How do companies choose between a CDP like Segment and Census for managing data in the modern data stack?

Lets talk about CDPs separately from Segment specifically, because Segment does a bunch of things. They do market themselves as a CDP, but I think they do more than just that.

CDP stands for "customer data platform." At the 5,000-foot level, if you look at a CDP's architecture diagram and what I just described with the modern data stack that Census, Fivetran and dbt -- these sorts of companies -- are building, they look very similar. You have big sets of users/customers sitting in apps, and I'm pulling that data into some sort of central place. I'm usually doing some amount of merging, cleaning or associating all of that data together. It's kind of the "transform" piece. ThenI publish those data points off to destinations.That’s a CDP roughly.

CDP tends to serve more of a marketing and advertising market for the most part, or at least that's where most of the traction has been. The CDP pulls in all my various data sets about customers and generates audiences for it that I can use and target.

CDPs historically have also usually been an all-in-one solution. You buy the product; it does all the data ingestion; in a lot of cases, it does the cleaning, the merging and the association based on its model, or it does it automatically for you; and then it does the deployment off to the various different destinations that it supports. There are benefits to having that all-in-one tool.

The problem comes in when you're worried about extensibility and flexibility. Most of the CDPs try to standardize on their view of the model. I'm personally most familiar with Segment, so I'll pick on Segment just a little bit. Segment's model is really around the .identify() and the .group() calls, and you're standardizing to those data structures. There are other CDPs on the market that offer other models. That works great if your business fits into that CDP's model.

But, for example, if you need a data connector that they don't necessarily support, or if you need to structure your business entities differently from the default one in those objects, then you start running into problems. You would expect these things to follow typical power laws. Everybody needs a Google Ads connector on the marketing side; everybody's going to sync data off to Google Ads. But maybe not everybody is syncing data to TikTok or something like that. Does your CDP support TikTok? It may or may not. Does your CDP support a consumer e-commerce use case? You're probably fine. Does it support a three-sided marketplace where you want to target the different entities differently? That might be a bit more of a stretch. That's where you start to run into some of the problems with a classic CDP. It's great as long as you fit into that ecosystem. But if anything you want to do works outside of that ecosystem, then you start to get in trouble.

At Census, we talk a lot about: "Hey, you don't need a CDP. Your warehouse is your CDP. It's whatever DP you want, it's your data platform." Through the modern data stack, you can assemble your CDP that works for your business in whatever way you need it to. You can pull in data from any source with Fivetran. If, for whatever reason, Fivetran doesn't have it, you can use Segment instead. You can use Stitch, or you can build your own. You can do the modeling in whatever form you want -- with dbt probably, but there are other options out there. And then you can broadcast that data out to the destinations that matter through Census, or by yourself. Before they were using Census, a lot of our customers were building their own integrations into these destination tools, pulling it out of data warehouse.

Ultimately, all of these things sitting on the data warehouse are just speaking SQL. The interface that they talk through is SQL queries and common table expressions. So Fivetran can work with dbt, Census, Segment, DataRobot, or whatever you want to get into the AI and ML side. You can stitch together all the different things that are most appropriate for your business.