Segment is a Customer Data Platform that allows organizations to collect first-party data from data sources like websites, and mobile applications. Segment can then send that customer data to various destinations such as CRMs, marketing tools, analytics platforms, and warehouses. Another way to describe this is a data pipeline.

Yes, you can. RudderStack supports Segment as a source as well as a destination. You can send your customer events to RudderStack whenever Segment gets an event. Besides, you can route the events from various sources collected via RudderStack to Segment.

Compared to Segment, RudderStack has some important differentiating features. RudderStack offers an open-source version. Unlike Segment, RudderStack follows a warehouse-first, developer-friendly approach to building a CDP - by integrating with some of the most popular data warehouses like Snowflake, BigQuery, RedShift as well as data lakes. In terms of pricing, RudderStack charges based on event volume rather than MTUs (monthly tracked users). Learn more about the differences between RudderStack and Segment in our comparison page.

Segment is primarily a Customer Data Platform or CDP, not an ETL tool. However, it does offer the capability to pull data from cloud sources.