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.
40,000+ sites and apps run RudderStack
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.
"Does everything Segment does + great transformations & reverse ETL features"
"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
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.
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
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