Best Top 3 open source segment alternative. Actually, You don't know the 3rd one.

The Twilio Segment is a proprietary and closed sourced customer data Platform. Segment claims to have more than 25k business as their regular customers, they provide demos as well if the customer asks for that, along with the Free account.

But there are many issues with closed source proprietary software, and then hosting the data on someone’s server is next level concern for privacy valuing enterprises and customers, like:

• The first major problem is Data. Your data is with them, on their cloud, it is not with you in your own environments i.e. servers, etc.
• Lack of Transparency. With closed source proprietary software the problem is you can not see how the software works or what data it collects, which may raise privacy concerns. You know the data hacks that happened in not so past.
• Vendor lock-in is another major problem with closed source applications and Segment is not an exception to this.
• Cost. This is expensive and its cost will increase as your business or website grows with more active users. Their limits are 1k and 10K for the Free and Pro plans. Which is not really good if you are not making much money out of your product yet.
• Licensing. There are very different kinds of issues associated with licensing, majorly if you are planning to launch your own B2B or B2C facing services but their licensing does not allow that.

permalinkHere's What we will cover in this article!

• The open source way.

• Here are the top open source segment alternatives.

• Apache Unomi

  • Introduction And Deep dive
  • Self hosting Apache Unomi for your Customer Data Platform needs using Docker-compose
  • Asking Questions and contacting them for your queries
  • It is Free. The Pricing.
  • 10 Apache Unomi FaQs

• Rudderstack

  • Introduction And Deep dive
  • Self hosting Rudderstack and Complete docker-compose.yml for you
  • Asking Questions and Comunity support links
  • Rudderstock FaQs

• Tracardi

  • Introduction And Deep dive
  • Self hosting Tracardi with Complete steps to self host
  • Asking Questions and Community support links
  • Tracardi 10 FaQs

• In Summary

permalinkThe open source way.

Open source culture and attitude to contribute back as a responsible person has opened many opportunities and Big companies and also the individual like you and me has been greatly benefited from this.

I fully agree with this. You? Yes!

permalinkHere are the top open source segment alternatives.

Below are the hand-picked best update and working open source alternatives to Segment. I hope you enjoy it.

Please tell me if you like this and it helps you decide better on your find.

• Apache Unomi
• Rudderstack
• Tracardi

I am sharing all the internal details and our detailed findings on segment alternatives. I am trying my best to answer most of the questions I usually have when I have to find something like this and hopefully, you will have similar questions in your mind as well.

Here are the questions I am putting here on your behalf and trying to answer.

1. Can you self-host this on your server?
2. How much privacy and control would you have?
3. Link to the actual codebase?
4. Link to their websites?
5. Can you buy cloud-managed hosting with these open-source applications?
6. What would be the cost if there is any?
7. Is it developer friendly and how much technical knowledge would it need to run these?
8. How good are their User guides and Developer documentation?
9. Do they have any help forum or place where you can directly them your doubts and technical questions?
10. is the project actively maintained or dead?

You got me!

It's time to deep dive now. Hold your breath, dear ladies and gentleman!

The first on our list goes like this. The one, from the great Apache foundation, and the pioneer to many open source stuff.

permalinkApache Unomi

Visit Apache Unomi

Visit Apache Unomi

permalinkIntroduction And Deep dive

In their own word:

Apache Unomi™ (pronounced "You know me") is a Java Open Source customer data platform, a Java server designed to manage customers, leads and visitors data and help personalize customers experiences while also offering features to respect visitor privacy rules (such as GDPR).

The entire code of Apache Unomi is available under Apache License V2. So what it means for you is you can go to their code repository at GitHub https://github.com/apache/unomi and look at their code and download it to your system and even you can share this with your people or experts.

Another great thing about this Open Source Customer Data Platform is, it is actively maintained and it is not going anywhere.

You can happily go and use this without any risk. Here is the link to directly download Apache Unomi. https://unomi.apache.org/download.html

You will love this Apache Unomi and Mautic video:

permalinkSelf hosting Apache Unomi for your Customer Data Platform needs using Docker-compose

Docker images are available for Apache Unomi here https://hub.docker.com/r/apache/unomi, this section will provide a few quick steps to get your first Unomi environment started, the only requirement being to have a recent version of Docker installed on your machine.

here is the quick docker-compose to run this on your system:

version: "3.8"
services:
  elasticsearch:
    image: docker.elastic.co/elasticsearch/elasticsearch:7.10.2
    environment:
      - discovery.type=single-node
    ports:
      - 9200:9200
  unomi:
    # Unomi version can be updated based on your needs
    image: apache/unomi:1.5.7
    environment:
      - UNOMI_ELASTICSEARCH_ADDRESSES=elasticsearch:9200
      - UNOMI_THIRDPARTY_PROVIDER1_IPADDRESSES=0.0.0.0/0,::1,127.0.0.1
    ports:
      - 8181:8181
      - 9443:9443
      - 8102:8102
    links:
      - elasticsearch
    depends_on:
      - elasticsearch

permalinkAsking Questions and contacting them for your queries

Apache Unomi has a great mailing list and they have a very community of users who can answer and very likely you will hear back from them here are their mailing list.

You can join their Slack channel and ask anything to them, any sort of thing related to Unomi.

If you are looking to find any answers to your difficulties, which you may face sometimes, you can search existing people's questions and answer them here and you can also ask your own.

Their Slack Channel: https://the-asf.slack.com/messages/CBP2Z98Q7/

permalinkIt is Free. The Pricing.

Apache Unomi is completely free to use for your personal or Business needs. However, since Apache Software foundations maintain many many open source software, so they do not provide any managed hosting.

However, you host this on your server or cloud or VPS like Digital Ocean, Vultr etc.

permalink10 Apache Unomi FaQs

Hopefully, I have answered most of your questions regarding Apache Unomi. But still, here are the 10 questions to get the 360 view of Apache Unomi.

permalinkRudderstack

Visit Rudderstock

permalinkIntroduction And Deep dive

Rudderstack is another best Open Source, AGPL-3.0 licensed, 2.7 Million Docker pulled Customer Data Platform (CDP) which can beat the Segment in every single aspect and feature.

This is just one of the best Customer Data Platforms available in the open source world with 200 plus integrations and custom connectors available out of the box with native Date warehouse support.

However, the list which I have created is best among all other options not mentioned here but Rudderstack has its own place with a huge customer base. You can self-host Rudderstack on your system or anywhere you like but if you are a Startup founder and looking for a quick cloud-managed solution then Rudderstack is your choice.

Compare to Apache Unomi, Rudderstack has advantages as Apache Unomi does not provide cloud managed service but Rudderstack does.

If you compare this with Segment, In Segment’s own words Segment is used by 25k plus businesses but Rudderstack is being used by more than 40K plus businesses, which is huge. This 40K number also tells you about its popularity and how Open source has influence over closed-source products like Segment.

When it comes to pricing Rudderstack has very generous pricing models for the Free tier with no strings attached to your active monthly users as long as your stay within 1 million events per month, which is not the case with Twilio Segment.

Here is the youtube video to further ease your journey:

permalinkSelf hosting Rudderstack and Complete docker-compose.yml for you

You can use docker to easily install the rudder stack to the system of your choice.

here is the docker-compose.yml file for you:

version: "3.7"

services:
  db:
    image: postgres:15-alpine
    environment:
      - POSTGRES_USER=rudder
      - POSTGRES_PASSWORD=password
      - POSTGRES_DB=jobsdb
    ports:
      - "6432:5432"
  backend:
    depends_on:
      - db
      - metrics-exporter
      - d-transformer
    image: rudderlabs/rudder-server:latest # latest version that matches 0.*.*
    entrypoint: sh -c '/wait-for db:5432 -- /rudder-server'
    ports:
      - "8080:8080"
    environment:
      - JOBS_DB_HOST=db
      - JOBS_DB_USER=rudder
      - JOBS_DB_PORT=5432
      - JOBS_DB_DB_NAME=jobsdb
      - JOBS_DB_PASSWORD=password
      - DEST_TRANSFORM_URL=http://d-transformer:9090
      - CONFIG_BACKEND_URL=https://api.rudderstack.com
      - WORKSPACE_TOKEN=<your_workspace_token> # Must be written without quotes e.g. WORKSPACE_TOKEN=20TokEO34NWitou2t3quO8teS7
      - STATSD_SERVER_URL=metrics-exporter:9125
      # DO NOT REMOVE - Mandatory env for Shopify
      - RSERVER_GATEWAY_WEBHOOK_SOURCE_LIST_FOR_PARSING_PARAMS=Shopify 
      # - RSERVER_BACKEND_CONFIG_CONFIG_FROM_FILE=true
      # - RSERVER_BACKEND_CONFIG_CONFIG_JSONPATH=<workspace_config_filepath_in_container> # For ex., /etc/rudderstack/workspaceConfig.json
    # Uncomment the following lines to mount workspaceConfig file
    # volumes:
    #   - <absolute_path_to_workspace_config>:<workspace_config_filepath_in_container> # Value for <workspace_config_filepath_in_container> should be same as the value provided for RSERVER_BACKEND_CONFIG_CONFIG_JSONPATH
  d-transformer:
    depends_on:
      - metrics-exporter
    image: rudderstack/rudder-transformer:latest
    ports:
      - "9090:9090"
    environment:
      - STATSD_SERVER_HOST=metrics-exporter
      - STATSD_SERVER_PORT="9125"
  # minio:
  #   image: minio/minio
  #   ports:
  #     - "9000:9000"
  #   command: server /data
  metrics-exporter:
    image: prom/statsd-exporter:v0.22.4
    ports:
      - "9102:9102"

permalinkAsking Questions and Comunity support links

You have a couple of choices here when it comes to looking for help, asking questions etc. They have a Slack channel where you can ask them, or directly contact them. Its here https://rudderstack.com/join-rudderstack-slack-community

They also have active GitHub issues where you can find technical questions to your problems and you can also engage with other people using the Rudderstack. Here is the link: https://github.com/rudderlabs/rudder-server/issues

Let's do it again and here are the 10 questions you need to answer your self but I am doing it for you. Please remember to give us a favor if our content helps you, just by sharing this with your friends on social media, etc.

permalinkRudderstock FaQs

here it is:

permalinkTracardi

Visit Tracardi

permalinkIntroduction And Deep dive

Tracardi is another open-source gem with an MIT license. What this means for you is that you can use this for personal or commercial purposes and that's fine. It's one of the Best no-code Marketing platforms with CDP alternatives to Segment.

The best thing about Tracardi compare to all the above options is that you do not have to write even a single line of code and you will still be able to start this within minutes. Trust me it's very powerful and You might already be knowing how powerful the ‘No code tools’ are!

The major pros about Tracardi is you can completely Automate your customer Journey with Zero lines of code and that to within minutes.

One of the amazing features of Tracardi is it works well with Apache Unomi as well, so what this means for you is, you can have both running on your server, Apache Unomi and Tracardi. Trust this would be a very powerful combo which is literally not possible in other cases.

Tracardi has good documentation and details too and you can reach out to their Slack channel(link below) for any help.

Here is a video to help you even further dig into this topic to understand how Tracardi can help you.

permalinkSelf hosting Tracardi with Complete steps to self host

To easily test and run Tracardi as your Customer data platform engine you can try below steps:

Please remember Tracardi needs the following components to run:

• Elasticsearch
• Redis
• Tracardi API
• Tracardi GUI

You will need to start the docker containers for all the above services. But if you follow the below Steps all these will be up and running in no time.

To build a docker container from source clone our repository

git clone https://github.com/tracardi/tracardi-api.git

Go to tracardi folder and run docker build

cd tracardi-api/ docker build . -t tracardi-api

After a while the docker will be build. It is on your computer, so you can run it like this.

docker run -p 8686:80 -e ELASTIC_HOST=http://<your-laptop-ip>:9200 tracardi-api

permalinkAsking Questions and Community support links

One way to connect on Technical issues is their GitHub issues, where you can post your questions and queries and get them answered by someone. Here is the link: https://github.com/Tracardi/tracardi-api/issues

Like others in the list, they have slack channel for Tracardi and you can utilize that as well, as you need: https://join.slack.com/t/tracardi/shared_invite/zt-141upmux1-waF44tNBbAKJRBIzZzCGdQ

Shall we answer the public now? on those criteria set by you can me, at the beginning of the post?

permalinkTracardi 10 FaQs

here it is:

permalinkIn Summary

If you are just looking for a summary out of all this in-depth data mentioned here. Here we go:

If you are concerned about your user base and the first-party data of your users and you have a huge user base you can choose either of the three options and you are good to go.

Now if you are looking for an open-source alternative to Segment but don't want to manage all the hassle yourself, you can go with Rudderstack. Now based on whether your active user base is still growing or you already have a huge user base you can go with either a Free plan or paid one. Their Free plan would work for many of you if are still starting as a startup or Solprenure and are not making much out of your product yet.

Now if you are looking to combine the power of two open sources Segment alternatives you can go with Tracardi, It has huge potential as you can use Apache Unomia and Tracrdi to manage your Customer experience but you need to be a bit technical as it has few more components to it.

I hope my effort has been helpful to you in finding the best open-source alternative to segment. Please share and give us your reactions below, we are open to listening to your feedback and improving based on your suggestions.