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Grouparoo: Open-source app to sync customer data with 3rd party tools

grouparoo.com

21–30 of 43 posts

Re: Grouparoo: Open-source app to sync customer data with 3rd party tools

#21

At a glance, this looks cool - im in the middle of designing an internal Customer Data Platform/Single Customer View to serve as a single data source for various internal & external marketing tools. Looks like this might be worth looking at. Does it have an API to access the user profile and group data ad-hoc? Can you stream data in? Can it trigger a destination sync when the underlying data changes? Can it do profil…

Great questions, thanks!

> Does it have an API to access the user profile and group data ad-hoc?

We’ve seen a few approaches here. 1) Yes, there are APIs 2) The Postgres database this runs on is in your data center, so you can read it directly 3) You can write back to your own product database as a “destination”

> Can you stream data in?

We support events via an API. We’ll store the vents and allow your to create profile properties from them. I’m very interested in creating a Kafka or other message bus sort of integration too that brings in data and/or triggers recalculations. No one has needed that yet, though, so it’s just on our eventual list.

> Can it trigger a destination sync when the underlying data changes?

We have schedules, table queries, and events to know profile data has changed. When it changes, it then recalculates groups. Then properties or groups change that are being sent to a destination, it automatically exports there. “Hey Mailchimp, the user changed their first name and should now be tagged as VIP.”

> Can it do profile merging (visitor -> known customer stitching)?

We have the concept of anonymous id before login. When we realize two profiles are the same (usually after logging in from another device or something), the profiles are merged and everything recalculated.

> How can you do reporting/analytics?

This hasn’t been a focus so far outside of our ETL mechanics. You can see who has been imported and exported and with what and when and all of that.

Things get more interesting around properties and their values, but we haven’t gotten there yet. We’ve seen some success at pointing tools like Metabase at the Grouparoo database.

Re: Grouparoo: Open-source app to sync customer data with 3rd party tools

#22

At a glance, this looks cool - im in the middle of designing an internal Customer Data Platform/Single Customer View to serve as a single data source for various internal & external marketing tools. Looks like this might be worth looking at. Does it have an API to access the user profile and group data ad-hoc? Can you stream data in? Can it trigger a destination sync when the underlying data changes? Can it do profil…

Great questions, thanks! > Does it have an API to access the user profile and group data ad-hoc? We’ve seen a few approaches here. 1) Yes, there are APIs 2) The Postgres database this runs on is in your data center, so you can read it directly 3) You can write back to your own product database as a “destination” > Can you stream data in? We support events via an API. We’ll store the vents and allow your to create pro…

Cool thanks, just installed it now to have a look. Any timeline for when S3 and Redshift will be available as a source & destination?

Re: Grouparoo: Open-source app to sync customer data with 3rd party tools

#23
post #3

Thanks for checking us out! Co-founder here, happy to answer any questions. There is so much to do in this space, but we’re excited to be getting started. No engineer wakes up in the morning excited to sync data to Marketo, so we started there - `npm install` and so you can get back to building the core product. We make data self-serve for your non-technical colleagues and we handle all the exhausting integration stu…

First, thanks for providing the `npm install` way to run it. Too many apps require Docker and that's it.

Question: Could we use Grouparoo to replace mixpanel? Would we need to build the client side to collect events and dump that into Grouparoo?

Re: Grouparoo: Open-source app to sync customer data with 3rd party tools

#24

Oh wow, this reminds of Hightouch ( https://hightouch.io ) and Rudder ( https://rudderstack.com ). It's interesting that all of these are positioned around data warehouses, which is generally very messy to deal with.

Founder of RudderStack here. Totally agree that data warehouse is messy but marketing systems are way more messier. In my previous startup, we did a bunch of Marketo implementation and issues I ran into

1) generating a simple report (like how many people came to your website and then opened your emails in last 1 yr) used to take for ever. Storing data was costly.

2) You could not generate complicated reports, say combining marketing + product data (e.g. number of people who came through campaign X and did used the product)

3) You were stuck with their not-so-great UI.

4) Analytics is one use case. Segmentation is another. If you want to create a segment of users (e.g. customers using the free tier of your product and have become active in last 7 days) and sync that segment to multiple destinations like email, salesforce etc, there is not a great way to do that from all the marketing systems.

On the other hand, if you can get all the data in your warehouse, you can use the best of breed tools for storage (Snowflake etc), Visualization (Looker/ChartIO/Tableau) and so on.

But you would need a product like Segment, RudderStack (and now Grouparoo) to get the data into the warehouse and sync it from warehouse back to different destinations.

Re: Grouparoo: Open-source app to sync customer data with 3rd party tools

#26
post #25

Wow, this is exactly what I started looking for at the start of the day. Unfortunately I can't use it yet as there's no Postgres SSL support - filed a GitHub issue here: https://github.com/grouparoo/grouparoo/issues/734

Thanks! That should be an easy one. What was your goal when you started the day? :-)

Re: Grouparoo: Open-source app to sync customer data with 3rd party tools

#27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Great questions, thanks! > Does it have an API to access the user profile and group data ad-hoc? We’ve seen a few approaches here. 1) Yes, there are APIs 2) The Postgres database this runs on is in your data center, so you can read it directly 3) You can write back to your own product database as a “destination” > Can you stream data in? We support events via an API. We’ll store the vents and allow your to create pro…

Cool thanks, just installed it now to have a look. Any timeline for when S3 and Redshift will be available as a source & destination?

Let me know how it goes: brian [at] grouparoo.com

Redshift is available now. We've talked about S3, but were looking for input on what kind of formats to read/write. Email me or make an issue [1] with what you were hoping for.

[1] https://github.com/grouparoo/grouparoo/issues/new?assignees=...

Re: Grouparoo: Open-source app to sync customer data with 3rd party tools

#28
post #3

Thanks for checking us out! Co-founder here, happy to answer any questions. There is so much to do in this space, but we’re excited to be getting started. No engineer wakes up in the morning excited to sync data to Marketo, so we started there - `npm install` and so you can get back to building the core product. We make data self-serve for your non-technical colleagues and we handle all the exhausting integration stu…

First, thanks for providing the `npm install` way to run it. Too many apps require Docker and that's it. Question: Could we use Grouparoo to replace mixpanel? Would we need to build the client side to collect events and dump that into Grouparoo?

At the moment, it depends what you are using Mixpanel for. If it's about collecting events and storing them, then we have a JS web library [1] for that and we'll happily store them in our database and let you do things with them. It will handle anonymous users and convert/merge them when they log in.

[1] https://www.npmjs.com/package/@grouparoo/client-web

Re: Grouparoo: Open-source app to sync customer data with 3rd party tools

#29
post #3

Thanks for checking us out! Co-founder here, happy to answer any questions. There is so much to do in this space, but we’re excited to be getting started. No engineer wakes up in the morning excited to sync data to Marketo, so we started there - `npm install` and so you can get back to building the core product. We make data self-serve for your non-technical colleagues and we handle all the exhausting integration stu…

How does this compare to Piesync?

There are many tools that do one-way integration from source to destination. Very few do real two-way sync. Is Grouparoo designed for that?

Re: Grouparoo: Open-source app to sync customer data with 3rd party tools

#30
Congrats guys from the team @ RudderStack. Glad to see more open-source products in this broad customer data space.

Is it fair to say this is more like the Segment personas's product? We see a bunch of use cases for personas (which we don't have in RudderStack) so can point to you guys.

Congrats again on the launch.

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