Feb 16, 2022
Feb 16, 2022
Customer data platform companies are all trying to offer the best product functions to our brand partners. We’re all focused on giving you the best features, the best customer service, and the best results.
In a highly competitive and complex environment it can be exhausting trying to determine which platform would work best for you.
If you’re a current user of the Segment customer data platform and looking for alternatives, or perhaps you’re researching Segment competitors to find your best option, this article is for you.
At Insider, we’re aware that our product may not be the perfect fit for everyone. That’s why we’ve evaluated the leading customer data platforms to determine which users would benefit most from each option:
Read more about our assessment of each customer data platform, their features, and pricing in the following sections.
Note: If you’re already convinced Insider might be perfect for you, get a free demo and get started today! If you’re a complete beginner to customer data platforms, here’s our Complete Guide to Customer Data Platforms.
Segment competitor: Insider
Segment competitor: Bloomreach
Segment competitor: SAP Emarsys
Segment competitor: mParticle
Segment Competitor: Totango
Conclusion: We stand by our product
Insider has many functionalities and therefore fits under various SaaS product categories. While we call Insider a Growth Management Platform, most customers and third-party review sites (like G2) categorize it as either a Customer Data Platform, Mobile Marketing, Marketing Analytics, Customer Journey Analytics, or Personalization Engine.
Given those category labels, you’ve probably already realized that Insider is biased towards marketing. Our platform has been developed with marketers’ needs in mind—meaning, we go beyond the usual customer data platform capabilities, which makes Insider your one-stop shop for customer data unification, segmentation, and personalization.
CDPs (Customer Data Platforms), by definition, collect data from various sources to create a single customer database that is organized to represent different audiences. As with a Segment platform, data management is the core of our platform.
Without any help from IT, you’ll be able to connect your data across channels with ease, stitching together offline and online customer data to create a complete view of a customer’s experience. Once you recognize who your customers are and how they behave, you can split them into groups and target them with offers that are relevant, timely, and appropriate. You’ll know which customers love which products. You’ll know which customers buy only when you have a sale going on. You’ll know which customers are the VIPs. And with that knowledge, you can give buyers what they want.
However, this is where the similarities between Segment and Insider end. While Insider is best suited for marketing, Segment leans towards product and engineering teams.
Comparing the two in the Customer Data Platform category on G2, our customers report that it’s easier to set up and do business with Insider and that Insider offers better support. In fact, customers rate Insider highly across a variety of criteria as shown below:
If you’re already trusting Segment with customer data management, it’s easy to connect Segment with Insider and upgrade instantly to take advantage of Insider’s improved ease of use and functionality.
Consider what Insider can provide …
Learning from the collected customer data, Insider’s AI-led predictive intent engine analyzes what your customers will do in the future. You’re not only learning what they’re doing in real-time, you’ll be equipped to predict when they’ll be purchasing something, when they’re about to leave your site, along with helpful data to inform your marketing strategy. All the hard work is done by the AI engine—making your next marketing move a no-brainer. The overview of each user is conveniently displayed in our analytics dashboard, giving you comprehensive insights that don’t require a data science degree to understand.
And for discerning marketers …
Insider’s most powerful feature is the individualization of every customer’s experience. Being data-driven and AI-supported, you can design and deliver an omnichannel marketing strategy that’ll move your customers to your desired goals faster. We’ve built a collection of marketer-tested templates for Email, Web, Mobile Apps, Web Push, and Messaging Apps to help streamline your workload.
The templates are not there only to save you time. Marketing automation capabilities convert any communication with your customers into a 1:1 experience, as communications are personalized and perfectly timed for the biggest impact. You can orchestrate a personal connection at every touchpoint on any channel. And if something doesn’t work out, you’ll know where it went wrong with a built-in real-time A/B testing feature.
We believe that every partner company deserves a devoted personal approach when deciding on an investment that significantly impacts their future success. That’s why we tailor our software and services to a company’s capacity, budget, and specific requirements.
But we’re able to disclose that the vast majority of our customers reported that the return of their investment happened in 6 months or less.
We’re proud that our customers are speaking for us. On user-review sites, our customers have given us highly commendable scores and put us among the top-rated platforms:
Given their highest possible rating, 5.0/5.0, Forrester Wave recognized Insider as a Leader in The Forrester Wave™: Cross-Channel Campaign Management (Independent Platforms) Q3, 2021
Insider was named a Leader in 2021 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Personalization Engines
Bloomreach, like Insider’s platform, offers more than a simple CDP. They label themselves as a Commerce Experience Cloud, which means they put all the essential commerce functionalities on one cloud platform with the goal of enriching customer experience. A CDP is central to Bloomreach’s three key products.
The Engagement product consists of a customer data platform built for marketers, omnichannel communications, journey orchestration, and testing and overlays. As expected from a CDP, Bloomreach’s product also unifies customer data from any source and turns it into customer profiles. With their analytics feature, you can manipulate the collected data into insightful reports to support your business decisions. This newfound knowledge can be used to launch personalized campaigns through built-in channels (email, SMS, web/mobile push, in-app messaging, WhatsApp, Adtech audiences, webhooks, or API). Along with the built-in channels, Bloomreach offers integrations with your favorite marketing tools.
Bloomreach’s most unique forté is their promising beginner-friendly interface. They have made building personalized omnichannel journeys convenient with their drag-and-drop technology.
Bloomreach offers more than the Segment CDP via two products. The Discovery package matches customers to the perfect product, using AI-powered site search, SEO, recommendations, and product merchandising. The Content package works as a headless content platform, enabling you to manage your storefront and easily add products to any page.
According to the user reviews on G2, when compared to the Segment, Bloomreach has received better grading in quality of support, ease of doing business, and product direction. Interestingly, Segment has been reported to be easier to use, and in setup and admin, as you can see in the comparison below. The main difference between the two products is in the user profile. Bloomreach is adapted to the marketers’ needs—mainly in the eCommerce industries—while Segment’s target audience appears to come from Computer Software, Information Technology, and similar industries.
Bloomreach doesn’t provide exact pricing on their website. They state that their pricing is customized to the number of customers your company serves, the size of your product catalog, and the number of events you execute. Their offer consists of three key products: Engagement, Discovery, and Content.
The pricing modules for Discovery and Content based on business size, with starting package Grow, advanced package Scale, and the Enterprise package.
As pioneers in the software industry, SAP software accompanied many businesses from the ground up. If you’re one of the many SAP trustees who run their software in different departments of the company, then your best choice for a customer data platform would be SAP Emarsys.
SAP Emarsys offers different platforms for different industries: retailers, eCommerce, and traveling, for example. The platform appears to work differently depending on each industry’s needs. Secondly, as for Insider and Bloomreach platforms, Emarsys exceeds the capabilities of a customer data platform. It’s labeled as an omnichannel customer engagement platform.
Emarsys’ many features are built to accelerate business outcomes. Their core feature is a Customer Engagement Platform that helps users achieve customer-centricity while providing the metrics, lifecycles segments, personalization variables, and analytics most relevant to a brand’s business. In simple terms, their CDP collects all the data from various sources and turns it into unified customer profiles and segments.
Similar to Insider’s platform, Emarsys offers AI-supported predictions such as purchase or engagement probability and product affinity. Using that knowledge, you’re able to personalize communications across channels in the shape of one-to-one product recommendations, visual affinity, channels and purchase predictions, individual voucher personalization, and send time optimization.
Emersys’ most unique feature is Emarsys Tactics, which are top-performing industry use cases. These are auto-populated, customer-based smart blocks that you can easily drag-and-drop into all of your communication channels. You can orchestrate customer journeys with the templated strategies and tactics taken from the most successful players in your industry.
Compared to Segment, Emarsys does appear to offer more. If you’re already using SAP software across your company, then integrating with Emarsys’ platform might be best for you. Customer reviews on the G2, however, suggest a preference for Segment over Emarsys. Customers felt Segment met their business needs better than Emarsys, and that the ease of use and quality of the product are better.
The pricing for SAP Emarsys platform is not disclosed on their website. A pricing model has been revealed on their G2 user review profile, as presented below.
mParticle can be considered a true alternative to Segment. Their platform is exactly what you would expect for a customer data platform. Like Segment, it collects customer data and connects it to all your tools for further use.
Companies place a lot of emphasis on data quality. mParticle helps you take control of data quality, firstly, by collection through secure APIs and SDKs, and, secondly, by providing an exact score on data health, exposing possible violations. The Data Master feature helps you build a cohesive data strategy to generate high-quality customer data. IDSync matches the identity of each user across data collected from many sources, which means it builds a single user profile for all activities.
As for Data Governance, it’s here that mParticle shines. You can manage data flows based on privacy statuses or consents. Your audiences are readily segmented based on consent, meaning you’ll be able to reach out only to those who allow it. The data flow is carefully channeled—it’s exactly determined which data may get sent where. mParticle helps you meet global compliance requirements, including CCPA, GDPR, and CPRA compliance.
The platform appears to be adapted with engineers and developers in mind. They’ve put out a Smartype feature for engineers to ensure proper event collection at run time. And for developers, there’s a CLI feature—an easy way for developers to interface with the mParticle platform through the command-line instead of through the user interface. There are not a lot of predetermined functions set up, so you’ll have your hands free to do your own calculations. The platform has a lot to offer those users with advanced data science knowledge.
mParticle might become useful to marketers, however, it doesn’t currently offer marketing tools. Your best option here is the possibility for integrations with marketing and analytics tools you’re already using. They also have a separate platform for Omnichannel Customer Journey Analytics, which they call Indicative. This platform provides a unified view of the customer journey across all your data sources and marketing channels.
Unfortunately, mParticle doesn’t have enough user reviews yet to allow effective comparison with Segment.
mParticle Customer Data Platform pricing is based on Monthly Tracked Users (MTU), data storage, and selected features. Their price is therefore tailored to your business capabilities and requirements. Features vary between Standard and Premium options.
The last Segment competitor evaluated is Totango.
Categorized under Customer Success Software, Totango offers everything you need to accelerate your customer success on their all-in-one Customer OS. The OS consists of three different products: a customer data platform, a customer health management platform, and cross-organization customer data access.
DNA-CX is their intelligent customer data platform, which connects all customer data streams in a 360 view. To ensure the data quality, DNA-CX approaches data incrementally, starting with imperfect data, then refining and iterating over time without incurring additional costs. The data is then accumulated to provide a detailed look into a specific customer’s financial data, product usage, support tickets, logged interactions with anyone in your company, demographic and behavioral data for each unique user at each account, and customer feedback.
Totango Spark is an upgrade to the customer data platform, which helps you achieve your customer success goals. It offers insights into your performance at each stage of the customer journey using health scores. You can tailor and apply a pre-delivered toolkit of configurable best practices, scorecards, and communication templates to your operations. Moreover, Totango Spark helps you build customer engagement modules for every stage of the journey with pre-built SuccessBLOCs. These are automation packs and templates to act instantaneously on every customer’s move.
The newest addition to their OS is Zoe. With Zoe, anyone in the company can have an impact on your customers’ experience, because the data is accessible to anyone through platforms they’re already using such as Salesforce, Zendesk, and Slack.
In our view, Totango would work best for B2B companies looking for better management of customer satisfaction and customer health. It helps you recognize which customers need to be prioritized.Where customers are abundant, in retail for example, it could become overwhelming.
When comparing Segment and Totango, reviewers on G2 found Segment easier to use, set up, and administer. According to the reviews, Segment might still be a better option, but it depends on what you need in a CDP.
Totango is completely transparent regarding their pricing model, with prices ranging from nothing to a completely customized price. A free option gets you quite a lot to begin with and costs you nothing to try, if you believe their platform is what you’re looking for.
If you’ve read this far, you’ll have learned a lot about customer data platforms. We hope we’ve helped to make your decision easier.
Written by
Srikant Kotapalli
Srikant is a seasoned product marketing leader with 15+ years of experience in building and marketing SaaS products. As VP of Product Marketing at Insider, Srikant is responsible for Insider's product positioning, GTM and analyst relations. When not working on product marketing projects, Srikant loves exploring the design and engineering of things