When comparing Amplitude vs KISSmetrics, the Slant community recommends KISSmetrics for most people. In the question“What are the best analytics tools for a SaaS web applications?” KISSmetrics is ranked 2nd while Amplitude is ranked 4th. The most important reason people chose KISSmetrics is:
KISSmetrics will combine registered user data with data before registering.
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro Get JSON data with export API
Any output data you can get in a dashboard, you can also get as JSON through their export API.
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.
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.
Pro SDK is open source and transparent
For apps that need high security auditing, or just if you want to know what code you're including, the SDK is open source with code available on GitHub.
Pro Gives you raw SQL access to your data
Enterprise customers can get direct access to Amazon Redshift's PostgreSQL Database. This offers multiple benefits - it allows for queries that are not supported by the dashboard, gives portability and ownership and allows using that data to build realt-time services based on that data.
Pro Tracks guest-turned-user data
KISSmetrics will combine registered user data with data before registering.
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.
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.
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.
Pro Event wizard
Pro Cohort retention analysis
Pro People search
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.
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?
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.
Cons
Con No installation tracking out of the box
It's possible to enable installation tracking by using a third-party service like Adjust and routing their data to Amplitude.
Con Ability to filter reports is lacking
It's only possible to have one subset and one filter active at a time.
