Best Segment.io Alternatives: Features & Prices Compared

Segment.io has established itself as one of the leading customer data platforms (CDP) thanks to its intuitive interface, flexibility, and robustness. However, since every business has unique needs, strategies, and objectives, one platform can’t offer the same experience to everyone. This is why several Segment.io alternatives exist, providing a different combination of integrations, features, and pricing plans.

This guide will explore five major Segment competitors that may fit better with your business, covering all the crucial elements you need to know about.

Here’s a list summary of Segment.io alternatives:

• Improvado: An enterprise-grade analytics platform collecting data on all customer touch points and helping companies better understand their audience and personalize their marketing efforts based on the insights from these data points.
• mParticle: An AI-powered CDP serving developers, product managers, and marketers.
• Tealium: A robust customer data hub with over 1300 integrations, developed mainly for marketers and data scientists.
• Datadog: A data monitoring and security platform for tracking cloud applications, tech infrastructure, and user experiences.
• Funnel.io: A low-code data integration platform capable of aggregating data from over 500 sources for use by marketing teams, data analysts, and IT professionals.

Segment Overview

Segment is a CDP that enables companies to collect, unify, and route customer data from websites, apps, and servers to any destination of their choice for proper analysis. Segment is popular for its ability to track customer interactions across all connected channels in real time. 

When you’ve aggregated your customers’ data using Segment, the platform allows you to carry out several procedures, like:

• Building a unique customer identity based on the customer’s interaction across all your channels.
• Delivering the data for use by your apps, websites, and servers.
• Sending the data to your company’s warehouse and other bulk storage platforms.
• Enriching the data by aggregating it from all your company’s sources.
• Launching personalized marketing campaigns using Engage, the platform’s marketing automation solution.

Data transformation on the platform is manual, relying heavily on SQL queries. Segment is, indeed, a robust platform with many advanced functionalities. So, users with no coding skills will find it hard to use.

Segment Use Cases

Segment’s solutions are tailored for engineering teams, product managers, and marketing professionals across multiple industries:

• Marketers use Segment to track events, create customer profiles, deliver personalized experiences, and access a 360-degree view of their prospects and customers.
• Product teams use Segment to collect behavioral data from apps, run A/B tests, and understand how new features impact product KPIs.

Because of its high technicality, Segment is most suitable for teams with engineering expertise. Only then can the company use the platform to its full potential. Moreover, Segment does not provide professional services to customers with special requirements, so if you encounter a technical issue or require customization, you can only rely on your in-house team.  

For example, you can’t request custom solutions. So, if you don’t find a specific marketing integration in the data sources catalog, you will need to code and connect it to your Segment account yourself.

Segment Pricing

Segment charges its customers based on the number of visitors tracked across its sources every month. It offers a free plan where you’re limited to tracking 1,000 visitors per month across two sources.

For its paid tiers, you get the Team and Business plans:

• Team costs $120 per month and allows you to track 10,000 visitors across unlimited sources.
• Business, its most popular premium plan, comes with custom pricing, where users are charged based on the number of visitors they track per month. This is also where you get access to all the features that come with the platform. Interestingly, the majority of the advanced features on Segment come as add-ons, with separate costs.

“Absurdly high” pricing is a popular “con” in Segment’s customer reviews. 

Segment Integrations

Segment offers integrations with over 300 sources and destinations, covering advertising platforms, email marketing tools, A/B testing platforms, and data warehouses, among others. Alongside integration with several data sources, Segment also allows you to collect event data using a tracking code that can be installed on your website, mobile apps, servers, and cloud apps.

Segment.io does not make any provisions for requesting custom integrations. However, if you have a team of engineers, you can build your own custom integration for any source or destination.

Why Look for a Segment Alternative?

1. Segment can become expensive real quick, and the benefits a company gets from using it may not outweigh the price it pays. 
2. The learning curve is steep, even for tech-savvy users. In-house engineering expertise is a must to use the tool to its full potential. 
3. It doesn’t offer professional services for businesses with unique data implementation and management needs.
4. If the data source catalog doesn’t include a needed platform connector, Segment customers can’t request a custom integration. 
5. Segment offers low data granularity, which affects what analysis your team can perform on the data and what insights you’ll derive. 

Best Segment Data Platform Alternatives

Improvado

Improvado is an enterprise-grade, end-to-end marketing analytics platform designed to help sales, marketing, and revenue teams get a holistic picture of their omnichannel efforts and activate growth through data-informed decisions.

Improvado simplifies how companies perform analytics by automating data extraction, transformation, and loading to the warehouses and BI, analytics, or visualization tools of their choice. The platform comes fitted with over 500 data sources and destinations, alongside prebuilt extraction templates to support users who perform bulk data extractions. Improvado’s billing plan also includes Data Extraction Customization Service (DECS) credits that can be spent on a custom data source connector or flat file ingestion. These two features ensure companies are able to analyze customer journeys thoroughly and identify the touch points that triggered a conversion. 

Unlike Segment, Improvado comes with a high level of granularity, helping companies better understand their audience and enabling more precise segmentation and targeting. 

One of Improvado’s biggest strengths lies in its data transformation engine, the Marketing Common Data Model (MCDM). The MCDM automatically aligns disparate naming conventions, maps your campaign data, and provides a quick overview of the aggregated data right in the Improvado UI. MCDM comes with a set of recipes, sort of like dashboard templates, allowing one to make a comparative analysis of data from multiple channels. The list of MCDM recipes includes an organic search, paid search, paid ads, eCommerce, call-tracking, and other dashboards. Improvado clients can also request a UTM audit, mobile analytics, or web analytics dashboard.    

Improvado Use Case

Improvado is designed for marketing, sales, and revenue teams in marketing agencies, mid-market brands, and enterprise companies. The platform centralizes customer data, enabling customer data analysis and customer journey mapping.  

The list of Improvado features also includes marketing attribution modeling. A custom attribution model helps identify what marketing campaign brings in new customers or triggers further advancement through the marketing funnel. Thus, the marketing and sales teams better understand customers’ behavior, the buying process, and the effectiveness of their efforts. 

Thanks to its compatibility with privacy compliance measures like HIPAA, SOC-2, and enterprise SLA, Improvado can be beneficial to companies in highly regulated industries like health, finance, and insurance.

Lastly, unlike Segment, Improvado is a no-code solution and, thus, is suitable for teams with no tech expertise. The Improvado team also offers professional services for customers who require assistance with setting up dashboards, automating reporting, and data warehouse management.

Improvado Pricing

Improvado runs on a custom-pricing model where a member of the sales team assesses your company’s unique goals and needs and calculates a pricing plan that’s most beneficial for your business. That way, you’ll only be paying for features and bandwidth you actually use.

Improvado also offers a token called Data Extraction Customization Services (DECS) credits, which you can spend within Improvado’s ecosystem on custom APIs, file ingestion, and other needs. 

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Improvado Integration

Improvado offers native connectors to over 500 data sources, ranging from advertising platforms and CRMs to payment gateways and eCommerce tools. The selection of tools encompasses touch points across the whole customer journey and all channels, painting a holistic picture for the team. 

Once the data is aggregated and transformed, it gets pushed to a BI, analytics or visualization tool, or to a data warehouse. Improvado supports leading data warehouses like Google BigQuery, Snowflake, and Amazon RedShift. It can also feed data to Looker, Tableau, or other visualization tools.

Browse through the complete list of Improvado’s data sources and destinations to learn more. The platform also has a comprehensive data dictionary containing metrics, dimensions, properties, and more supported by each data source.

mParticle

mParticle is an AI-powered CDP that allows marketers, product managers, and developers to collect, enrich, and transform data for analytics, storage, attribution, audience targeting, and more.

At its core, mParticle focuses on data connection, quality, and governance.

With integration with over 250 data sources and destinations, mParticle enables companies to achieve a unified view of their customers from all channels and touchpoints. The platform also allows users to create custom connections through its Events API. This is a code-intensive process and can only be handled by developers.

For data transformation, mParticle allows you to create “rules” in the pipeline to automatically filter, reformat, and enrich your incoming and outgoing data.

mParticle offers an impressive level of granularity, allowing users to derive insights at any level.

While most users have been impressed by mParticle, there are general complaints about its ease of use, limited debugging capabilities, and pricing.

mParticle Use Case

mParticle is designed for developers, product managers, and marketers in several industries like gaming, retail, financial services, and more. Security and privacy compliance are integral to the platform’s services, making it suitable for businesses in highly regulated industries.

Marketing professionals use mParticle to build a consolidated view of their customers, analyze user journeys, and create user segments in real time.

Product managers use mParticle to fuel their tools with the right insights, govern the flow of data, and analyze churn without SQL.

However, mParticle is structured for developers and can take long hours in setup and implementation time before marketing teams can begin using it to its full potential.

That said, the mParticle learning curve is quite steep for non-technical users. But it makes up for this through professional services, where a team provides assistance with implementation, training, and customization.

mParticle Pricing

Like Segment, mParticle’s pricing is customized according to its users’ needs. To get a quote, you’d need to get in touch with the sales team. Pricing is based on your Monthly Tracked Users, data storage, and features selected.

By default, mParticle places limits on the flow of incoming data to protect the performance of its dashboards. So, if you’re an enterprise user tracking data at scale, you may find your apps lagging from time to time. To increase your limit, you’ll need to contact the sales team for additional costs.

mParticle Integrations

mParticle offers integration with over 250 platforms, including analytics, marketing, data warehousing, and security solutions. Just like Segment, mParticle doesn’t make provisions for requesting custom integrations.

However, the platform offers an interface called the Events API, which allows you to create custom connections for your apps. However, this can only be done by users with coding expertise.

Tealium

The Tealium ecosystem comprises four core products: EventStream API Hub, IQ Tag Manager, AudienceStream CDP, and Data Access, which all combine to help companies manage customer data across the entire data supply chain, from collection and standardization to transformation and activation.

Tealium has one of the largest integration libraries in the industry, with over 1300 client-side and server-side integrations alongside flexible APIs and libraries. Companies that wish to integrate custom data sources will need to hire a team of developers to do so using Tealium Functions, a JavaScript-based feature available on AudienceStream and EventStream.

Security and privacy compliance are among Tealium’s biggest strengths, and this has made it a popular brand among healthcare companies.

While Tealium has been lauded for its impressive functionalities and versatility, some users complain about its complex learning curve and average data visualization features. The platform’s data enrichment capabilities are basic, and users find it hard to build rules for data transformation.

Tealium Use Case

Tealium is tailored for marketers in enterprise-sized companies. Thus, most of its features are designed to help marketers get the best out of their customer data.

The majority of Tealium’s customers are in the health and finance industries, which are highly regulated and privacy-sensitive industries. This is because Tealium is strict with privacy compliance policies like HIPAA, ISO, and SOC, and it will even sign a Business Associate Agreement (BAA) with customers in these industries.

While Tealium identifies as a low-code platform, it is not particularly intuitive for non-technical users. Customers will need the help of engineers to set up pipelines and implement their data strategies. Otherwise, you can sign up for Tealium’s professional and managed services, where you get implementation and training support from the company.

Tealium Pricing

Pricing for Tealium’s Customer Data Hub is customized based on each customer’s data usage needs. To get a quote, you would have to contact the sales team to discuss your needs.

Tealium Integrations

Tealium offers a suite of over 1300 client-side and server-side integrations alongside APIs and libraries. There is no option for requesting a custom connection.

If you need to integrate a custom data source, you can do so using Tealium Functions. However, this requires JavaScript coding skills.

Datadog

Datadog is a cloud-based analytics and data monitoring platform oriented toward developers, IT operations teams, and business owners.

The platform offers real-time business intelligence by helping businesses collect data on customer activities in company apps and third-party systems. The platform provides integrations with over 600 data sources and destinations and retains metrics for up to 15 months at full granularity for comprehensive historical analysis. The platform also provides real-time interactive dashboards, notifications, user monitoring, and a code-free BI tool. 

Datadog advantages come at a super-steep learning curve price. Processes like data normalization and unstructured log ingestion are hard to carry out. The platform’s customer support holds the lowest rating among all of the solutions presented in the list, and there needs to be a proper escalating process for fixing data monitoring issues.

Datadog Use Cases

Datadog allows its users to build data pipelines and aggregate data across the company’s entire tech stack. Once the data is centralized, teams can simulate user journeys, filter, and search through and visualize data to get end-to-end visibility into user journeys and their behavior across web and mobile applications. 

While other solutions on the list specialize in tracking and analyzing customer data for better marketing personalization and effectiveness, Datadog emphasizes the correlation between user experience and infrastructure performance. Business-critical user actions and metrics can be analyzed in the context of frontend performance and application errors. 

Datadog users span multiple industries, including financial services, healthcare, manufacturing, and technology, among others.

Datadog Pricing

Since Datadog offers a wide range of solutions, pricing depends on the specific tools you plan to use.

The platform offers discounts if you’re signing up for multiple tools. In general, Datadog’s pricing is quite confusing, but it offers a 14-day free trial, so you can play around with the platform and see what you can do with it.

Datadog Integrations

Datadog integrates over 600 platforms, covering security platforms, marketing tools, cost-management services, data warehouses, and more. The platform claims to continually update its catalog and offers to build custom integrations for customers who make a request.

Funnel.io

Funnel is a marketing analytics tool that aggregates and harmonizes customer data for further use and analysis. The platform comes with over 500 integrations, covering popular marketing platforms, payment gateways, data warehouses, and more. 

The tool supports integration with various BI and visualization platforms. Users who want to carry out ad-hoc analysis and create quick reports about customer behavior can also do that in Funnel using the Data Explorer feature. Funnel offers prebuilt data visualization templates to help users access insights faster.

One of Funnel’s weak points is its pretty limited data transformation capabilities. For example, the platform can’t reliably unify naming conventions across disparate data sources. Thus, users have to do this manually, which can significantly slow down the data analysis process. 

Funnel.io Use Cases

Funnel caters to marketers, data analysts, and IT/engineering professionals in agencies, eCommerce brands, and retail stores.

Digital marketers leverage the platform to consolidate marketing data from multiple channels and touchpoints, apply simple transformations, and generate insights from analytics, visualization, or BI tools.

Funnel has security compliance certifications like SOC-2, GDPR, ISO, and PCI. Thus, it can benefit companies in highly regulated industries. It doesn’t have HIPAA compliance. So, US-based healthcare businesses might need to take note of that.

Funnel.io Pricing

Funnel’s pricing plans come in two categories: Marketers and Agencies. The plans for marketers include:

• The Essentials plan ($399 per month, billed annually).
• The Plus plan ($999 per month, billed annually).
• The Enterprise plan ($1,999 per month, billed annually).

The pricing for agencies includes:

• Agency Small
• Agency Medium
• Agency Large, all at the same price points as the plans for marketers.

Additionally, Funnel doesn’t charge its users based on how much data they collect and analyze. Instead, it uses a system of credits called Flexpoints, which every user gets upon signing up for a billing plan. Flexpoints represent the number of connectors and features you can use at each billing plan. You can mix and match these as you deem fit, up to your Flexpoint capacity, and when you run out of points, you can purchase additional units.

Funnel.io Integrations

Funnel.io offers a collection of 500 integrations, encompassing tools and platforms in various categories, including email marketing, social media, data warehousing, and more.

Customers on the Plus and Enterprise plans can also request custom connectors to aggregate data from custom sources using a push or pull method. Each method comes with its own challenges, and when bugs occur, you’ll need assistance from a data engineer.

Moving Forward

This guide has explored some of the best Segment alternatives and competitors. However, to make the best choice for your organization, you need to factor in your company’s size, the channels you use, technical expertise, budget, and more. If you need more assistance, feel free to book a call with one of Improvado’s experts.