Creation date: 2018-05-10T02:38:10
Let’s talk Unomi like we are at the coffee machine
Me: What are we doing for a single view of people across the site, emails, and apps?
Teammate: We need a brain that can store profiles, collect traits, and react in real time without renting our soul to a black box.
Me: That sounds like Apache Unomi. Open source. Built to track events, merge identities, and run rules that change content or push data. If you want a customer data platform feel without a monthly bill, this is worth a look.
What makes Apache Unomi interesting right now
I have been trying Unomi on a small stack with a CMS and a tag manager. It sits in the middle holding the profile store and sending decisions back. A few facts from hands on work:
- Profiles and traits: Every person gets a profile key. You can add traits like plan, lifecycle stage, or last product viewed. Traits are just JSON fields, which keeps it flexible.
- Events: Page views, form submits, product clicks. You post events and Unomi updates the profile and fires rules.
- Segments and scoring: You can build segments from traits and event counts, then score people for priority. Great for personalization and outreach queues.
- Rules engine: If this then that, powered by conditions on events or profiles. Rules can enrich traits, drop people into segments, or call webhooks.
- Storage: Under the hood it uses Elasticsearch. Fast reads for segments and queries, which is what makes the realtime trick possible.
- Privacy: There is a concept of consent and event filtering, which matters a lot with a new data law coming in later this month.
- Standards: It follows the OASIS Context Server ideas, so you are not locked to a vendor playbook.
If you care about open source CDP options, this combo of profiles, traits, and rules is the core you want.
How I set it up and kept it sane
The biggest win was to treat Unomi as the source of truth for identities while keeping everything else loosely coupled. Here is the playbook that worked for me:
- Identity keys first: Decide what makes a person unique. I used a visitor cookie for anonymous traffic and email for known users. Unomi can merge profiles when a user moves from unknown to known.
- Trait schema: Write a simple sheet with the traits you plan to store. Keep names short and clear. Example: newsletterSubscriber as a boolean, lastOrderTotal as a number.
- Event map: Start with three events only. PageView, FormSubmit, ProductClick. Add more later. Each event updates very few traits to avoid noise.
- Segments that matter: Build segments that drive action. Hot lead, Needs onboarding, About to churn. If a segment does not trigger a change in your site or your email, drop it.
- Rules as glue: Use rules to normalize data and push calls to other tools. For example, when a FormSubmit has a work email, mark a B2B flag and send a webhook to your CRM endpoint.
- CMS and tag manager: Ask for a profile snapshot on page load. Use traits to adjust blocks like hero copy or recommended content. Keep the page fast by requesting only what you need.
With that, Unomi stops being a toy and turns into the profile backbone behind your site and your outreach tools.
Risks and gotchas you will want to plan for
- Consent first: Do not collect what you cannot explain. Store consent as traits. Filter events when consent is missing. You will sleep better.
- Merge mistakes: Over eager merges ruin profiles. Keep the merge rules tight. Email match should be exact. Do not merge on names or loose cookies.
- Data bloat: Elasticsearch grows fast. Cap event retention. Roll old events into aggregates on a schedule.
- Bot traffic: Add bot guards in your tag manager and in Unomi rules or you will segment bots as power users.
- Security: Lock the endpoints. Do not expose admin ports to the public web. Use SSL everywhere you can.
- Team drift: If marketing invents traits on the fly, you will get chaos. Keep a small registry and review new traits weekly.
None of these are deal breakers. They are just the tax you pay for owning your data.
A calm way to wrap this up
Apache Unomi gives you profiles, traits, segments, and rules without a long contract. Start tiny. Three events, five traits, two segments, one rule that does real work. If it earns its keep, grow from there. If it does not, you can walk away with no sunk cost and a better map of what you truly need.
If you want me to share a starter trait list and a rule set that keeps noise low, ping me and I will post it next.