Segment, now Twilio Segment, is a customer data platform (CDP). See 2026 pricing (Free, Team, Business), key features, pros and cons, and top alternatives.
Segment was founded in 2011 in San Francisco as a customer data infrastructure company, building tools that let engineering teams collect event data once and send it to many downstream analytics and marketing tools without custom integration work for each one. In November 2020, Twilio acquired Segment for approximately 3.2 billion dollars in an all-stock transaction, and the product now operates as Twilio Segment.
Segment's core offering is a customer data platform (CDP) that unifies data from web, mobile, and server-side sources into a single customer profile and routes it to hundreds of destinations, including analytics tools, advertising platforms, CRMs, and data warehouses.
Segment's Connections product provides SDKs and a large catalog of pre-built destination integrations, so teams instrument tracking once and distribute data broadly. Protocols enforces data quality against a defined tracking plan, and the Privacy Portal helps teams manage data subject access and deletion requests for privacy regulations.
Higher tiers add Unify, an identity resolution engine that merges anonymous and known user activity into one profile, and Reverse ETL, which syncs data from a warehouse back into operational and marketing tools. The Business tier also includes Twilio Engage for building audiences and multi-channel customer journeys.
Segment prices primarily by Monthly Tracked Users (MTUs). The Free plan covers up to 1,000 MTUs with limited destinations. The Team plan starts at 120 dollars per month for up to 10,000 MTUs, unlimited destinations, and basic governance tools, with cost scaling as MTU volume grows.
The Business plan is custom-quoted based on MTU volume and required features, with typical real-world contracts ranging from tens of thousands to several hundred thousand dollars per year for larger enterprise deployments.
Yes, Segment offers a free plan that supports up to 1,000 monthly tracked users (MTUs) with a limited number of destinations.
The Team plan starts at 120 dollars per month for up to 10,000 MTUs, with cost scaling as MTU volume increases.
Segment is owned by Twilio, which acquired the company in November 2020 for approximately 3.2 billion dollars in an all-stock deal. It operates as Twilio Segment.
MTU stands for Monthly Tracked User, referring to the number of unique users or devices tracked across all of a company's connected sources in a given month.
Segment was founded in 2011 in San Francisco, California.
Unify is Segment's identity resolution feature that merges anonymous and known user activity into a single customer profile, available on the Business tier.
Yes, Segment's Reverse ETL feature syncs data from a cloud data warehouse back into operational and marketing tools.
Segment competes with other customer data platforms such as mParticle, RudderStack, and Amplitude.