Personas is a paid add-on to for person-level profiles and a simple traits & audience builder. It is designed for e-Commerce use cases like updating ad audiences a few times daily.
Customer data platforms unify data across tools to create a holistic and chronological record of your customer’s attributes and interactions with your company. From there, you can build logic to segment, cleanse, transform, and sync the data out so that tools and teams stay aligned, and marketing and sales efforts are optimized.
The main value propositions that customer data platforms offer are two-fold: efficiency and conversion optimization.
Personas cannot use all your customer data - only Segment Sources. This means it cannot display a true unified customer profile. Read Segment's Personas documentation and Sources documentation on the data it can support.
Personas cannot transform & segment data in any way. You're limited to by the capabilities of their attributes builder (see their docs) and audience builder. None of these can operate on all your customer data.
Personas cannot map & filter data being sent to your end tools. As with Segment's main product, there is no mapping or filtering of data to prevent crowding out your downstream tools. You can only use audiences in a small number of tools (see their docs).
Personas is a new, lightweight customer data platform in 2018. If you're looking for a more established, fully-featured, robust customer data platform try evaluating:
Segment can track data from its tracking libraries (like analytics.js) and a limited range of connectors that can act as Segment Sources (tools that can send data - see their Catalog, then uncheck "Destinations").
Segment Sources are designed to send data into a data warehouse like Redshift in bulk. You cannot send data from Redshift to your tools with Segment.
There is no way to send data between tools with Segment alone.
Hull’s integrations are two-way, so you can sync data between tools in our integrations library or your own built & hosted connectors.
You can also ingest data from:
analytics.js, without overloading your end tools.
Personas is built for e-Commerce, not B2B use cases. It doesn't have person and company level identity resolution or relationships.
With Hull, you can see a unified customer profile and unified account profile, including the relationships between people and company. Customize your identity resolution strategy & person-company relationships to match your unique business logic.
Then, map unified data about people and companies natively to all your tools, all in real-time.
Since Segment cannot access all your data source, it cannot unify all your customer from all your tools, tracking & databases. You cannot see data from your:
With Hull, you can see a truly unified customer profile for every lead, customer & account in Profiles.
Segment Personas is limited to a simple attributes builder and audience builder. The limits of this are shown in their Personas documentation. You're also limited to data that you can capture through Segment.
With Hull, you transform all your customer data in any way using Processor - the real-time editing environment for your customer data. With simple JavaScript, you're no longer constrained by a graphical user interface.
Personas cannot access all your data to build segments, and it cannot update segments in real-time.
Personas does not automatically create native segments, lists & views in your end tools - except for a very small number (see their audience documentation). Everything else requires you to use the boolean fields they create & update segments in your end tools.
With Hull, you can build precise segments using all your customer data which update & refresh in real-time too. There's no constraints in how complex your Hull Segments can be. You can use Hull Segments immediately in your end tools.
Segment sends the entire payload in every call to each Segment Destination tool. There is no filtering of data or mapping to existing data.
With Hull, each integration has mapping of segments, attributes, and events so you can control who and what about them is synced. You can also map to existing data in your end tools, and set overwrite rules.
Map, filter & sync Contacts, Companies & Lists in HubSpot with User & Account Profiles & Segments in Hull via the HubSpot integration.
Map, filter & sync Leads, Contacts & Accounts in Salesforce with User & Account Profiles & Segments in Hull via the Salesforce integration.
Map, filter & sync Leads & Contacts in Close.io with User & Account Profiles & Segments in Hull via the Close.io integration.
Segment's pricing starts free but is priced based on "monthly tracked users" (website visitors, leads, customers - any person). For any team with traffic, this usually becomes a discussion of an annual sales contract.
No scaling team we’ve seen stays on Segment free plans, particularly since their recent price hikes. With Segment, we see teams consistently stuck:
Hull gives one complete customer data platform with predictable infrastructure costs & real control over data flows into your end tools.
Hull's customer data platform gives your data teams a complete toolset to unify, transform, segment & sync data across all your tools real-time.
We saved over $15,000 on Salesforce and doubled qualified leads. Customer success and sales are very, very happy. I can give them whatever information they want, and I don’t need a backend developer. Data is more reliable. We have more control.
Go beyond the capabilities of Personas & leverage your existing Segment tracking with Hull's Segment integration.
