Snowplow vs. Segment
How does Segment – a Customer Data Platform (CDP) – compare to a Snowplow Behavioral Data Platform (BDP)?
What’s the difference
between Snowplow and
Segment?
Segment is a useful tool for the right user – however, it is struggling to keep pace with trends in the data space. Notably the emphasis on data privacy and ownership, the demand for transparency and OS tech, and the wide adoption of Cloud Data Warehouses.
As such, it is on the verge of being branded a legacy technology. Its value proposition of harnessing the complexity of customer data amidst the explosion of SaaS platforms over the last couple of decades – while initially compelling – is now showing its age with the emergence of best-in-class tooling across the Modern Data Stack.
Implicit in Segment’s focus on sending data to hundreds of downstream apps is that the data warehouse becomes just one of many destinations. As organisations have coalesced around cloud data warehouses as their central source of truth, they have begun to feel frustrated with Segment’s limitations. The data it delivers is not fit for purpose, and in many cases serves as an active blocker to aspirations for behavioural data.
If you are building for complexity and growth, Snowplow is definitely the better option.
“I’ve never seen engineers and marketing people talk to each other as much as they are right now. We’ve just touched the surface with Hightouch, Snowplow and Braze. I am super excited to see what’s possible.”
DARREN HAKEN | HEAD OF ENGINEERING, AUTO TRADER
Key Snowplow Features
True real-time latency
Get data to your storage destination in as little as 5 seconds to create use cases such as real-time recommendations.
Quality assurance
Trial tracking in a sandbox environment – like software testing. Data is also pre-validated with JSON schemas to ensure quality.
Easy to query
Create a single, unified table, which can be easily queried.
Private SaaS deployment
Deploy our technology directly into your own cloud environment – customer data is not stored by Snowplow.
True first-party cookies
Snowplow allows you to understand your customers’ behaviour during their anonymous journeys, maximising the efficiency of your marketing funnel.
AI & BI ready data
Snowplow lands data in your storage destination in an AI- and BI-ready state, saving an enormous amount of time cleaning and wrangling data to get it to operational quality.Snowplow vs Segment Overview
Choose Snowplow for:
- Future proofing your modern data stack
- Advanced analytics and AI use cases with a composable CDP
- A strong focus on data ownership, compliance and governance
Choose Segment for:
- Marketing teams simply looking to get data from A to B
- Small companies unaffected by the monthly-tracked-user pricing
- Sending data immediately to 3rd-party tools – often unfiltered and without adopting centralized storage
Warehouse and lake-first analytics
The warehouse is becoming the center of data gravity, with the global data warehousing market set to be worth $30 billion by 2025 (Global Market Insights).
In terms of data modeling in the warehouse, Snowplow is the third-largest publisher of dbt models on the planet, after dbt and Fivetran.
Compliance
Segment stores your data The best practice for first-party data is to be stored in a warehouse, not a third-party SaaS platform. The fact that your data is kept on Segment’s servers means you do not have complete control over your data.
Data-subject requests
The fact that Segment stores your data presents a potential risk around responding to data-subject requests. Customers have to rely on Segment to delete data on their behalf.
Understanding your data
Snowplow is designed to achieve the structure and flexibility needed to operate effectively in an increasingly complicated era for data compliance. Segment creates confusion by producing poorly understood data, potentially leading to compliance issues.
Composable CDPs are replacing CDPs
A Composable CDP consists of the same components as an off-the-shelf CDP like Segment: Data Collection, Data Storage/Modeling, and Data Activation, however, each stage is provided by a best-in-class tool, avoiding many of the issues with packaged CDPs.
Avoid Segment MTU pricing
There are many benefits to event-based pricing
Fairness
MTU-based pricing: highly engaged and monetizable users cost the same to track as users that have interacted with your product just once.Event-based pricing: cost scales with the value of the user. Low-value users (e.g., that bounce) generate few events and so cost little to track.
Predictability
MTU-based pricing: browser restrictions – e.g., ITP – disrupt joining the customer journey and favor the Vendor by inflating the number of monthly tracked users.Event-based pricing: more predictable due to wide event bands and less likely to incur the cost of unfair overages.
Scalability
MTU-based pricing: customers can suffer punitive averages or huge contract value increases on renewal.Event-based pricing: cost per event decreases with volume as the bands get wider (1m-5m, 5m-10m and so on).
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