Great article. Do you know any good reading material for understanding GDPR compliances. What data fields can be tracked and what cannot under the compliance rule?
You're not really comparing Snowplow fairly here - Snowplow's job entire job is to collect data, what you do with it after is entirely up to you - print it, model it, bop it, delete it. The other tools all have interfaces, modelling, user management etc etc that is not Snowplow's realm. This is a major distinction that not a lot of people understand (and most businesses aren't kitted out to do).
Saying Snowplow's analysis is limited to errors and counts of events is also misleading - it doesn't do any 'analysis' out of the box, because that's not it's job. (And in reality their error logging is pretty crap - you need to write your own)
Snowplow has a managed service.
Pricing for Snowplow is somewhat externalised - you're paying for engineers, analysts etc to model your data. The actual service is quite cheap when compared to other providers, but not when you factor in the totality of effort needed to model it. That comes with major pros and cons which many companies don't fully appreciate.
Integrations, again, not its job, integrates with most cloud providers or anything that can accept a request.
This is a great summary, and I really appreciate the insights. I have worked with a couple of these, and I am investigating Snowplow now (mainly due to cost concerns). Am I missing something? From their
EDIT: The below corrections have been made to the original article.
A few corrections that have been pointed out (which is great, because I haven't personally used all the tools on this list!):
- Segment has functions, which can transform data in flight
- Segment has a free tier (1000 visitors/mo)
- Snowplow supports a pixel tracker
- mParticle now owns Indicative and has analytics capabilities
- Posthog, Heap both tools to investigate
- GA4 will be less anonymized
- Amplitude warehouse destinations in beta
I will keep this comment up to date with other additions, and then update the post.
Great article. Do you know any good reading material for understanding GDPR compliances. What data fields can be tracked and what cannot under the compliance rule?
Your mix of companies makes the comparison incomplete and not apples to apples
You're not really comparing Snowplow fairly here - Snowplow's job entire job is to collect data, what you do with it after is entirely up to you - print it, model it, bop it, delete it. The other tools all have interfaces, modelling, user management etc etc that is not Snowplow's realm. This is a major distinction that not a lot of people understand (and most businesses aren't kitted out to do).
Saying Snowplow's analysis is limited to errors and counts of events is also misleading - it doesn't do any 'analysis' out of the box, because that's not it's job. (And in reality their error logging is pretty crap - you need to write your own)
Snowplow has a managed service.
Pricing for Snowplow is somewhat externalised - you're paying for engineers, analysts etc to model your data. The actual service is quite cheap when compared to other providers, but not when you factor in the totality of effort needed to model it. That comes with major pros and cons which many companies don't fully appreciate.
Integrations, again, not its job, integrates with most cloud providers or anything that can accept a request.
This is a great summary, and I really appreciate the insights. I have worked with a couple of these, and I am investigating Snowplow now (mainly due to cost concerns). Am I missing something? From their
docs it appears they have robust support for web hooks as well as a pixel tracker. https://docs.snowplow.io/docs/collecting-data/collecting-from-own-applications/pixel-tracker/
https://docs.snowplow.io/docs/collecting-data/collecting-data-from-third-parties/