Simply put, Segment is a SaaS event tracking platform that assists businesses with collecting and leveraging data from digital areas like applications, websites, SaaS management, and SaaS tools.
Segment is typically for and SMB/mid-sized companies and app developers and simplifies the data collection process, and provides the opportunity to create relevant content for customers and personalized experiences.
To better understand the intentions behind Segment, it was originally designed to provide solutions for collecting and moving event data.
It generates messages about what is going on in a website or app and translates the information that is inside of those messages into a format that can be understood by other tools.
But Segment isn’t the only option in the data transformation space. Gain some awareness of these Segment alternatives and the benefits that are associated with them.
1. ActionIQ
ActionIQ’s niche is helping companies achieve a total digital transformation, leveraging a database and adding a CDP as an extra layer on top of that.
ActionIQ’s entire data model is focused all on contacts and fields, making it really tailored towards businesses that have already placed a significant investment into a specific technology stack and just need extra data access and tools.
2. Amperity
Amperity is a CDP platform that is very focused on identity resolution, and whose main
customers are big retail or brick-and-mortar businesses with disparate data sources.
As is the same with most CDPs, Amperity has a few of the normal marketing activation capabilities that other CDPs offer, but they are limited.
3. Lytics
Lytics is an alternative to Segment that prides itself in being able to empower marketers instead of just focusing on developers and engineers, with this being why the implementation time for Lytics tends to be much longer than competitors like Segment and mParticle.
But let’s not forget that Lytics has a very intuitive UI tailored for marketers, which makes it simple to use and streamlined.
Lytics has much more detailed machine learning capabilities than other platforms, with its Machine Learning API providing a framework to create custom ML models inside the platform.
4. mParticle
mParticle is a Segment alternative that differs in that Segment is set up to handle SMB/mid-sized companies.
But mParticle can take care of business for enterprise-sized companies and has established itself as a CD! (Customer Data Infrastructure) that focuses on data integration, data governance, and audience management, with mParticle clients assigned a dedicated customer success rep.
Also, mParticle provides more durable capabilities around mobile event tracking and data integration as well.
5. Rudderstack
RudderStack is a fully open-source CDP platform for developers to deploy data pipelines and collect customer data from apps, websites, platforms, and autotrack events, which can be activated in the data warehouse.
Although RudderStack claims to be open-source, most of the features like cloud connect and Reverse ETL are available through their paid offering.
RudderStack hasn’t quite mastered any particular areas of the process but is the only CDP that can run completely on-premise but doesn’t own any of the data, it being that it is all kept inside an organization’s proprietary technology stack.
6. SimonData
SimonData is an email service platform that happens to be combined within a CDP, sharing some similarities to other solutions like Braze, Iterable, and Salesforce Marketing Cloud.
SimonData does connect natively to data warehouses, but it moves the data out of the warehouse, making it difficult for compliance, with the service also locking users into a simple user/event data model instead of supporting various forms of data within the warehouse, such trips, flights, products, groups, and purchases as well.
Keep in mind that SimonData is also a Segment alternative that happens not to support notifications very well.
The reason that companies are choosing to keep marketing platforms and data platforms separate and leverage dedicated solutions like Iterable or Braze on top of a CDP is because the needs of marketers are rapidly changing.
7. Tealium
There is another Segment alternative called Tealium, a CDP solution that focuses on enterprise-sized companies and places emphasis on marketers over developers.
Tealium’s core product is “Tealium IQ,” which offers flexibility since it is not a native Google service like Google Tag Manager, allowing it to integrate with a wide range of different platforms.
Tealium’s main selling point is privacy and security, which is the reason many healthcare and financial services companies use it.
With Segment, Tealium, SimonData, Rudderstack, mParticle, Lytics, Amperity, and ActionIQ to choose from, which option will you go with to meet your data needs?