[dwl285]

If you have a data team: Stitch / Segment -> BigQuery -> Dataform -> BigQuery -> Looker

I work with many companies helping them set up their data stack, and from what I've seen this is pretty much the optimal set up. These tools all require very little maintenance, are relatively cheap (compared to the man power required to set these things up from scratch internally), and scale well as companies grow and complexity increases.

If you don't have a data team: Segment -> Amplitude/Mixpanel

If you don't have a dedicated data team, you can do a lot with tools like Amplitude and Mixpanel. Get your engineering team set up with Segment and tracking all of the important interactions within your product, and set Segment to pass those events to Amp/Mix. Self serve analytics in these tools is then pretty easy and will serve you well until you start hiring a data team.

Full disclosure: I work for Dataform (used to be a customer, loved it so much I decided to join them)

[alexfromapex]

Thanks for sharing, I don’t think there’s an “optimal setup” in the objective sense but good to know this works well.

[dwl285]

Good point. I guess I mean, if you put a gun to my head and forced me to pick one, this is what I'd pick (and I think it works for a pretty meaningful percentage of companies that are looking for an answer to the original question)

[grahamdietz]

^ Dataform is cool. Check them out.