What are the best Product Analytics tools?

I've used product analytics tools for a few years now as a growth marketer, and there are a select few I always choose or recommend to startups I help with consulting/advisory, or any startup friends looking for advice. You can see my reasons in this article for the platforms I've mentioned. If I had to select my top 3, they are Segment, Amplitude and Mixpanel. Like with any analytics platform, it comes down to solid event tracking. Always plan before setting up. Go basic and set up the foundational tracking you absolutely need, before doing more complex tracking.

Who uses product analytics tools?

I'm a growth marketer and use these tools pretty much daily. Various roles within a startup would vary with usage depending on their key skills and what they need to do for the company. For those who would normally use product analytics tools often, they are product managers, developers, data scientists, analysts, UX designers and growth marketers.

Are there any free product analytics platform?

All the tools I've mentioned actually have a free-tier (freemium) option, which is really beneficial if you're testing out a new tool or just starting out. However, with all of these platforms being feature-rich, none of them stay free forever. Most have generous free-tier options, normally tracked by the amount of visitors or events you setup, then you'll have to pay. My recommendation I do say for any new startup is to signup and set up a few tools, and then decide which one you prefer once you scale.

9 Best Product Analytics Platforms for Tech Startups (2024)

Favourite

Segment

About:

I first came across Segment back in 2014 and they have gone from strength-to-strength, year-after-year and have become the market CDP platform leader. One of my favourite platforms working with SaaS startups.

Top Features:

Unify data points and your technology stack the power to talk to each other, so you can get a better understanding of users through your customer journey, better personalised targeting, better data to make faster and better business decisions, align data across departments and teams (whether marketing, development, etc) and so much more.

Improve targeting across the whole customer journey. From website visitors to custom Intercom messages, to landing page visitors receving customised personalised ads through Google Display... you get the picture. There are over 300 native integrations with Segment with many of your favourite platforms, plus more possibilities thanks to Zapier and custom API's.

You can setup your own data warehouses in just minutes, which is formatted and schematised for consistent data. Functions is another big feature as part of Segment where you can connect many applications (1000's even) with just a few lines of JS. Read more about functions on the website.

CDP

API

Integrations

Pricing:

You can signup and start using the platform for free. The free plan tracks up to 1000 visitors per month and only 2 sources. Upgrade to the team plan which starts from $120 per month. A business plan is also available which you can book a demo for.

Web/App

Freemium

$-$$$$

Learn more

Favourite

Amplitude

About:

When it comes to product analytics, the best platform I've loved using across SaaS is Amplitude.

Top Features:

As a digital optimisation platform, Amplitude enables growth marketers, product managers and developers to uncover insights and dive into deep analytics about how customers and users engage with SaaS products.

Setup funnels, explore behavourial data, identify particular segments (DAU, MAU users and more), customer journeys, as well as predict behaviour and future metrics based on patterns.

The platform is more than just an analytics platform, you can run personalised experience syncing popular apps for onboarding, activation, reengagement and more. As well as run product experiements to test product growth hypotheses. Both are really cool features, definitely read more about what's possible on the site.

Experiments

Intelligence

data management

Pricing:

Pricing is broken into the 3 main products - analytics, recommend and experiment. Analytics is free to signup and create an account. Both recommend and experiment, you will need to request a demo.

Web/App

Freemium

$-$$$$

Learn more

Favourite

Pendo

About:

If you're looking for a platform that enbales you and your team to create better product experiences, then check out Pendo.

Top Features:

Pendo has a range of solutions as part of their product suite, including analytics, onboarding guides, in-app support, customer feedback, roadmaps, mobile and more.

With analytics, go deep with insights across product adoption, user retention, segments of engaged users to inactive users, feature usage and lots more.

Coinciding with insights from your analytics, you can setup in-app guides for personalised onboarding and re-engagement experiences. Additonally, find out more information through product feedbacks to help out with future product features. There's also an awesome feature as part of the suite to communciate roadmaps with real user insights. Looks awesome!

in-app guides

web/mobile tracking

Pricing:

There's a free plan available that you can get started with, which allows up to 1000 monthly active users. For more tracked users and other features, you will need to get in touch with their team.

Web/App

Freemium

$-$$$$

Learn more

Favourite

Mixpanel

About:

A long-time favourite by many tech startups around the world is Mixpanel.

Top Features:

Track the full funnel - from user acquisition, onboarding, activation to then how users engage with your product, you can get a full view through the interactive dashboards areas of improvements, product feature ideas, and a lot more.

Dive deep into funnels, flows, cohort analysis, user segmentation, product features and experiments, retention reports and more. You can create visually appealing dashboards that non-tech or non-analytical marketers can easily see, helping them understand how people are engaging with your product.

When it comes to setting up tracking, governance and consistency of events is really important for reliable tracking. You can enrich data within the platform through lookups, incorporate schema API's, and data views for teams.

Funnels

retention reports

Interactive

Pricing:

Mixpanel has a freemium plan which is very generous, which lets you track up to 100k users, per month. Then you can build your own plan starting from $25 per month, with added advanced features.

Web/App

Freemium

$-$$$$

Learn more

Favourite

Fullstory

About:

One of the more impressive platforms I've used personally before is Fullstory. Get a full picture of how users engage with your app.

Top Features:

Get rich data insights across your application, through heatmapping (i.e. button clicks, etc), video session replays, time on pages and loads more. Truly see what drives users to convert, engage, or churn. Visually see what needs to be optimised.

The video recording feature in particular is really awesome. Whilst tools like Hotjar and Inspectlet exist, Fullstory have done a great job with the amount of event details you can see by users, from initial referral (source), to button clicks, time on sections of the pages, and more. Easy to show insights and analytics from the platform to non-growth marketers or anyone who doesn't have strong data skills.

Going to back to the analytics capabilities, you can setup your own custom funnels for your most important events, testing new features, etc. Hook up integrations such as Slack, Jira or Trello to for whenever their is a bug, issue with a user, etc. Also setup alerts and digest emails to keep on top of it all.

web/mobile tracking

Discover insights

Collaboration

Pricing:

There's a freemium plan for you to give Fullstory, which is limited in terms of sessions. You will need to book a demo for the paid plans - enterprise or business.

Web/App

Freemium

$-$$$$

Learn more

Favourite

Heap Analytics

About:

A popular tool used by many startups I've worked with previously used for analytics, reporting and optimising is Heap Analytics.

Top Features:

There are three core components of Heap Analytics, including data analytics, data management and data foundation. The platform has come a long way with it's feature developments since I first started using it a few years back.

Get deep insights and breakdowns into how users engage and use your product. A recent feature they introduced are journey maps, which help you visualise with ease the steps users take, from initial acquisiton/onboarding flows to new product feature releases. You can view the maps via event tables or visual paths. A really nice feature is 'suggestions', hihglighting areas where there are opportunities to fix certain paths and areas within your application which you can prioritise.

Other analytics features include segmentation analysis (i.e. cohort analysis, etc), view reports from table graphs to charts, and even setup your own custom dashboards of your most important metrics. There are also 'playbooks' which are pre-built templates, and other ways to quickly generate reports. There are loads more within Heap to check out, incuding data enrichment and governance features for data management.

Funnels

dashboards

Enrichment

Pricing:

There's a freemium plan available which gives you the ability to track up to 10k users per month. For more sessions for 1 project, plans start at $3,600 per year. Larger plans are available for more projects and more advanced features.

Web/App

Freemium

$-$$$$

Learn more

Favourite

Totango

About:

A customer journey analytics picture giving you an end-to-end view of how customers interact with your product is Totango.

Top Features:

There are a few key product features as part of the platform, from 360 customer analysis views, segmentation, workflow automations, customer health scores, data hubs and more.

Track, measure journeys and understand your customers through analysis across onboarding, retention, renewals, account upgrades and more. Go deep by seeing customer engagement metrics as well as user recordings, so you can see what's going on. Setup automation workflows such as assigning key tasks based on actions to team members and more.

One feature I really love that this platform provides is templates/toolkits, which exists to help setup specific journeys that you can track. Saves lots of time setting up and a great way to understand the full potential of this platform. There's a big library of them available on the website.

customer journey

Templates

Engagement tools

Pricing:

A free plan is available for up to 100 customer accounts. A great way to test if this platform is right for your business. Then pricing begins at $499 per month.

Web/App

Freemium

$-$$$$

Learn more

Favourite

Woopra

About:

If you're looking for platform end-to-end analytics platform to capture the CX journey of your users, then check out Woopra.

Top Features:

A key feature of Woopra is the visual journey maps, which makes it visually evident of how customers interact with different funnels and flows. Setting up the journey/flow steps you want within the interface is seamless and easy to use. You can segment further for a deeper breakdown of certain user groups.

Analyse custom trend reports that illuminate areas of opportunities and bottlenecks you may not be aware of. Uncover users and flows that drive real revenue, see specific attributes such as locations, customer health scores and more that contribute to MRR/ARR. You can also in real-time track product errors or bugs which may disrupt customer experiences. The user profiles is really powerful to see specific individuals and how they engage with the product.

Included as part of the analytics capabilities are retention reports. View short and long-term cohort analysis, and see how long/when users churn. Go deeper with segmentation and reasons for churn. There are also integrations with some of your favourite SaaS tools to setup workflows, as well as setting up automations from notifications of signups, to delegating tasks, reports and more.

customer journey

historical data

user-level analytics

Pricing:

For up to 500k actions (events) per month and 90-day retention of data, you can use Woopra for free. Then plans start from $349 per month.

Web/App

Freemium

$-$$$$

Learn more

Favourite

Smartlook

About:

Smartlook is a platform that lets you record the behaviour of your users across your whole application from acqusition to product usage.

Top Features:

Track the whole customer journey, see how users interact with pages throught heatmaps, as well as record video sessions to see exactly what they're doing within your product.

The reporting functionality and dashboard views are really nice. View event and stat breakdowns within any part of the funnel, any specific page or any key feature of your app. With funnels, you can even see data in real-time as users flow through it.

Understand how users churn through retention analytics and tables. A cool feature they have is 'one-click' tables, meaning with any event within the app, just click it and see retention analytics for that event/feature. Pretty awesome.

Heatmapping

Video recording

behaviour flows

Pricing:

You can sign up for a free plan which gives you up to 1500 sessions per month. There are startup and business plans available, with the startup plan beginning at $39 per month, and the business plan at $95 per month. An ultimate plan is also on offer for larger companies.

Web/App

Freemium

$-$$$$

Learn more

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9 Best Product Analytics Platforms for Marketers & Founders (2024)

Segment

Top Features:

Amplitude

Top Features:

Pendo

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Mixpanel

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Fullstory

Top Features:

Heap Analytics

Top Features:

Totango

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Woopra

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Smartlook

Top Features:

Platform

Pricing

Plans

⚡ Frequently Asked Questions ⚡

What are the best Product Analytics tools?

Who uses product analytics tools?

Are there any free product analytics platform?