RudderStack vs Segment
It’s time to take a modern approach to your customer data platform, and say goodbye to legacy CDPs that charge you a premium to store your data in a black box.
Trusted by leading brands
Modern data teams replace Segment
with RudderStack
RudderStack is the only end-to-end Segment alternative. Put your own warehouse or data lake at the center of your data stack and increase the value of your existing architecture, eliminate unnecessary cost and compliance risks, and take control of your customer data with RudderStack’s warehouse native CDP.
Why choose RudderStack?
Built for data teams
RudderStack is open source and built for data teams including Github integrations and an API-first approach to data collection and management, so you can seamlessly integrate it with your existing stack and workflow.
Warehouse native platform
RudderStack treats your warehouse or data lake as a first class citizen. Easily build complete profiles in your warehouse, enrich and transform data for endless use cases, activate warehouse data across downstream tools, and turn your warehouse into your single source of truth.
True customer 360 in your warehouse
RudderStack builds a complete view of the customer in your warehouse. Unify customer data from every touch point, automate identity resolution, and accelerate time to value with complete customer profiles built in your warehouse or data lake.
Complete data ownership and transparency
RudderStack doesn’t store any data, reducing data privacy and compliance (GDPR, CCPA, etc) risks and giving you full ownership of your data. Collect first-party data from any source, transform and enrich data, solve identity resolution and more - all in your warehouse or data lake.
Support for data warehouses and data lakes
RudderStack supports data warehouse and data lake destinations including Amazon Redshift & S3, Microsoft Azure Synapse & Data Lake, Google BigQuery & Google Cloud Storage, PostgreSQL, and Snowflake.
Does everything Segment does + great transformations & reverse ETL features
G2 Review
Features our customers love
Get a real-time view of events from every data source, see performance under load, set up notifications and alerts in PagerDuty, and get rich statistics about event delivery in Grafana
Automate identity resolution and quickly build complete customer profiles in your warehouse or data lake
data lake sync
Sync events to your warehouse or data lake as fast as 15 minutes
Run key destinations like Braze, Google analytics, LaunchDarkly and more in cloud and device mode concurrently for complete functionality
Transform and enrich events in real time with JavaScript or Python code, then send the results to your entire stack.
Map warehouse columns to downstream destination fields
"When it came down to deciding the right solution, there wasn’t a question. We chose RudderStack as the foundation for our warehouse native customer data platform to enable data-driven personalized engagement online"
Chris Frye, Director of Digital Architecture
We’re API compatible with Twilio Segment
You can use all of your existing data pipeline instrumentation and everything will just work (including warehouse schemas!) Simply switch the SDKs and update analytics to rudderanalytics.
We’ll automatically migrate your anonymousIDs
RudderStack will automatically grab the Segment anonymousId and send it in our payload, so you won’t have any data inconsistency or interruption in downstream tools. When migration is complete, just remove the Segment SDK.
Our Segment migration team is here to help
We’re here to make your migration to RudderStack seamless and pain free. Have more questions?
Top RudderStack advantages
Features
Doesn't store your data
Warehouse sync times
as fast as 15 min
12+ hours
Access to all warehouse data
Open-source offering
Ad blocker resilient
Dedicated VPC hosting
Real time transformations
Session tracking
Hybrid mode integrations
Data Pipelines & Integrations
Sources
SDK sources
16 generally available RudderStack supports Rust, Unity and Flutter (Segment doesn’t)
16 generally available, 1 beta, 1 alpha Segment supports Kotlin, Xamarin and Clojure (RudderStack doesn’t)
SDK Session tracking
High-performance JS SDK
SDK ad blocker detection
Cloud event sources
20+ generally available
30+ generally available
HTTP API Source
ETL sources
30+ generally available
10+ generally available
Custom sources
Webhooks + real-time Transformations Included in every plan
Source Functions ⚠️ Paid feature
Destinations
Total destinations
160+ generally available
200+ generally available, 150+ in beta
Warehouse & data store destinations
8
6
Data lake destinations
4
3
Streaming destinations
8
4
Custom destinations
Webhooks + real-time Transformations Included in every plan
Destination Functions ⚠️ Paid feature
Cloud & device mode
Hybrid mode
Event filtering
Dedicated allowlisting and denylisting for select destinations, flexible custom logic via Transformations Included in every plan
Primarily UI-configured filtering, custom logic available via proprietary language (“FQL”) ⚠️ Only available in Business Tier
Hybrid mode
Warehouse sync frequency
Configurable from 30 minutes (or faster) up to 24 hours. Included in every plan.
24 hours (Free plan), 12 hours (Team plan) Hourly (Business plan) ⚠️ Segment cannot sync faster than hourly
Reverse ETL
Reverse ETL pipelines
Generally available, fully-featured reverse ETL functionality
Public beta due December 2022
Testing & Troubleshooting
Live event viewer
Event & integration testing
Test API
UI dashboard
Real-time Event Transformations
Javascript
Python
Device mode
Libraries
Transformations Templates
Transformations API
Deployment & Management
Deployment & Management
SSH Tunneling for data stores
Single-tenant cloud deployment option
Managed VPC deployment option
System health & alerting
Basic email notifications System health and custom alerts via dedicated Grafana dashboards & your alerting system of choice
Basic email notifications Basic system health via the Segment UI
Connection config management
Via Terraform
Via Segment’s config API
EU data center
Frankfurt
Dublin
Data Governance & Privacy
Data Governance & Privacy
Tracking plans
⚠️ Via Protocols (paid add-on)
Fixing bad data
CHECK Implemented via code
Implemented via UI
Event replay
⚠️ Available only in Segment’s Business Tier
Event metadata reporting
Code linting for instrumentation
⚠️ Via Protocols (paid add-on)
GDPR
HIPAA
Beta
SSO
User Profiles & Audiences
User Profiles & Audiences
User Identification
Identity resolution
Warehouse-based
Black-box with UI
User profiles
Warehouse-based
UI-based
Computed user traits
Built by you in your warehouse
⚠️ Must buy Engage and build in Segment
Audience building
Built directly on your warehouse data
⚠️ Must buy Engage and build in Segment
Support
Support
Slack Community
Public, open to everyone
⚠️ Private, customer-only
Dedicated Slack Channel
Technical Account Manager
Customer Success Manager
Accelerate data activation for every team
Give your sales and support teams superpowers by delivering the complete customer profiles from your data warehouse directly to Salesforce, Hubspot, Zendesk or another CRM tool, so they’ll never perform outreach or schedule a call without the relevant context.
Collect data from all of your web and mobile apps with our high performance SDKs, enrich the data in your warehouse, and serve it to product analytics tools to drive customer insights and help your team build a deep understanding of the customer journey to increase retention and drive a smarter product roadmap.
Support marketing with the data and insights they need to drive campaign performance, deliver effective personalization, and improve customer experience.
Example: Marketing wants to enrich new customer profiles from an internal Redis data store
Learn more about RudderStack
Frequently Asked Questions
What’s the difference between RudderStack’s pricing model and Segment’s?
Segment’s pricing is based on monthly tracked users (MTUs), while RudderStack charges on event volume. An event can be any single user interaction, for example, a user log-in, an order complete, or a page view. The challenge with the MTU approach is if you have a product or company that has many users but not many conversions (e.g., a media company that drives a lot of content views). Segment will price each user into their pricing model even if they’re not generating revenue for your company. RudderStack charges only for the events.
Does RudderStack store data?
No. Unlike Segment, RudderStack does not store your data. Our warehouse native approach allows our customers to build their customer data platform in their warehouse of choice.
Is RudderStack Open Source?
RudderStack offers both an Open Source and a Cloud option for tracking events. You can find a detailed comparison of these two options on the RudderStack Cloud vs. Open Source page of our docs site.
What if I don’t have a data warehouse?
Not a problem. RudderStack also works with Data Lakes and hundreds of destinations. Check out our catalog of integrations to see which providers we support.
Take control of your customer data. Explore RudderStack today!
Our Free plan includes 1 million events per month, so you can explore and test the product. Install an SDK, connect a destination, and see data start to flow.
