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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.

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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?

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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

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Scalable, volume-based pricing

Our enterprise plan supports large data teams who need state of the art security and white-glove support. Get the full RudderStack Platform.

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Features our customers love

Integrated monitoring and alerting

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

Fully configurable warehouse identity resolution

Automate identity resolution and quickly build complete customer profiles in your warehouse or data lake

Blazingly fast warehouse/
data lake sync

Sync events to your warehouse or data lake as fast as 15 minutes

Hybrid mode integrations

Run key destinations like Braze, Google analytics, LaunchDarkly and more in cloud and device mode concurrently for complete functionality

Real-time transformations

Transform and enrich events in real time with JavaScript or Python code, then send the results to your entire stack.

Security & compliance by design

Map warehouse columns to downstream destination fields

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"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

Currently a Segment customer? Switching is easy.

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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.

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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

Email

Slack Community

Public, open to everyone

⚠️ Private, customer-only

Dedicated Slack Channel

Technical Account Manager

Customer Success Manager

Accelerate data activation for every team

Sales and Customer Success teams

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.

Product Teams

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.

Marketing teams

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

Migrate from Segment in 3 steps

Frequently Asked Questions

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.


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.


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.


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.