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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.

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.

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.

"Does everything Segment does + great transformations & reverse ETL features"

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Joel P.

G2 Review

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.

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?

Compare RudderStack vs Segment features and functionality

Top RudderStack advantages

Features

RudderStack

Segment

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

Both RudderStack and Segment offer a variety of data pipelines and integration types. This section breaks down the comparison across all major features and functionalities in this category. Below the chart you’ll find additional details and links to resources on each feature or functionality.

RudderStack

Segment

Sources

SDK sources

‏‏‎ ‎‏‏‎ ‎‏‏‎ ‎‏‏‎ ‎‏‏‏‎

There’s 80% crossover for the most popular

languages and frameworks

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

‏‏‎ ‎‏‏‎ ‎‏‏‎ ‎‏‏‎ ‎‏‏‎ ‎‏‏‎ ‎

RudderStack includes configurable session data in

each event payload

High-performance JS SDK

‏‏‎ ‎‏‏‎ ‎‏‏‎ ‎‏‏‎ ‎‏‏‎ ‎‏‏‎ ‎‏‏‎ ‎‏‏‎ ‎

Both RudderStack and Segment’s JavaScript SDKs
are performance-optimized for web


SDK ad blocker detection

‏‏‎ ‎

RudderStack’s SDK can automatically detect ad

blockers and send event flags through.

Cloud event sources

‏‏‎ ‎‏‏‎ ‎‏‏‎ ‎

Segment has more cloud event sources than

RudderStack

20+ generally available

30+ generally available

HTTP API Source

‏‏‎ ‎‏‏‎ ‎

Both RudderStack and Segment have HTTP endpoint sources (and RudderStack’s is API compatible with Segment!)


ETL sources

‏‏‎ ‎‏‏‎ ‎‏‏‎ ‎

RudderStack has about twice the number of ETL sources compared to Segment (with a growing library)

30+ generally available

10+ generally available

Custom sources

‏‏‎ ‎‏‏‎ ‎‏‏‎ ‎‏‏‎ ‎

Custom sources in RudderStack are built with Webhook Sources and Transformations, whereas Segment charges for their dedicated, UI-based Functions feature

Webhooks + real-time Transformations

Included in every plan

Source Functions

⚠️ Paid feature

Destinations

Total destinations

‏‏‎ ‎‏‏‎ ‎‏‏‎ ‎

Segment has more generally available destinations and a large number in beta.

160+ generally available

200+ generally available, 150+ in beta

Warehouse & data store destinations

‏‏‎ ‎‏‏‎ ‎

RudderStack supports additional data stores like Redis

8

6

Data lake destinations

‏‏‎ ‎‏‏‎ ‎

RudderStack supports Databricks (Delta Lake)

4

3

Streaming destinations

‏‏‎ ‎‏‏‎ ‎

RudderStack supports additional streaming services like Kafka and Azure Event Hub

8

4

Custom destinations

‏‏‎ ‎‏‏‎ ‎

Custom destinations in RudderStack are built with Webhook Destinations and Transformations, whereas Segment charges for their dedicated, UI-based Functions feature

Webhooks + real-time Transformations

Included in every plan


Destination Functions

⚠️ Paid feature

Cloud & device mode

‏‏‎ ‎‏‏‎ ‎

Both RudderStack and Segment support cloud and device mode destinations

Event filtering

RudderStack supports allowlisting, denylisting, sampling and other reusable filtering logic on all plans, while Segment charges for more limited functionality

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

‏‏‎ ‎‏‏‎ ‎

RudderStack supports running select destinations in both cloud and device mode simultaneously

Warehouse sync frequency

‏‏‎ ‎‏‏‎ ‎

For all users, RudderStack can load data every 30 minutes or faster, whereas hourly syncs are only available in Segment’s highest paid tier

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

‏‏‎ ‎‏‏‎ ‎

Reverse ETL pipelines send data from your warehouse to downstream tools

Generally available, fully-featured reverse ETL functionality

Public beta due December 2022

Testing & Troubleshooting

Live event viewer

‏‏‎ ‎‏‏‎ ‎

Both RudderStack and Segment offer live event viewers for testing and debugging

Event & integration testing

‏‏‎ ‎‏‏‎ ‎

RudderStack has an API-based approach for testing events and integrations whereas Segment takes a less flexible UI approach

Test API

UI dashboard

Real-time Event Transformations

JavaScript

‏‏‎ ‎‏‏‎ ‎

RudderStack lets you operate on event payloads in real time, then send the transformed payloads to multiple destinations.

Python

RudderStack supports transformations in Python and JavaScript

Device mode

Transform events before they are sent directly to device mode destinations

Libraries

Write custom functions, then store them in a library and call them in other Transformations.

Transformations Templates

Quickly operate on data and customize integrations with pre-built code templates for things like hashing PII, enriching user profiles, dynamically setting HTTP headers, parsing user agents and more.

Transformations API

Write and manage Transformations code in your own version-controlled Github repo.

Deployment & Management

When it comes to deployment, RudderStack and Segment differ significantly. Segment users all run in a multi-tenant cloud environment. While most RudderStack customers (even in high security industries) run RudderStack’s cloud product because we don’t store data, we offer multiple additional deployment options for enterprises with specific security needs (more detail below). Both companies offer EU data centers.

RudderStack and Segment both offer functionality for system health observability, notifications and managing configs, but take different approaches. RudderStack prioritizes tools already used by and familiar to developers, like Grafana and Terraform.

RudderStack

Segment

Deployment & Management

SSH Tunneling for data stores

‏‏‎ ‎‏‏‎ ‎
Securely send data to your data store via SSH tunneling.

Single-tenant cloud deployment option
RudderStack enterprise customers can choose a single-tenant cloud deployment.

Managed VPC deployment option
RudderStack and Segment support VPC deployments.

System health & alerting
RudderStack and Segment both offer system health and notification functionality, but take different approaches.

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
RudderStack and Segment allow you to manage your connections config via API, but take different approaches.

Via Terraform

Via Segment’s config API

EU data center
Both RudderStack and Segment offer

Frankfurt

Dublin

Data Governance & Privacy

As with many features, RudderStack and Segment both offer features to help you manage data governance and privacy, but take different approaches. You’ll see lots of checks below since RudderStack and Segment can do similar things in this category, but the devil is in the details.

RudderStack

Segment

Data Governance & Privacy

Tracking plans
Both RudderStack and Segment’s offer tracking plans.

⚠️ Via Protocols (paid add-on)

Fixing bad data
RudderStack and Segment both allow you to fix bad data, but take different approaches.

Implemented via code

Implemented via UI

Event replay
Both Segment and RudderStack offer event replay features, but with RudderStack, you can replay events from your own data store.

⚠️ Available only in Segment’s Business Tier

Event metadata reporting
Access rich event metadata, including versioning, key counts and more, via API

Code linting for instrumentation
RudderStack’s RudderTyper is very similar to Segment’s Typewriter. The only difference is that RudderTyper is available on all plans.

⚠️ Via Protocols (paid add-on)

GDPR
Both Segment and RudderStack support GDPR compliance and user deletion, but RudderStack doesn’t store data.

HIPAA
RudderStack has been HIPAA-compliant since 2020 as no customer data is stored. Segment announced their HIPAA feature in November 2022 - currently in beta.

Beta

SSO
Both Segment and RudderStack offer SSO.

User Profiles & Audiences

RudderStack

Segment

User Profiles & Audiences

User identification
Both RudderStack and Segment offer user identification via SDKs and the identify method

Identity resolution
Both RudderStack and Segment offer identity resolution functionality. Again, RudderStack enables this in the warehouse and Segment does this behind the scenes in their platform.

Warehouse-based

Black-box with UI

User profiles
Both RudderStack and Segment offer user profile creation. RudderStack enables this on the warehouse, whereas Segment forces users into a UI.

Warehouse-based

UI-based

Computed user traits
RudderStack can activate any trait you compute in your warehouse. Segment primarily leverages their UI, with limited warehouse trait creation functionality.

Built by you in your warehouse

⚠️ Must buy Engage and build in Segment

Audience building
RudderStack and Segment both offer audience creation capability. RudderStack does this on top of your warehouse, where Segment requires you to build in their UI.

Built directly on your warehouse data

⚠️ Must buy Engage and build in Segment

Support

As a smaller, newer company compared to Segment, RudderStack is proudly delivering award-winning support to its customers (check us out on G2!). We offer web, email, and dedicated slack channels for support as well as dedicated customer success and technical account management in accordance with your payment tier.

RudderStack

Segment

Support

Email

Slack Community

Public, open to everyone

⚠️ Private, customer-only

Dedicated Slack Channel

RudderStack provides dedicated slack channels for paid customers to get immediate and contextual support

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

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.

Migrate from Segment in 3 steps

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.

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