What are the best analytics tools for a SaaS web applications?

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24

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91

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Recs.

Mar 16, 2020

Last
Updated

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19 Options Considered

Best analytics tools for a SaaS web applications	Price	Platforms	Last Updated
89 Mixpanel	-	-	Oct 16, 2019
86 KISSmetrics	-	-	Mar 4, 2020
-- Amplitude	-	-	Mar 16, 2020
-- Google Analytics	-	-	Mar 4, 2020
-- Heap	-	-	Jan 6, 2016

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score 20 · Answer 1

Mixpanel

Top Pro

Updates in real time

On Mixpanel you can view live activity on the site from both streams of events or broken down into your actual users. This can be very practical for de-bugging and catching errors as they happen, especially for new, buggy products. See More

Top Con

Expensive

The smallest plan is $150 per month, and only gets you 500k events. See More

Top Pro

Behavioural messaging

Mixpanel allows you to send notifications based on users actions. For example, you can use it to improve customer retention by analyzing the conditions where your users decide to leave your product and then send targeted messages designed to bring them back. This is an amazingly powerful feature that really bridges the gap between analyzing the data and acting on it. See More

Top Con

Only allows one filter per funnel step

Each funnel step can only include one filter, so you could have "browser" and "city" but not both. See More

Top Pro

Easy to use web interface

Online interface makes it simple to view events, and aggregate data. Queries can be built by selecting actions and associated properties from a drop-down, and the corresponding data will be displayed. These queries can then be bookmarked for later use. A table view and CSV export option is also available. Multiple queries can be displayed together, making it easy to compare two sets of data, or to view the relationship between them. The interface also features a "Live View", allowing you to watch events as they are sent, which is useful for testing, and viewing realtime events. See More

Top Con

Charts are not very configurable

For instance the retention charts are pretty static. You can change dates but not a lot of definitions. See More

Top Pro

Contact users directly through the people page

Mixpanel allows you to directly contact users from the people dashboard via push notifications, sms, and email. After viewing the user history, or filtering on events and metrics, you can send an individual user, or a segment direct messages. See More

Top Con

Steep learning curve

Top Pro

Automatic iOS event integration

Mixpanel can integrate with iOS, exposing app screen, and allowing you to set events through an online visual interface. See More

Top Con

Revenue tracking metrics won't work for advertising businesses

Because the revenue tracking doesn't allow for fractions of dollars per visit (at least not as of 2014) any site that makes money based on advertising won't be able to leverage the revenue metric features. See More

Top Pro

Remote configuration of events on iOS

On iOS, you can change or add events reported through the web interface so you don't have to submit a new version of the app to alter events. See More

Top Con

Limited public visitor and authenticated user merging

Top Pro

Funnel analysis

Funnel analysis allows you to see how many people have performed certain sequence of actions. You can use this to understand what part of the sequence needs to be improved the most. See More

Top Con

No built-in solution for installation tracking

It's possible to enable installation tracking by using third-party services like Adjust or AppsFlyer and routing their data to Mixpanel. See More

Top Pro

People analysis

Events can be grouped on a per-user basis allowing you to view each user's event history. You can use that information to see how individual users use your product. See More

Top Pro

Straightforward setup

It's very easy to set up. See More

Top Pro

Cohort analysis

Cohort analysis allows you to compare things like user retention over time, what kind of progress has been made with that retention over time, how many people perform certain actions from a set starting point over time, etc. See More

Top Pro

Successful companies use it

Khan Academy Hipmunk AirBnb TaskRabbit See More

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score 15 · Answer 2

KISSmetrics

Top Pro

Tracks guest-turned-user data

KISSmetrics will combine registered user data with data before registering. See More

Top Con

Ability to filter reports is lacking

It's only possible to have one subset and one filter active at a time. See More

Top Pro

Funnel analysis

Funnel analysis allows you to see how many people have performed certain sequence of actions. You can use this to understand what part of the sequence needs to be improved the most. See More

Top Pro

Simple integration

KISSmetrics offers the following ways to integration into your application: Language Specific APIs - Official support for Javascript, Ruby, PHP, Python and Objective C. There is also third party libraries for most of the popular languages not officially covered. CSV import Support for integrating with Mailchimp and Recurly. See More

Top Pro

Amazing customer support

Look at any blog post written about analytics tools and you will see the KISSmetrics team engaging with their customers. There are also stories such as this one of the KISSmetrics CEO personally reaching out to his customers immediately as they need help. See More

Top Pro

Event wizard

Top Pro

Cohort retention analysis

Top Pro

People search

Top Pro

Support for URL parameters in the API

KISSmetrics lets you add a parameter in your URL (i.e. “http://yoursite.com/yourpage?kme=Track+This+Event”) and then automatically logs it without any additional Javascript code. This is very helpful to track clicks on links for example and is not currently support in Mixpanel. See More

Top Pro

Comprehensive revenue tracking

At the end of the day revenue is the key metric for SasS businesses and KISSmetrics really shines here. You can track: Total Revenue Average {Daily/Weekly/Monthly} Revenue Predictive Lifetime Value (Killer feature) Avg Customers / (Day/Week/Month) Churn. A very important metric and a key enabler (or disabler) of revenue. The revenue reports can also be segmented for further analysis. The KISSmetrics documentation give some examples on the sort of questions the revenue report can answer: How much revenue did I make this month compared to last month? Which of my pricing plans is contributing the most revenue? Which ads have brought in the most paying customers? What referring sites do most paying customers come from? How much did an A/B test affect revenue? See More

Top Pro

Flexible KPI calculations

A key advantage KISSmetrics has over Mixpanel in particular is its ability to not only calculate custom formulas, but display the data in a "snapshot" view with a modifiable time period. This is a killer feature for building your companies dashboard. See More

See All

score 2 · Answer 3

Amplitude

Top Pro

Generous free plan

The free plan allows you to log 10 million events per month. There are also 2 paid plans - Business and Enterprise. Business costs $995 and allows for up to 100M events per month while Enterprise has the price is negotiated on a case by case basis and supports an unlimited number of events. See More

Top Con

Paid plan is expensive

GW's Experience

Like mixpanel but with group property in adition. This allow to analyse at company account level, not only user level. See More

Top Pro

Event Flows visualize popular user paths

Event Flows, an Enterprise level feature, shows a branching user-action path from or towards a certain page/action. For example, it could show most popular actions performed after landing on a product page or the most popular path towards clicking the buy button. Compared to funnels, that allow you to track if users follows a predetermined path and where they drop off, Event Flows show what users choose to do instead. And while it's possible to create a funnel for each branching path, that involves a lot of time and some guesswork which is not present in Event Flows. Additionally, it's possible to integrate Amplitude with Mode to create a User Paths report. It's similar to the Event Flow, but visualized differently. See More

Top Con

Group p

JanetGodwill's Experience

Similar to Mixpanel in capacity but has a more generous free plan. However it get expensive rely quickly. I would recommend to setup Mixpanel & Amplitude on top of Signal.io. The group attribute allow to analyze behavior on company account level, but it isn't part of the free plan See More

Top Pro

Groupe property

Useful to analyze company behavior or account behavior for SaaS See More

See All

score 7 · Answer 4

Google Analytics

Top Pro

Free for most use cases

Google Analytics is free unless you need their premium service, which is $150,000 per year. However, it's only necessary for massively large enterprise size data sets. See More

Top Con

Heavy users get sampled reporting

If you send a lot of data Google starts sampling the data it uses for your reports. See More

Top Pro

Intelligent Alerts

You can configure to be notified if certain things happen. See More

Top Con

User-based analytics is lacking

Google Analytics tracks visitor actions, their user action tracking is still very basic. It has started supporting user ID, but in a very basic way. See More

Top Pro

Highly customizable

Top Con

Can't handle authenticated users

Top Pro

Allows custom dashboards

Depending on the most important information to the user, the dashboard can be customized in order to put emphasis on certain metrics. This feature allows Google Analytics to satisfy users from a broad range of industries. See More

Top Pro

Well documented

Top Pro

Provides free training

Google provides free services that train users in each aspect of Google Analytics, especially when used in conjunction with AdWords. See More

Top Pro

Awesome API

The API itself, tools, documentation, and abilities of the API are very powerful. See More

Top Pro

Import data

Google Analytics allows users to update user information from other sources. See More

Top Pro

Google Play analytics

Because it's a Google product, Google Analytics can tell you how users discovered your app through Google Play. See More

Top Pro

Constantly releasing new features

Released more than once a week in 2014. See More

Top Pro

Mobile web and Mobile app tracking possible

Top Pro

Integrates with AdMob

Since Google owns AdMob, they can provide deep integration, and allow you to respond to data with marketing campaigns. See More

See All

score 4 · Answer 5

Heap

Top Pro

Capture everything, organize it later

After adding a JavaScript snippet to the site, Heap captures every event that you can organize later instead of having to define events upfront. It means that if you decide to track something new you have data from the past as well. See More

Top Con

No Android integration

Heap lacks Android integration. See More

Top Pro

User friendly

Heap does not require any coding knowledge to set up. See More

Top Pro

Free plan

If your site has less than 5000 monthly visitors, you can use Heap for free indefinitely. See More

Top Pro

Highly detailed

Since every single data point is logged you can do highly specific analysis. See More

Top Pro

Tracks guest-turned-user data

Heap will combine registered user data with data before registering. See More

Top Pro

Powerful and easy to set up cohort analytics

Cohort analysis allows you to compare things like user retention over time, what kind of progress has been made with that retention over time, how many people perform certain actions from a set starting point over time, etc. See More

Top Pro

Visit based pricing

Heap determines cost of service based on monthly visits instead of the more common data point based pricing that incentivises tracking less data points to save money. See More

See All

score 3 · Answer 6

Madkudu

Top Pro

Attempts to predict user behaviour

Madkudu analyzes user-data and let's you know if a user is struggling and plans to leave or if a user is ready to convert needs a push in the right direction. See More

Top Con

Limited to trial conversion

The app is designed specifically for the purpose of increasing trial conversions. Using it as a general purpose analytics tool is not possible. See More

score 4 · Answer 7

Matomo (previously Piwik)

Top Pro

Free/libre

Piwik is FOSS, so it can be freely modified & redistributed. See More

FlexibleChloris's Experience

great user-friendly tool. I use it as a pro-privacy alternative to google analytics, data ownership is important to use and it comes with many features that GA doesn't have See More

Top Pro

Can be self-hosted

See All

score 2 · Answer 8

Countly

Top Pro

Try without signing up through an open demo

You can try it out without signing up at all by playing around with their demo. See More

Top Pro

Continually updating real time analytics

Countly pages are updated in real time without needing a page refresh. See More

Top Pro

All-in-one crash, analytics and push notifications

No need to use another SDK. See More

Top Pro

Very fast interface

Transitions between pages on the Countly web interface is nearly instant. See More

See All

score 1 · Answer 9

GoSquared

Top Pro

Emails a summary of week's events

Allows being informed without having to spend too much time following analytics. See More

Top Con

E-commerce analytics requires an expensive plan

To get e-commerce analytics, a subscription plan is required. The subscription starts at 18$/mo for 100,000 monthly datapoints. See More

Top Pro

Straightforward

GoSquared has 4 views - Now, Trends, E-commerce and People. "Now" is a dashboard that gives an overview of what's happening on the site in real time, "Trends" displays information like most visited content, referrals, engagement, etc over a period of time, "E-commerce" displays analytics about your online shop and "People" shows all site's users and tracks their behaviour in real time. See More

See All

score 1 · Answer 10

EventHub

Top Pro

Simple deployment

Requires only downloading and executing a jar file. See More

Top Con

Abandoned

Hasn't been updated in over 2 years. See More

Top Pro

Free and open source

Licensed under MIT. See More

Top Pro

A/B testing tool

Top Pro

Cohort analysis

Top Pro

Funnel analysis

See All

score 1 · Answer 11

Keen.io

Top Pro

Great for custom, complex, large-scale analytics solutions

Keen is designed for developer to be able to build custom, complex, large-scale analytics solutions. See More

Top Con

Development knowledge is not optional

There's no drag and drop interface, setting up analytics requires a developer. See More

Top Pro

Offers a good free plan

The free plan allows for 50,000 events. See More

Top Pro

Allows gathering and visualizing data for your users

Top Pro

Good documentation

Top Pro

Can be easily integrated into existing projects

See All

score 1 · Answer 12

Kilometer.io

Top Pro

Simple

The setup requires adding a peace of code to the site and from there the tool automatically generates a bunch of charts, metrics and dashboards. See More

Top Con

Limited

You can only choose from a predefined list of charts, metrics and dashboards. See More

Top Con

In beta

See All

score 2 · Answer 13

Roguelytics

Top Pro

Real-time

Top Pro

Analytics data are embedded in your site

You can view analytics data (total users, user interactions, etc.) directly on your web site instead of signing into a separate portal/site. Note: this view is restricted and will not be displayed to regular users. See More

score 1 · Answer 14

Pulse Metrics

Top Pro

Not as confusing as competitors

Answer 15

Intercom

Top Pro

Very responsive support

John Chun's Experience

This a good marketing suit for SaaS but it is no analytics suit. it will provide only hight level stats See More

score 1 · Answer 16

FirstOfficer

Top Pro

One-click integration with Stripe

No coding necessary, fetches all the data from the charging gateway. See More

Top Con

Tracks only sales-related information

The analytics tool won't track what users do on your site. See More

Top Pro

More accurate than event-based analytics

Events sometimes go missing. FirstOfficer checks data consistency against Stripe API and uses similar double-entry system than your bookkeeping to make sure that all the payments are processed. See More

Top Pro

Created by a finances professional

The founder has a BBA in accounting and practical experience from accounting, ensuring that the metrics are calculated right and that they are compatible to use with the numbers from bookkeeping. See More

See All

score 1 · Answer 17

Yandex Metrica

Top Pro

Customazible reports with attribution modelling

Top Pro

No limits or sampling

Top Pro

Built-in click heatmap

Metrica can track where users click (includes non-link items) allowing you to see the most popular sections as well as items mistaken for links. See More

Top Pro

Offers site availability monitoring

Metrica can monitor the site for availability issues and send out an email and/or SMS notification when issues occur. See More

Top Pro

Shows keyword data from encrypted Yandex search queries

Yandex encrypts all search queries so they don't show up in any other analytics tool except for Metrica. See More

Top Pro

It's real-time

Top Pro

Includes user-path visualisations

Top Pro

Clear link map

See All

Answer 18

Adobe Analytics

Top Con

Very, very expensive

The price is negotiated. Starts at $50k/year. No free plan available. See More

Top Pro

Can pull in data from 3rd party sources

You can pull data from third-party source sources like Salesforce or Gmail via their APIs to then associate that data with the user data from Adobe Analytics. See More

Top Con

Docs could be better

Top Con

Steep learning curve

See All

Answer 19

Alexa

Top Con

Unknown ranking accuracy

Alexa's ranking is based on users that have installed one of their browser extensions and sites that have installed a tracking script. It's unknown what kind of users are installing the extensions and how big is the sample size (Alexa claims it to be millions). See More

Top Pro

Provides information about competitors

Alexa, in addition to on-site metrics, provides traffic, engagement and reputation data about other sites. See More

19 Options Considered

My Recommendation for Mixpanel

My Recommendation for Mixpanel

Updates in real time

Expensive

Behavioural messaging

Only allows one filter per funnel step

Easy to use web interface

Charts are not very configurable

Contact users directly through the people page

Steep learning curve

Automatic iOS event integration

Revenue tracking metrics won't work for advertising businesses

Remote configuration of events on iOS

Limited public visitor and authenticated user merging

Funnel analysis

No built-in solution for installation tracking

People analysis

Straightforward setup

Cohort analysis

Successful companies use it

My Recommendation for KISSmetrics

My Recommendation for KISSmetrics

Tracks guest-turned-user data

Ability to filter reports is lacking

Funnel analysis

Simple integration

Amazing customer support

Event wizard

Cohort retention analysis

People search

Support for URL parameters in the API

Comprehensive revenue tracking

Flexible KPI calculations

My Recommendation for Amplitude

My Recommendation for Amplitude

Generous free plan

Paid plan is expensive

Event Flows visualize popular user paths

Group p

Groupe property

My Recommendation for Google Analytics

My Recommendation for Google Analytics

Free for most use cases

Heavy users get sampled reporting

Intelligent Alerts

User-based analytics is lacking

Highly customizable

Can't handle authenticated users

Allows custom dashboards

Well documented

Provides free training

Awesome API

Import data

Google Play analytics

Constantly releasing new features

Mobile web and Mobile app tracking possible

Integrates with AdMob

My Recommendation for Heap

My Recommendation for Heap

Capture everything, organize it later

No Android integration

User friendly

Free plan

Highly detailed

Tracks guest-turned-user data

Powerful and easy to set up cohort analytics

Visit based pricing

My Recommendation for Madkudu

My Recommendation for Madkudu

Attempts to predict user behaviour

Limited to trial conversion

My Recommendation for Matomo (previously Piwik)

My Recommendation for Matomo (previously Piwik)

Free/libre

Can be self-hosted

My Recommendation for Countly

My Recommendation for Countly

Try without signing up through an open demo

Continually updating real time analytics