TrustRadius: an HG Insights company

Hull CDP (discontinued)

Score4.7 out of 10

5 Reviews and Ratings

What is Hull CDP (discontinued)?

Hull CDP was a real-time rule and action engine that provided SaaS and Ecommerce businesses with more control over their customer data. Hull was acquired by MessageBird in April, 2021, and is no longer available.

Categories & Use Cases

Not quite there yet

Pros

  • Data visualization from Segment
  • Integrates with multiple tools
  • Webhook integrations
  • Tagging via Zapier

Cons

  • Needs a deduplication engine
  • Needs to be able to perform bulk and automated data cleansing (unified data is messy)
  • Needs to integrate with more tools
  • Needs to be able to be tailored to different use cases, such as a retail/ecommerce use case, with RFM metrics

Return on Investment

  • No ROI. I invested in it for months and promised functionality was never delivered

Alternatives Considered

Segment, Pipedrive and Airtable

Hull - easy to use, great support, wide range of integrations

Pros

  • Slack integration - we revolve around slack as our central comm hub and having our customer information surfaceable is just gold.
  • Making back-end data easy to read and digest - there is a lot of data that gets generated by our customers and it's impossible to sift through without Hull consolidating that information for us.
  • Customer support - we have only had a couple issues in the many months using Hull and it's always been a quick resolution. They use Slack to support BTW which I love.

Cons

  • I am not sure about new features, if they are rolling out or what!
  • It might also be valuable to see the responsiveness of things triggered through Hull, sometimes data takes a bit longer than expected to trigger a workflow (but never really more than a minute so not a huge deal really...)

Return on Investment

  • Positive: No longer asking engineering for customer activity data
  • Positive: Allowing additional data integrations for where our customer activity data can be seen

Alternatives Considered

Segment.io and Zapier

Hull is the CDP that rudders our Marketing's ship.

Pros

  • Good fit for our SME marketing/ Sales Tech stack. Integrations like HubSpot and Clearbit are native and easy to use within Hull- and it was one of the only providers that fit that criteria when we were vetting options.
  • Ease of Use. Hull is fairly intuitive for a casual user. The only real questions that came up for us were doing the data-mapping phase when we mapped fields against Hull.
  • No database to maintain. A critical selling point for us, and something which has freed up a fair amount of engineering time on an ongoing basis has been that Hull, unlike Segment, didn't require us to maintain a database.

Cons

  • Double-Counting some data refreshes: In the early days of Hull (March '17 ) we had cases where data refreshes were sometimes double counted, which potentially could have been been a problem given that in that they do have a usage based model. It never incurred extra costs for us and the customer success team at Hull was responsive whenever we found instance that are usage was higher than normal.
  • Improvements to Knowledge Base/ Training: The product development speed at Hull has been fairly rapid, which has been a great thing, though materials on how to use the product have lagged behind. We encountered a few issues automatically pushing data fields between Hull and HubSpot where we had to remap fields based on whitelist/ blacklist logic. While it was fairly easy once their customer support walked us through it- we probably would have been able to set it up on our own with customer success material.
  • Increased number of native integrations: They've been adding new integrations and deepening them pretty regularly, but it would be great to see them continue to add integrations. In the meantime, we found workarounds for just about everything, however, with Zapier and Segment.

Return on Investment

  • Seamlessly enriched data: Once we set up the Hull+ Clearbit integration we saved a large amount of time and lack of clarity by having our enriched leads delivered directly to HubSpot.
  • Easily Segmented Campaigns: We've been able to segment our Customer Database much more effectively in Hull than we were able to in HubSpot. Their easy to use filters helped us to engage pockets of leads that we were generally neglecting previously.

Alternatives Considered

Segment

Other Software Used

HubSpot, Salesforce Lightning, SalesLoft