Snowplow vs Curve: Build or Buy Healthcare Tracking?

Snowplow vs Curve for healthcare tracking is a build or buy decision. Snowplow gives a data team the parts to build its own behavioral data pipeline: trackers, a collector, enrichment, schema validation and loaders into your own warehouse, with your team designing the events and deciding what reaches each ad platform. Curve Compliance is a managed service for healthcare ad conversion tracking. Curve's team sets it up, Curve sends conversions server-side to Meta, Google, TikTok, Microsoft and LinkedIn with health details filtered out, and Curve signs a BAA on every plan.

Book a call. Curve Compliance's team sets up server-side conversion tracking for your healthcare ads, keeps PHI-like data out of what each platform receives, and signs a BAA on every plan. Book a call with Curve.

What Snowplow is, and how you can run it

Snowplow collects events from websites and apps, validates and enriches them, and loads them into a data warehouse or lake that you choose. Snowplow's documentation lists four ways to run it:

• CDI Cloud. Hosted by Snowplow, so you don't set up cloud infrastructure yourself. You manage the data destination.
• CDI Private Managed Cloud. Snowplow hosted in your own cloud account, using your data warehouse or lake. Snowplow manages ongoing maintenance such as upgrades and security patches.
• Community Edition. For non-production use. Snowplow calls it a starter template to evaluate Snowplow for testing purposes.
• Production Self-Hosted license. For teams with an existing Snowplow implementation. You host the pipeline infrastructure and the data destination yourself.

On licensing, Snowplow says its tracker SDKs are under Apache 2.0, with the JavaScript tracker under BSD 3-Clause. Its pipeline applications, including the Collector, Enrich, Iglu Server, the loaders and Snowbridge, are under the Snowplow Limited Use License, which allows usage in non-production environments only. The Self-Hosted guide says Community Edition is for testing and evaluating Snowplow and must not be deployed in production. So a production healthcare deployment runs through one of the routes above.

What running Snowplow involves for a healthcare team

Snowplow's own documentation sets out the pieces. Depending on the route, Snowplow runs more or less of the infrastructure for you. The tracking design is yours to make.

1. Cloud infrastructure. Snowplow's Self-Hosted quick start deploys a load balancer, the Collector, which writes raw events to Kinesis, Pub/Sub, or Kafka or Event Hubs, the Enrich application, an Iglu Server with its database, raw, enriched and failed-event streams, and loaders for Redshift, Databricks, Snowflake, BigQuery or a data lake. With Private Managed Cloud, the pipeline runs in your own AWS, GCP or Azure account and Snowplow handles upgrades and security patches.
2. A tracking plan and schemas. Custom events and entities are defined as schemas in your Iglu schema registry, and Enrich validates each event against its schema before it moves on. Your team decides which events exist and what each one carries.
3. A warehouse or lake. Loaders write enriched events into the warehouse or lake you run, such as Snowflake, BigQuery, Redshift or Databricks. You own the raw event data, and your warehouse holds whatever the events contain.
4. Rules that keep PHI out. Snowplow's PII pseudonymization enrichment runs after the other enrichments and hashes the fields you configure, with strategies that include SHA-256. You list the fields, either standard ones such as the user ID or IP address, or paths inside your own events. Deciding which values could reveal health information on your site is part of that configuration.
5. Delivery to ad platforms. Snowplow's event forwarding lets you filter, transform and send events to third-party platforms in real time. In Snowplow Console you create a forwarder: a connection with your credentials, JavaScript event filters, field mappings and any custom functions. Snowplow's pre-built integrations list Amplitude, Bloomreach, Braze, Meta Conversions API and Mixpanel, and its Meta guide says email, phone and name must be SHA-256 hashed and to "never place raw personal data in custom_data".
6. A BAA. Snowplow's security page says its HIPAA-eligible platform offers a standard Business Associate Addendum and that its Private Managed Cloud deployment keeps PHI inside your own cloud infrastructure. Snowplow also holds SOC 2 Type 2 and ISO 27001 certification. Your cloud provider and warehouse store the events too, so check whether each of them signs a BAA. The BAA directory lists many common marketing and analytics tools.

Where health data slips into events

Meta's Business Tools Terms say advertisers will not share data that "includes or is based on, directly or otherwise, health information". On a healthcare site, that information rarely arrives as a labeled field. It shows up in a page address for a condition, a page title, a form answer, or an event named after a treatment. A pipeline does exactly what it is configured to do, so with a build approach your team writes those rules and keeps them current as the site, the forms and the campaigns change. Moving events server-side is the start of that work, as server-side tracking alone is not HIPAA compliance explains.

What Curve Compliance takes on for you

Curve Compliance is built around the job most healthcare marketing teams need done: getting accurate ad conversions to the platforms without health details. Curve's team does the setup, typically live in about a week, though it varies case by case.

1. One script, server-side delivery. Curve replaces browser ad pixels with one script and sends conversions from Curve's servers to Meta Conversions API, Google Ads, TikTok, Microsoft Advertising and LinkedIn.
2. Health details filtered by design. Each platform receives only a fixed list of fields. Contact identifiers are off by default and SHA-256 hashed when turned on, and events can go out under neutral names. Before the page address leaves the browser, the script redacts parts that look like contact, health, search or quiz data. Curve also detects PHI-like patterns, such as condition names, form answers or emails in URLs, and flags them so they can be stopped at the source.
3. Attribution that survives booking. Curve keeps the ad click when a visitor leaves to book in IntakeQ, Calendly, Acuity, Jane App, OptiMantra, Boulevard, ZocDoc, Mindbody, Vagaro, Square, Setmore or Booker, so a booking made days later still matches the ad. GoHighLevel funnels and embedded widgets are set up by Curve's team.
4. Outcomes after the booking. Curve receives outcomes through incoming webhooks from booking tools, CRMs and call tracking, through Keragon connections to EHR and intake tools such as Healthie, Athenahealth, OptiMantra, IntakeQ and Jane, and through offline uploads from a CRM or EHR. Each outcome is credited to the original ad click.
5. Proof of what each platform accepted. Event Logs show what Curve sent to each platform and what the platform accepted. Campaign Reporting puts ad spend next to Curve-tracked conversions for every platform and campaign, with five attribution models and the conversions behind any number.
6. A BAA on every plan. Curve Compliance signs a BAA on every plan, and consent management, session replay and heatmaps sit under the same BAA.

Build vs buy, side by side

The job	Running Snowplow (per Snowplow's docs)	Curve Compliance
Who runs the infrastructure	Snowplow (CDI Cloud), your cloud account with Snowplow managing upgrades (Private Managed Cloud), or you (production Self-Hosted)	Curve, as a managed service
Who designs the events	Your team, as schemas in an Iglu registry	Curve's team, mapped to each ad platform
Keeping PHI out	PII pseudonymization enrichment on the fields you configure, plus your forwarder filters	Fixed field list per platform, hashed identifiers, neutral event names and PHI-like pattern detection
Getting conversions to ad platforms	Event forwarders you configure, with a pre-built Meta Conversions API integration	Server-side to Meta, Google Ads, TikTok, Microsoft Advertising and LinkedIn
Bookings and later outcomes	Set up by your team in the tracking plan and warehouse	Attribution kept through schedulers, plus webhooks, Keragon and offline uploads
Where the event data lives	Your warehouse or lake	Curve, under the BAA
BAA	Standard Business Associate Addendum on the HIPAA-eligible platform, per Snowplow	On every plan
Setup	Depends on the route; Self-Hosted uses Snowplow's Terraform modules	Curve's team, typically about a week

Which approach fits your team

Snowplow fits a team that wants schema-validated behavioral data from its website and apps in its own warehouse, has data engineers to design and maintain the tracking plan, and wants the pipeline inside its own cloud account. For product analytics and in-house modeling, owning that raw data is the point.

A managed service fits a practice, clinic group or telehealth brand whose main question is which ads bring in patients, and which wants conversions reaching Meta and Google without building and maintaining that logic itself. That is the job Curve Compliance's team takes on, from the first script to the event mapping for each platform.

For a feature-by-feature view, see the head-to-head Snowplow vs Curve comparison. For the wider decision, read build vs buy for server-side tracking in healthcare, Curve vs RudderStack for healthcare data pipelines, and our guide to HIPAA-compliant analytics.

Where to start

Run the free Curve compliance scanner on your booking and intake pages to see which pixels and trackers load today. If Meta has already restricted events on your dataset, read what to do when purchase events are restricted.

Book a call. Curve's team will look at what your site sends today and show how Curve Compliance would set up conversions for each ad platform you run. Book a call with Curve.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is Snowplow HIPAA compliant?

Snowplow says its HIPAA-eligible platform offers a standard Business Associate Addendum, and that its Private Managed Cloud deployment keeps PHI inside your own cloud infrastructure. As with any tool, what is collected, stored and forwarded depends on how your team configures tracking, enrichment and forwarding.

Is Snowplow open source?

Partly. Snowplow's tracker SDKs are under Apache 2.0, with the JavaScript tracker under BSD 3-Clause. Its pipeline applications are under the Snowplow Limited Use License, which allows non-production use only, and Snowplow describes Community Edition as a way to test and evaluate Snowplow.

Can Snowplow send conversions to Meta Conversions API?

Yes. Snowplow's event forwarding includes a pre-built Meta Conversions API integration. You set the event filters and field mappings, and Snowplow's guide says email, phone and name must be SHA-256 hashed.

What is the difference between Snowplow and Curve Compliance?

Snowplow is a platform for building your own behavioral data pipeline into your warehouse. Curve Compliance is a managed service for healthcare ad conversion tracking: Curve's team sets it up, Curve filters PHI-like data before anything reaches Meta, Google, TikTok, Microsoft or LinkedIn, and Curve signs a BAA on every plan.

Does Curve Compliance sign a BAA?

Yes. Curve Compliance signs a BAA on every plan.

How long does it take to set up Curve Compliance?

Curve's team does the setup for you, including the script, the scheduler and EHR connections and the event mapping for each ad platform. It is typically live in about a week, and it varies case by case.