9 Free and Paid Alternatives to Segment

In this article, I will:

• briefly explain what Twilio Segment is and its purpose along with its features
• introduce Segment alternatives and give brief information 
• compare those tools with Segment
• provide reviews for each platform from different platforms (such as Capterra and G2)

If your company is looking for an alternative for the Segment, I highly recommend you to check out my list. 

Without further ado, let's start with Segment. If you already know what Segment is, you can skip to the alternatives list by clicking here.

What is Segment?

As itself declares on its website, Twilio Segment is the leading Customer Data Platform (CDP) with over 20,000 users worldwide. First of all, Twilio Segment is a tool that collects user data from websites, apps, etc. Using Segment, you can store, send, transform or archive your data. 

But when you add other tools to the equation, you can do so much more. With the combined data from various sources, you can enhance your decision-making process and customize user experiences to the max.

But how? Well, Twilio Segment takes action happening on your website, turns it into a message, and sends it to another platform in the required formats. To help you visualize, I will give you an example.

Let's assume that I went to a park. There is a security camera in the park, so now it's known that I've arrived at the park. Then the authorized person saw me through the screen, wrote it down that I arrived at the park then emailed it to his supervisor.

The camera + the authorized person + the computer that sent the email = Segment

So when people implement Segment's code into their websites, Segment becomes the receiver, the translator, the storage, and the transferor.

Yes, my example was bizarre, but actually, it's not that different from the Internet. Whenever a user clicks on something, they take a step towards somewhere.

And it is crucial for businesses to understand user behavior and journey to stand out among their competitors.

Nowadays, numerous companies use Customer Data Platforms to gather first-party data, get to know their customers, and shape their content accordingly.

Let's take a look at Segment's key features before I explain why you need an alternative to Segment.

Segment Key Features

• Account-Based Marketing
• Behavioral and Contextual Targeting
• Campaign Personalization and Segmentation
• Customer Database
• Customer Profiles and Segmentation
• Data Analysis Tools
• Data Capture and Transfer
• Data Connectors
• Data Discovery, Data Governance, Data Integration, Data Masking

Segment Pricing

• There is a free version.
• Team plan: Starts at $120/mo
• Business plan: Custom priced.

Segment Reviews

ProsCons"Segment is a great platform that allows a lot of different functions in customer's data collection. The best thing by my point of view is that a lot of marketing tools are ready to use, you have only to connect them to Segment and all the data will flow.""Custom integration or customization is really hard to do, third parties implementation sometimes lack some essential feature that would become a hard blocker during the integration."

Why would you need an alternative to Segment?

1. It is pricey for start-ups or small businesses: You can find cheaper alternatives that would still help you to scale.
2. Its learning curve is very steep for new users: There are lots of reviews on how it takes so much time to get familiar with Segment. 
3. It is complicated and overwhelming for beginners: Segment has numerous features that can be overwhelming at first. However, Segment's complex dashboard doesn't make it easier to get accustomed to.
4. It needs more integrations: Segment mainly has the well-known brand's integrations rather than smaller brands, and some find it quite insufficient, especially if they can get it from a competitor with less cost.
5. Its customer support is inadequate: Customer support is really important when it comes to complex tools like Segment; however, there are some complaints regarding Segment's customer service and its incompetent customer support.

Top Alternatives to Segment

So if you want to try alternatives to Segment, here is the list:

1. Google Analytics
2. Datadog
3. MarketingCloudFX
4. Bloomreach
5. Mixpanel
6. BigPicture
7. Profisee
8. Snowplow Analytics
9. Qlick Sense

We'll go over each tool, how it compares to Segment, and in which cases they should be preferred.

Without further ado, let's start with our first product:

1) Google Analytics

Google Analytics is one of the most well-known analytics tools, and it's preferred by many companies worldwide.

Although Google Analytics isn't a customer data platform, it's still a great alternative to Segment. 

• Google Analytics is easy to use, but still has a considerable number of features such as:
  • converse analytics, social analytics, mobile analytics, content analytics.
  • data visualization and monitoring tools
  • data filtering, manipulation, and funnel analysis
  • data collection application program interfaces (APIs)
• With Google Analytics, you can improve your funnels to improve your customer experience and with a little background knowledge.
• Using Google Analytics with Google Ads is super convenient for startups and small businesses
• Google Analytics is easier to use and navigate through.

Google Analytics Pricing

• Free.

Google Analytics Reviews

ProsCons"It was very simple to install and understand. What I love the most is that I can see what prospect are looking at on my website and what has the most interest.""Apart from getting the data of users from country wise or platform wise, Google Analytics doesn't provide much data even though Google can provide a lot more and few times I find missing or inaccurate data. As an administrator I expect more user data, So I can provide a content which user expects.

2) Datadog

Datadog is a monitoring and analytics platform and is one of the best Segment alternatives. 

Datadog Key Features

• Team collaboration tools
• Full API access
• Customizable monitoring dashboards
• Alert notifications
• Clean graphs of StatsD
• 80+ turn-key integrations
• Easy-to-use search tool
• Data aggregation

You can collect and manage data with Datadog. In one place, you can bring metrics, apps, servers, and team members together. Also, it comes packed with integrations. Java, Slack, Amazon Web Services, Windows Azure, and more are at your disposal. 

With Datadog, you can understand the user experience better, improve user experience with actual data visualizations and optimize your marketing strategies. In addition to that, it provides source control and bug tracking so you can make sure that your campaigns and applications run as you intended.

Overall, Datadog is an excellent alternative to Segment.

Datadog Pricing

• It has a free version.
• Pro plan: $15 per host & per month
• Enterprise: $23 per host & per month
• Datadog Reviews

ProsCons"Datadog is probably one of the most notable analytics tool out there for large companies. It's easy to track users' flow in terms of what routes they're hitting, when they hit a snag and 404, or other metrics like how performant certain requests are which allows us to identify bottlenecks and get rid of them immediately.""The filtering of data is not as comprehensive as I would like. I sometimes need to search through the results to find what I need. Displaying a record in the chronological order is not always perfect and I sometimes don't get the context I want."

3) MarketingCloudFX

MarketingCloudFX is a marketing software tool that helps you to manage data and use it for marketing your business efficiently. It is an all-in-one marketing automation platform that enables you to access, track, and handle data to create better campaigns for your product.

MarketingCloudFX Key Features 

• Wide range of tools to help you manage data.
• Comprehensive visitor information
• Personalized content
• Automated email marketing
• Advanced targeting 
• Analysis and reporting
• Customer relationship management (CRM) integration
• Call tracking

With these features, you'll get to know your audience better.

Also MarketingCloudFX offers two programs: LeadManagerFX and LeadNurtureFX. These programs will help you manage your leads and get to know your audience. With LeadManagerFX, you make a database of your current and old leads that you can use to help you develop effective campaigns.

In addition, if you're a business-to-business (B2B) company wishing to track the companies visiting your site, CompanyTrackerFX helps to track your visitors' IP addresses and compare them to a big database of known corporate IP addresses.

MarketingcloudFX Pricing:

Custom Priced.

MarketingCloudFX Reviews

MarketingCloudFX is not reviewed yet.

4) Bloomreach

Bloomreach (previously Exponea) is a commerce experience cloud that helps many brands to deliver personalized customer journeys. It offers a suite of products that enhances personalization and digital commerce growth. 

Bloomreach offers:

• AI-driven search and merchandising for discovery,
• CMS for content,
• a CDP and marketing automation solutions for engagement

And these solutions become the unified customer and product data with the speed and scale of AI-optimization and enable revenue-driving digital commerce experiences.

Bloomreach Key Features 

• Building and Personalizing Emails
• Automated Email Responses
• A/B Testing
• Mobile-Optimized
• Marketing Lead Database
• Data Quality Management
• Segmentation
• Online Behavior Tracking
• Web Analytics
• ROI Analytics
• Revenue Analytics

If you're looking for a tool to replace Segment.io that offers a unified solution for customer data management and personalization, Bloomreach is the best alternative for you.

Bloomreach Pricing:

All Bloomreach plans are custom priced.

Bloomreach Reviews

ProsCons"Bloomreach has an incredibly powerful set of analytics and segmentation tools, facilitating deep, meaningful understanding of our customer data. It's easy to create highly targeted, trigger-based automations to help achieve our business goals. Overall, it's an extremely versatile tool (one of the most flexible CRM/ESPs that I've ever used) that offers a huge array of customisation over how you use it.""Due to its high level of customization, it can be very complex to understand how to use the various elements of Bloomreach to begin with. Even simple reporting and data analysis can be pretty complicated until you've gained a good understanding of the reports, aggregates, running aggregates, segmentation tools, etc. I've been using the tool almost daily for approximately 4 months, and there are still elements that I struggle to completely understand. However, I do get a good level of support from my CSM and support team."

5) Mixpanel

Mixpanel is another Segment.io alternative that helps you manage your data better. It is a product analytics tool that allows you to track your customer conversion, user behavior, and how people engage with your products; you can construct better outcomes along with a better user experience.

Mixpanel Key Features

• A/B Testing
• Customer Engagement
• Retention features
• Visual coding
• Mobile Surveys
• Notifications, bookmarks, annotations
• Event tracking
• Comprehensible Data Analytics

Mixpanel enables you to collect more accurate data for your business. You'll see what is working for your business, for example, which CTAs catch more attention or which page gets more interaction. Then, based on the parameters, you'll streamline accurate customer and product data. You can send messages and run experiments to improve your marketing campaign based on what you pick up.

Mixpanel can also help you to identify trends for your business by establishing key metrics.

This tool also allows you to see how users interact with the website's pages by allowing you to spot trends among your audience in terms of how they interact with your site. So you can understand users' behavior better and use that knowledge to create better campaigns.

If you're looking for a data tool with many features to replace Segment with, Mixpanel is the best option for you.

Mixpanel Pricing

Mixpanel's pricing has 3 plans:

• The Starter Plan: Free.
• The Growth Plan: Starts at $799 per year.
•  The Enterprise Plan: Custom priced.

Mixpanel Reviews

ProsCons"The simplicity of Mixpanel to understand the user behaviour and insights from the event data is just fantastic. The power of creating multiple dashboards and constantly looking at all the funnels are great as well. We have got much better with data in the last 6 months as a team. It's like a go-to tool for our user insights.""Mixpanel can get pretty expensive for a smaller startup/company looking to utilize Mixpanel. If you qualify for it, the startup program helps, but once you get pass that, there's a bit of a difference between their free tier and their paid plan."

 6) BigPicture

Another great Segment.io alternative is BigPicture. BigPicture is a project portfolio management software that helps you to create better campaigns with your data.

BigPicture Key Features

• Backlog Management
• Change Management
• Collaboration Tools
• Due Date & Progress & Milestone Tracking
• Percent-Complete Tracking
• Portfolio Management
• Project Planning
• Reporting/Analytics

With BigPicture allows to you can streamline processes like watching anonymous traffic, identifying visitors, separating and prioritizing them according to behaviors, turning anonymous traffic into valuable leads.

You can also integrate data from your website, CRM, and integrations tools with BigPicture. It comes with an integration-friendly interface that allows you to keep all your data in one place so your teams can benefit from all features simultaneously. 

BigPicture is more user-friendly than Segment; however, still full of opportunities.

BigPicture Pricing

It starts from $10/year but pricing changes according to tiers. 

BigPicture Reviews

ProsCons"It combines all the projects into one whole view for a program to see the resources being used in-between projects. This is especially valuable in determining strategy and allows for more accurate and speedy decisions by the executive team.""Does not allow multiple people to be assigned to a task. This may be more of a limitation of JIRA than BigPicture however. The application can be slow depending on architecture it is hosted on."

 7) Profisee

Profisee is a master data management (MDM) platform that provides organizations with a fast and affordable way to deliver trusted data across the business. With Profisee, you can effectively manage your data while ensuring high data quality.

Profisee Key Features

• Flexible modeling and deployment
• Security management
• Audit capabilities
• Batch integration
• Fast time to value and low total cost of ownership
• Event & Golden record management
• Real-time bi-directional integration
• Enterprise workflow management

Profisee is a practical Segment.io alternative since it allows you to interpret your audience by turning all the numbers into visual models for your business.

It offers fast-track data management, which focuses on configuration rather than coding. So it's an affordable Segmentio alternative if you're looking for a way to manage your data better.

Profisee Pricing

• It is custom priced.

Profisee Reviews

ProsCons"The UI is very intuitive and easy to use. It enables us to create matching and survivorship rules and strategy in an easy an intuitive ways. In addition, it makes the data stewardship job simple and easy. The Profisee support team is excellent and responds almost immediately to all our questions and they try their best to resolve the problem to our satisfaction.""Sometimes adjusting Matching/survivorship attributes can be painful."

8) Snowplow Analytics

Snowplow Analytics is a cloud-based data collection solution for small to large businesses that collect and store event data across all platforms in real-time.

Snowplow Analytics Key Features

• Customer Database
• Data Analysis Tools
• Data Connectors
• Data Discovery
• Data Governance
• Data Integration
• Data Migration
• Data Profiling
• Data Quality Control

With these tools, you can stay compliant with privacy and GDPR regulations and avoid security breaches across data pipelines.

Snowplow Analytics also lets users get notifications and detect data quality using manual methods if any event pipelines are facing difficulties.

Overall, it's a great alternative if you want to prioritize a real-time data journey for your future growth.

Snowplow Analytics Pricing

Snowplow Analytics doesn't have any pricing plans. You can use the pricing calculator on their website to estimate the cost.

Snowplow Analytics Review

ProsCons"Snowplow lets us store very granular data about customer interactions with our site. It's great to have full access to the data and it's open source, so the cost is MUCH lower than comparable products like GA 360 and Adobe.""The only thing that I dislike about the software is that the initial setup time is high and the support/help system is weak."

9) Qlick Sense 

The last Segment alternative is Qlik Sense Data Analytics. Qlick Sense is a self-service analytics platform that promotes data literacy and discovery for all types of users throughout an organization.

It serves the entire range of analytics use cases, from self-service visualization and exploration to guided analytics applications and dashboards, custom and embedded analytics, mobile analytics, and reporting.

 Qlick Sense Data Analytics Key Features

• Graphs and Charts
• Score Cards
• Calculated Fields
• Data Column Filtering
• Data Discovery
• Automatic modeling
• Predictive Analytics
• Data Visualization
• Big Data Services
• Data Transformation

Qlick Sense Data Analytics Pricing

Qlik Sense Business Plan: $30/user/month. Billed annually.

Qlik Sense Enterprise SaaS: Custom priced.

Qlik Sense Analytics Review

ProsCons"I like that it is intuitive from data collection to presentation. It is very interactive and helps a lot of insight advisor who learns from my decisions and shows better and better results.""I want more flexibility in adjusting the font in the visualization extensions. At the moment, it is only possible with a table and pivot table. It would be great to have this function instead of creating a custom theme for each department."

Conclusion 

Segment is a successful tool, but there are plenty of great alternatives out there for you to consider. Many of these have more affordable pricing plans or features better suited to different needs.

To finish, here's a summary of the best Segment alternatives along with our thoughts on what each tool is best suited to:

1. Google Analytics: Best free option with many analytics features.
2. Datadog: Best for medium to large companies who wants more integrations to manage their data.
3. MarketingCloudFX: Best for businesses wanting an all-in-one marketing solution rather than an analytics tool.
4. Bloomreach: Best for mid-size to large companies looking for a comprehensive solution packed with features.
5. Mixpanel: Best for medium to large companies wanting incredible analytics capabilities and focusing on analytics rather than gathering data.
6. BigPicture: Best for businesses wanting a user-friendly Segment alternative.
7. Profisee: Best for businesses that want a cost-effective data management solution.
8. Snowplow Analytics: Best for those who want customizable event-driven analytics.
9. Qlik Sense: Best for companies wanting simple and effective data preparation and visualization.