Hightouch Agentic Marketing Platform
Centralized event tracking has improved product analytics and simplified data workflows
What is our primary use case?
Our main use case for Hightouch is the events capability that they provide, so we primarily use it for product analytics today.
We have a mobile app, a website, and a web app in five different regions. We deploy the SDK from Hightouch on all of these surfaces. All screen views, interaction events, scroll events, and any kind of data that can help with product analytics are sent back to the data warehouse, where we run analytics on usage patterns, AB tests, and similar things.
We don't use a lot of the other capabilities they provide, but the fact that Hightouch has a lot of different things to offer is useful because we can always expand into those if we need to. The pricing is decent and à la carte, so we pay for the capabilities we use. Within what we are using, the volumes are reasonably generous, I would say.
What is most valuable?
They offer a lot of different types of capabilities around CRM and automation, but as I said, we don't use those. We primarily use only the events for product analytics feature.
Hightouch has positively impacted our organization, as it was a suitable replacement for the product analytics solution we were using previously. I think the onboarding was rather seamless, the support is great, and the team is very responsive. The offering also has rather generous caps, as I mentioned, compared to competitors' offerings in the market, which have similar prices but much lower usage caps.
There are definitely improvements in analytics quality because of the contracts they provide on the control plane. There were also definite time savings. Previously, the user experience of the PMs and developers was rather awkward, because they had to trigger events in staging and go to another place to ingest them into the warehouse. Now, because Hightouch provides a single control plane, people can play with the staging app and immediately get feedback on the events being fired. There are pretty good time savings and productivity gains in the development life cycle, as well as in the life cycle of the data engineer who is ingesting the data into the warehouse, because we just need to pull data from S3, since Hightouch writes to S3. Hightouch also provides the ability to write natively to the warehouse, but we chose not to go down that route because S3 ingest is far more economically viable for us.
What needs improvement?
I think Hightouch as a platform has a lot to offer. It is primarily a CRM or reverse ETL type of offering with a lot of AI bells and whistles. However, it feels to me that the entire events offering is a bit of a second-class citizen in the suite of tools they offer. I say this because a lot of the documentation is out of date, and we hit a few random edge cases when using the events platform, which felt a little raw compared to other, more mature event platforms. I would say the improvement here would be for them to spend a little more time and attention on the platform itself, or provide a little more TLC, especially from the events perspective.
For how long have I used the solution?
I have been using Hightouch for a year now.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
Hightouch is stable in my experience.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
Hightouch scales well.
How are customer service and support?
The customer support from Hightouch is great.
I would rate the customer support as eight on a scale of 1 to 10.
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
We were using Snowplow, and it was the self-hosted version because it was open source. When Snowplow changed its licensing, we explored signing with them, but considering the cost involved, we looked at other players in the space and landed on Hightouch because there were a few trade-offs there.
What was our ROI?
I have definitely seen a return on investment with time saved. I have talked about the developer experience on the product side as well as the experience on the data engineering side. We have also saved cost because we can grow into the generous volumes they provide without having to pay more, as we would have had to on any other platform. Money is saved, time is saved, and fewer employees are needed. Fewer employees are needed because we are not self-deploying a platform, upgrading it, and applying security patches. Hightouch's control plane handles all of that for us, so there is definitely less work for us to do. Fewer employees needed is therefore also a viable metric.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
My experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing was smooth. Pricing was very reasonable for the events offering. I know that they have other products which are far more expensive, but pricing was fine. Setup cost was also reasonable, and licensing was fair.
We did have a rather poor experience working with one of their sales partners. The initial outreach to Hightouch put us in touch with a third party who was doing reselling for them in Southeast Asia. Those people were effectively pushing us to do an agreement with them for them to do the implementation, rather than just selling us a high-cost Hightouch license, which is what we were after. After that somewhat average or below-par experience, I switched to asking for a direct Hightouch contact. Hightouch itself was fine.
Which other solutions did I evaluate?
Before choosing Hightouch, I evaluated other options, including Snowplow, Hightouch, and PostHog. I think there was one more option as well.
What other advice do I have?
On a scale of 1 to 10, I would rate Hightouch as eight.
I chose 8 out of 10 looking at it purely from what the other event platforms are offering. I think Hightouch is a great value proposition from the cost perspective and for the volumes that people want to scale into.
For the events specifically, I think Hightouch is a great offering. The advice I would give really depends on where people are coming from. If they have an existing tech stack and want to migrate, it is going to be challenging regardless. However, if they are starting fresh, it might be a good solution to ramp up with.
Which deployment model are you using for this solution?
If public cloud, private cloud, or hybrid cloud, which cloud provider do you use?
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Data syncs between our database and CRM have improved accuracy and now support faster decisions
What is our primary use case?
To resolve order associations and identity resolutions, we primarily use Hightouch to retrieve data from our database, which is our source of truth, and then push it back into our CRM platform so that the sales and marketing teams have all information without discrepancies.
Our main use case for Hightouch is to ensure that all information in our portal and database matches in HubSpot, as sales and marketing professionals use the CRM platform to make calls, schedule meetings, and log activities, with HubSpot being the primary source of truth. We must ensure that whatever information we have in our database and warehouse is reflected in HubSpot as well. We also create various segments and perform other derived calculations at the database level, such as creating deals, which we push back into HubSpot so the team knows whom to target and call, in terms of lead scoring and other activities.
How has it helped my organization?
Hightouch has positively impacted our organization by creating a ripple effect that has definitely improved our data accuracy, which in turn leads to better business decisions. We have managed to resolve many issues in HubSpot mainly through Hightouch, enabling us to create custom objects, sync them back, and use those custom objects to better validate and resolve any issues in HubSpot. Hightouch is one of the tools we use primarily to populate the right set of data back into the CRM platform, speeding things up and improving our data accuracy, which leads to better business decisions.
Our data accuracy has improved significantly by at least 30%, and the time saved from installation and other activities is approximately three to four hours.
What is most valuable?
Hightouch's best features include a simple and easy-to-navigate user interface, which means there is not much of a learning curve involved, simplifying the process of setting it up and selecting desired fields along with using the query editor. The user interface is so simplistic that it did not take us much time figuring out where each button is and what they do.
My experience with the query editor and field selection is that it was very easy for me to identify where I need to edit the query, and I could easily spot the fields and buttons that help me in creating the models for the sync. This was self-explanatory for me and something I really appreciate about Hightouch.
What needs improvement?
I do not see anything that needs improvement. Since we are relatively new to using Hightouch, we have not explored all functionalities yet, so I cannot comment on what can be improved at this time. I do not think there is anything minor or something I wish existed in the platform that needs to be added.
For how long have I used the solution?
We have been using Hightouch for the past six months primarily for reverse ETL to fix our issues in HubSpot, which is our primary CRM tool used by both sales and marketing people.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
Hightouch is stable.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
Hightouch's scalability is quite good.
How are customer service and support?
Hightouch's customer support is quite good.
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
We did not use a different solution before Hightouch.
What was our ROI?
We have definitely saved time and improved our data accuracy.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
My experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing was smooth.
Which other solutions did I evaluate?
Before choosing Hightouch, we did not evaluate other options.
What other advice do I have?
I rate Hightouch an eight on a scale of one to ten based on all the comments I have made. Regarding Hightouch's artificial intelligence capabilities, I think its governance and security are aligned with industry standards.
I think Hightouch's accuracy is quite good, and while we have not explored many of Hightouch's artificial intelligence capabilities yet, we are still creating all syncs and models manually to ensure everything is placed in the right location.
Intuitive Hightouch Empowers Marketers to Launch Campaigns Faster
Composable data has enabled real-time customer journeys but profile stitching still needs improvement
What is our primary use case?
My main use case for Hightouch is as a composable data platform, which works differently from traditional customer data platforms. Unlike them, Hightouch allows us to operate on top of our data warehouse, whether it's Snowflake, DataBricks, or any SQL-supported warehouse, leading to almost negligible data movement and improving our data latency through reverse ETL.
In a specific workflow, Hightouch made a significant difference as it helped our team build and activate customer journeys through various channels such as email, integrating with services such as Salesforce Marketing Cloud and allowing marketers to log in, use stitched customer profiles to create segments, and activate them.
I find Hightouch valuable because it avoids data duplication and unnecessary costs associated with moving large amounts of data, enabling us to work on real-time data through its composable solution. Although Hightouch is still evolving with many improvements possible, it operationalizes a marketer's approach to utilizing customer data for personalized use cases.
How has it helped my organization?
Hightouch has positively impacted my organization by allowing us to address more real-time use cases, which is beneficial, although the stitching process for profiles still lacks features such as unmerging, with the current capabilities being deterministic. I look forward to seeing enhancements in this area in future product releases.
We have been able to activate on abandoned cart and abandoned browse use cases with Hightouch, making it a powerful tool for our marketing strategy.
What is most valuable?
The best features that Hightouch offers, in my opinion, include a flexible and convenient UI that is easy for marketing personnel to use, complemented by decent security features such as role-based access, which allows for controlled data access, alongside the ability to define a more understandable schema for business users. However, integrating Hightouch requires significant effort to set up those integrations and datasets.
The feature that made the biggest difference day-to-day is Hightouch's ability to create normalized, performant data models, which could truly aid enterprises dealing with a variety of data systems. Additionally, although the UI is user-friendly, the limitation to specific compute platforms such as Snowflake and the need for support in hybrid landscapes are areas for future improvement.
What needs improvement?
A lot of data engineering still needs to be handled by companies themselves, as Hightouch does not fully address this issue, and I believe it is an area for them to focus on.
Hightouch could be improved by adding probabilistic stitching for ID resolution, enabling incremental ID resolution to avoid full identity graph generation each time, enhancing support for hybrid data landscapes, and improving explainability and reliability in production support.
For how long have I used the solution?
I have been using Hightouch since my previous company, where we migrated from Treasure Data Acquia to Hightouch, and I personally led that entire implementation.
What other advice do I have?
Hightouch is a mature product, although it still needs to catch up with leading CDPs. Nevertheless, it is comparatively cheaper than larger competitors, offering significant cost-saving potential along with many capabilities. My advice for others considering Hightouch would be to take this into account.
Regarding Hightouch's AI capabilities, I have not had the opportunity to work with them personally, and although I know they are publishing various AI agents, I did not encounter any AI functionalities during that time as they were not available in the product at that moment.
I would rate Hightouch a six out of ten. I chose this rating because Hightouch has plenty of room for improvement, and although I have explained the shortcomings, I recognize that as a young company, they are likely prioritizing these enhancements.
In-house campaign control has improved, while audience testing and data exports still need work
What is our primary use case?
My main use case for Hightouch is to facilitate our marketing campaigns, particularly our email campaigns.
A specific example of how I use Hightouch for my marketing and email campaigns is that if we pull web analytics data from our flagship sites like Toyota or Lexus.co.uk, we can use that data to identify or categorize customers into hot or warm prospects and then send them a bespoke email, essentially encouraging them to come in for a test drive.
I have other examples regarding my main use case with Hightouch. For example, we have a flat battery campaign where we want to reduce our stay callers. They have an old car and they haven't had a battery replacement in a while. We realized there was a cost-saving initiative by predicting people with batteries that could be replaced and replacing them, which would ultimately save us money by preemptively replacing the batteries rather than waiting for their battery to go flat. We worked with AA to receive that data and built a pipeline around that, which identifies customers, and we pushed that to Hightouch.
How has it helped my organization?
Hightouch has positively impacted my organization by allowing us to take a lot of our marketing initiatives and campaigns in-house rather than relying on third-party vendors to create email campaigns and send out emails for us. We have been able to take control of a lot of our marketing initiatives now.
What is most valuable?
The best features Hightouch offers are a very large amount of connectors, a good amount of sync destinations, and it is designed to be a business-friendly interface for building audiences and journeys.
Out of those features, the one my team uses the most is probably the schema and the model integration, which allows data engineers to sync data from their warehouse or lake house to Hightouch. Journeys and audiences can be built on top of that by non-technical users, which I find so valuable.
What needs improvement?
One way Hightouch can be improved is that you should be allowed to easily export data that goes through journeys. At the moment, there is no simple way to do that, so this is definitely a feature that can be added. In this way, we can test what entries go through Hightouch journeys and compare them to our own audience sample.
For how long have I used the solution?
I have been using Hightouch for 18 months.
What was our ROI?
I can share specific outcomes or metrics that show how this change has benefited my organization. We have seen faster campaign launches because we have more direct control. There is less back and forth with dependencies. We have also reduced processing costs, which we previously would have had to pay to our third-party partners. With campaigns like flat battery, for example, we have managed to save over six figures a year.
What other advice do I have?
I rate Hightouch a 7 out of 10 because I think it has improved a lot in the past 18 months. They are always willing to add more features. I still think it is a bit clunky in some areas and it can be improved further; it is not a perfect tool yet, but it definitely does as advertised.
Regarding Hightouch's governance and security, I think they are good because I think it is a composable data platform, so it does not make a copy of our data, which is always a plus, and I do not see risk of any PII data being exposed on it.
Regarding Hightouch's accuracy and reliability of output, that is something we have not used much of. In all honesty, that is something which we have left unexplored.
My recommendation to others reading reviews on PeerSpot is that they should really clarify whether they need Hightouch or not. If you think you can work with non-technical people to build journeys and audiences, then it is worthwhile, and that is where you can save time.