Hightouch Data Activation Platform

What do you like best about the product?

Customer Studio is a great option for data folks to set up a solid self-service tool for our colleagues, so they can create audiences and sync them across many different tools.

What do you dislike about the product?

The differences between the rETL models and Customer Studio aren’t very clear to me, and it’s not obvious how they’re meant to be distinguished. I wish the pricing model wasn't based on the # of syncs

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

Our marketing and sales teams can generate audiences without writing any code, which makes the process much easier and more accessible for everyone. Getting integrated was a pretty simple process

What do you like best about the product?

The alerting is top tier for reverse ETL syncs. Unlike some other reverse ETL tools, Hightouch surfaces detailed error and provides detailed logs to help you troubleshoot sync issues when they arise.

The wide variety of sources for reverse ETL syncs makes it easy for me to move data where I need for various audiences. For example: CRM software, customer service support ticket software, instant messaging apps (Hightouch can post CSVs of synced data!), marketing platforms, etc.

For our non-technical colleagues, the UI makes it very easy for them to create audiences and segments with 0 code/sql .

What do you dislike about the product?

The UI has a few unintuitive things, but they are easy to navigate around with some familiarity. It fundamentally has two major features, reverse ETL (for engineers) and audience building (no code), that you kind of need to treat as two different products. For example: you may need to create the same model in both sections of the website to make it available to each.

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

It helps our marketing, growth and sales teams build audiences with 0 code. It also helps our data engineering team easily move data between many different systems to wherever it is needed.

What do you like best about the product?

I loved how easy it was to start using Hightouch as a new user. Its user interface is quite intuitive and modern, which makes onboarding easy. As an end user, there is a limited set of actions I typically perform on Hightouch, and after an initial training, I have found navigating the platform effortless and even enjoyable. The UI is solid enough that even if I’m doing something new, or something I haven’t repeated long enough to form muscle memory, it feels self-explanatory so I can manage even without having to explore the documentation. Perhaps most importantly for my purview, integrations with Braze and Mixpanel have made Hightouch an invaluable tool for my company, eliminating dependencies on engineering teams and making funneling data from our app into Braze (for marketing purposes) quicker and easier than ever before. They even have a built-in AI agent which has proven super helpful in building audiences. Performance has been reliably stable in my experience, I haven’t encountered any downtime or lags.

What do you dislike about the product?

There are some things that stand to be improved with the user interface, for example when it comes to data visualization (“Charts” under “Intelligence”): Pie chart is not available as an option, sorting options are not available when you have multiple “Group by” dimensions, and the data labels for the bars on a bar chart are truncated. Also, data isn’t automatically refreshed and you must manually click a button to refresh a dashboard or a chart. For me these are minor concerns, as these features are far from being a significant use case for me on Hightouch.
Also, this is probably a me thing, but I haven’t really gotten to the point where the internal terminology (e.g. “Activation,” “Customer Studio” on the navigation panel) is not confusing to me.

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

Hightouch has significantly expedited our “time to market” from identifying a new data need for marketing use to when it’s available on Braze and ready to use in campaigns and segments. With the abilities afforded by Hightouch and its seamless integrations, I no longer have a bottleneck caused by a dependency on developer availability and prioritization as a marketing person. It has saved so much time and allowed us to become a lot more specific with our targeting, meaning we can send more timely, and more personalized messages to users, tailored more than ever before to where the user is lifecycle-wise.

What do you like best about the product?

I like how simple it is to write SQL queries and map them to properties or events in Hightouch. It makes handling databases with hundreds of thousands of rows much easier because I can import only the changes that are needed, which saves time and effort. The integration process is quick, allowing us to ship new integrations fast and securely. Additionally, using custom variables and business logic for segmentation directly from our databases makes the process seamless and consistent. The initial setup was very simple and easy, and I got it done within a day.

What do you dislike about the product?

Limited use for Free Tier. Unless you are ready to commit over $400/month for just a couple of connections, it's very expensive and the free tier is now very restrictive, only allowing you to run 2 syncs continuously. The recently downgraded the Free Tier use. It used to allow up to 25 syncs monthly from basic tools like Google Sheets, but now it limits you to run a maximum of 2 syncs before having to fully upgrade. At the added monthly costs, it's almost not worth it and would recommend building in-house vs using the tool.

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

I use Hightouch to map SQL queries to properties or events, seamlessly syncing data from our warehouse to tools without re-running everything from scratch. It saves complexity by allowing incremental data changes, and simplifies using custom variables and logic.

What do you like best about the product?

I really appreciate the customer support for Hightouch, especially when it comes to getting data from point A to point B. Talonight was particularly helpful for figuring out APIs, documentation, and what it takes to transfer information from one source to another. The human support via Slack is super responsive and prompt, which has meant a lot to me and my team. I also enjoy the customization features and the ability to allow access controls, role-level security, and other elements, so that Hightouch works effectively for me. The initial setup was ready to go from day one, and in terms of the setup and implementation, it was as simple as I can remember. The customer support has been world-class, with responsiveness and letting me know when something has a solution, along with providing different options and only closing the ticket when I confirm everything is good to go. Shout out to Tyler Knight, my customer success engineer; I appreciate working with you.

What do you dislike about the product?

nothing comes to mind ATM

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

I use Hightouch to sync terabytes of data from warehouses to marketing platforms, enabling automatic updates for email, push, and text notifications for enterprise marketing initiatives.