Census vs Segment

Find out why customers choose Census as the most complete platform for data activation and quality. Census wins in scalability, observability, and performance to help every team build better data, together.

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High-growth enterprises choose Census:

What do you get from Census
that you can't get from Segment?

Built for marketing & data teams

Unlock powerful activation and audience segmentation without code, or manage the same resources in code to ensure security and governance.

Highest quality integrations

Sync with confidence with the fastest and most reliable connectors that scale to billions of rows — up to 200x faster than other activation platforms.

Trusted data layer

Ensure data quality and rapid delivery with an entire suite of collaboration tools that enable data transformation for every team.

Why customers choose Census over Segment

Census

Segment

Pricing

Flexible for multiple use cases, easier to forecast pricing, and scalable for growing organizations.

Based on # of MTU (monthly total users) which is notoriously difficult to forecast.

Additional Fees

None

Segment Personas is available to business tier accounts as an "Add-on"

Data Activation

Visual Segment Builder

The most user-friendly audience segmentation for marketing teams that supports multi-object segmentation, many-to-many relationships, and full SQL compatibility natively with the data warehouse.

Requires duplicating data in Segment to achieve full functionality.

Data Modeling

No-Code Data Transformation

Computed Columns enable self-serve transformations like rollups, equations, lookups, GPT, and text transforms.

No functionality

Data Engineering

Sync Management API

Programmatically create, trigger, edit, and delete syncs, models, and connections.

No functionality

Native dbt, Looker, and Sigma integrations

Connect to any existing dbt project, Looker Look, or Sigma Workbook. You can configure Census to automatically run syncs whenever your dbt Cloud models have been rebuilt. Census will alert you if dbt changes will adversely affect Census syncs.

No functionality

Security

Data stays in the warehouse by default

Rest assured that your data is safe in transit and at rest. We don't store any of your data and we can provide custom temporary storage options.

Segment copies and stores your sensitive customer data in order to function, resulting in duplicate data storage and processing costs.

Role-Based Access Controls

4 different levels of permissions, with a unique Operator role that only creates and manages segments and syncs on approved data models.

Basic roles and permissions.

Observability

Sync Logs in the warehouse

Census stores detailed logs of every data point and every audience synced in your data warehouse so you can query them with SQL or BI tools. No extra tools needed.

Logs are stored in Segment (90 days)

Sync Dry Runs

Census supports running test syncs to preview how data downstream will change, without actually changing your destination data.

No ability to preview syncs

Support

White Glove Onboarding

Every customer has a dedicated CSM and Customer Data Architect. Our CDAs aren't your average support team, all of them used to be Heads of Data at companies like Verizon and the AMA.

Additional fee for enhanced onboarding

Data Community

Join thousands of fellow data practitioners in the OA Club Slack community and get instant help and support from your peers.

Public community access.

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“We tried Segment but it didn't really work for us. There was no ability to transform analytics data, it was expensive, and it was hard to use. And the destinations were quite limited.”