We’ve only been working on Astronomer for two months, so right now the biggest difference between Astronomer and Segment is for Meteor devs — if you haven’t instrumented your app for user analytics yet, our Meteor package wraps Meteor methods, iron-router, flow-router, and Mongo database interactions — effectively instrumenting your entire Meteor app for user events, automatically.
Type meteor add astronomerio:core, add the configuration, and your app will emit well-formed user events automatically to the Astronomer service. From there you can designate where to send your user data.
Vision:
We’ll implement auto-event emission for other app dev frameworks; React and Angular are next. Our goal is to save devs the boring/error-prone work of instrumenting their app for user analytics (so in this way we’re sort of like Heap).
We’ll make adopting new tools less painful — data replay functionality will be a standard feature. Again, goal is to make dev’s life easier. Exporting data from one service and into another is a huge pain for devs today.
Amazon Redshift is getting popular for analytics (once you want to take the training wheels off, and move away from tools like Mixpanel/KISSmetrics) — access to your data in Redshift will be a standard feature.
We provide an option to bring-your-own AWS account, giving you full control of your data, not us.
We’ll license our entire platform for larger enterprises that want complete control/customization. Once you have a handful of sources and a handful of destinations, things get messy, especially considering things like unreliable APIs and data replay. Our platform provides a hub to keep things tidy.
The service will be very affordable whether or not you care about Redshift. Some new pricing ideas here: http://astronomer.io/first-100 — we’re still learning, would love more testers.
We have the Intercom integration live right now, ready for some alpha testers to see if we got it right Feel free to ping me directly if you run into any problems (ry@astronomer.io).
