If you're looking for customer data infrastructure (CDI) or an event tracking tool, you've likely encountered RudderStack. But is RudderStack the best solution, or are there better alternatives?
This article will cover:
- What is RudderStack?
- How does RudderStack work?
- Pros and cons of RudderStack
- What are the alternatives to RudderStack?
What is RudderStack?
RudderStack is a Customer Data Infrastructure (CDI) that helps your data team collect events, manage ETL pipelines, and create audiences to power your marketing use cases. The platform provides an open-source event tracking solution, enabling you to build a Customer 360 view of your customers.
How Does RudderStack Work?
Even though RudderStack is a customer data infrastructure, it still has the same feature set as a customer data platform, which is required to help power marketing use cases.
- Data Collection: RudderStack allows traditional ETL pipelines or event streams to collect data in two ways. For non-event data or traditional ETL use cases where you want to move data into your warehouse, RudderStack provides several sources to assist you.
- Data Storage: RudderStack's default deployment stores your event data in a managed storage bucket on a seven-day rolling basis. Enterprise customers can change this to a 30-day rolling basis. If neither of those options works for you, you can store your event data in your own data cloud storage.
- Identity Resolution: Profiles is the RudderStack feature that allows you to build a Customer 360, where you can transform data within the warehouse to stitch customer data from multiple sources
- Audience Management: RudderStack provides a no-code audience builder that connects to your data warehouse so you can build audiences without writing SQL and send that audience to a downstream destination.
- Activation: Event Forwarding and Activation API are two options to support real-time streaming. And RudderStack offers reverse ETL capabilities to help sync customer data with your downstream tools.
Pros and Cons of RudderStack
Here is a quick summary of RudderStack's pros and cons to help you decide if it’s right for you.
Pros
RudderStack is a great open-source tracking option that allows you to leverage your existing data infrastructure to avoid paying for double storage. The RudderStack ETL pipeline solution helps you collect data from your existing SaaS application so you have more than behavior data in the platform.
Cons
If you're looking for a marketer-friendly solution, RudderStack might not be the best choice, as the platform was built for data teams. The audience builder isn't straightforward and often requires engineering work to get the most value. If you want to unlock the best features of RudderStack, you'll have to pay, as most of the premium features are only available via the paid cloud offering. Integrations within RudderStack are limited, especially ETL and Reverse ETL, and the platform provides visual mapping but is only available for certain destinations.
What are the Alternatives to RudderStack?
Hightouch
Hightouch is a composable CDP that sits on top of your warehouse, providing easy access to all your customer data and enabling you to use it to power your marketing use cases. The platform provides all the features of a CDP, like data collection, identity resolution, and analytics, but in a way where you can select the products you want to use rather than paying for a bundle of features you might not use.
Segment
Segment is a traditional CDP that focuses on collecting behavioral data and sending that data to business tools to power your use cases. The platform is designed for data teams and technical marketers, focusing on gathering and unifying customer data from multiple sources like websites, apps, servers, and cloud applications.
ActionIQ
ActionIQ is a CDP that helps you collect and unify your customer data into a centralized platform you can then use to power your campaigns in your marketing channels. The platform assists you in improving customer experiences through advanced analytics and journey orchestration and provides machine learning and AI tools for automating segmentation, product recommendations, and churn prevention tasks.
Conclusion
RudderStack is good for data teams, providing various data collection and management tools, but it's not a marketing tool. It may have some of the same features as a CDP, but it isn't marketing-friendly, and marketers are the main users who need access to this data.
A composable approach like Hightouch allows marketers and others within your business to self-serve access to your customer data and create the audiences needed to power any use cases. If you're interested in learning more, book a demo with one of our solution engineers.
