tech-savvy users. Segment’s UI makes monitoring simpler, and its documentation makes debugging and problem-solving easier. For RudderStack, although you have the ability to view live event streams, understanding blocks and problems requires dedicated data engineers.

What if Both Segment and Rudderstack Don’t Seem Right to Me?

Companies are always on the lookout for Segment alternatives and Rudderstack alternatives because of the disadvantages mentioned above. The key is to find a solution that gives you the processing power of both of these tools without the hefty prices, limited integrations, and lack of onboarding.

Introducing HockeyStack

HockeyStack is an analytics and attribution tool designed to unify interdepartmental data and uncover key insights such as the MRR of your content, the content activation rate, and even the lead quality.

Content Activation Rate dashboard from HockeyStack

The no-code interface and integration pool make data consolidation a breeze. All you need to do is choose the template for your dashboard, select where you’d like to extract data from, and set up the goals you want to track to get real-time insights.

This way, business users can make data-driven decisions without relying on IT teams, making decision-making both fast and efficient.

Set

One of the best things about HockeyStack is that setup takes just 5 minutes, so you can start monitoring key metrics instantly.

Here’s what else is in store:

  • Step-by-step user journey: HoockeyStack allows users to track each step of the user journey; whether it’s a click, a newsletter subscription, or a signup, you’ll be able to see it all as it happens.
  • Funnels & goals: Create funnels to visualize your customers’ journeys and identify points of friction that can be minimized for quicker conversions.
  • Revenue attribution: Want to know what each of your marketing channels mean in terms of revenue? You can do that – and even track the MRR of each content piece! – with HockeyStack.

Segment vs. Rudderstack: Key Takeaways

Both Rudderstack and Segment are great tools with their own fortes. That’s why it’s understandable that deciding between these tools can be a difficult.

Here are a few key takeaways that you should keep in mind that will make your decision-making process easier:

  • Segment’s pricing plan is more reasonable for large businesses with a stable and engaged customer base, while RudderStack’s pricing is more affordable for smaller businesses that have a fluctuating number of monthly visitors who are not as active.
  • Segment requires less coding knowledge, and businesses that do not have dedicated data engineers will have an easier time using this tool. However, for businesses with data engineers that are looking for an open-source tool that can be self-hosted, RudderStack is a better option.
  • RudderStack does not store customer information, which is a plus in terms of data privacy. Segment also protects data, but still stores customer information.
  • Both tools have learning curves that take time and effort, though Segment provides more guidance.

At the end of the day, it’s important to take a good look at all the features, integrations, and pricing of the tools you’re considering to ensure that you make the right decision.

FAQ

What is RudderStack?

RudderStack is a customer data platform that can unify and transform customer data from multiple sources. It’s an open-source tool for developers and provides real-time data that are updated frequently.

What is RudderStackgood for?

RudderStack is good for customers who don’t want to spend time building their own data warehouses, and for businesses that are looking for real-time data that’s synced frequently.

What is the main difference between Segment and RudderStack?

The main differences are: the pricing plans (Segment charges based on MTUs, RudderStack charges based on monthly tracked events,) onboarding experiences (Segment has a more mature one,) and a number of integrations (Segment has more integrations but RudderStack often adds new integrations and services.)

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