Disclaimer: Haven't looked at Jitsu in depth so my understanding below may be limited.
Reading through their comment below - "Jitsu can be used for any kind of data while Segment compatibility is just a thin layer on top".
I am guessing they have built a generic event API that can be used to send any JSON payload while RudderStack (like Segment) has a opinionated view of events - e.g. there has to be a userID (or anonymousID), that ID is persisted in a cookie (for web), every event must include that userID. Furthermore, there are certain standard for event tracking for specific verticals which RudderStack supports (e.g eCommerce https://rudderstack.com/docs/rudderstack-api/api-specificati...)
Having this opinionated view helps us map these events to all the 100s of destinations, otherwise, you cannot send any arbitrary JSON to these destinations. It also lets us build more post processing in the warehouse (e.g identity stitching, user sessions etc https://hub.getdbt.com/rudderlabs/, we are going to build more MLish applications like churn-models and release them too).
On the other hand, it becomes hard to send generic events (e.g. application telemetry) via RudderStack which seems possible via Jitsu. With RudderStack, you would have to create hacky userID to tag on every event which doesn't make sense.
In summary, go deep on one use case (customer-data) or wide as a generic event streaming platform.
Beyond this, there are other feature differences (transformation, reverse-ETL etc) but that's not a fundamental difference imo. They are just getting started and are a much smaller team so that's expected. Impressive to see what they have built.
(New accounts are subject to extra restrictions and sometimes software kills their posts. We review those and try to find and unkill all the good ones, though it takes time and we do miss a few. I've marked absorbb's account legit now so this won't happen again.)