The information you can get from user surveys and feedback forms will only take you so far.
When you’ve spent potentially hundreds of thousands of dollars or more developing a new SaaS platform, service, or digital product, you need much more in-depth information in order to continue to improve the product and grow your customer base.
Fortunately, as is often the case, data at scale can provide the answer. Product analytics is the art of extracting thousands of product data points from user behavior to determine how users typically interact with your product.
What is a product analytics tool?
The problem, as always with data analytics, is potentially receiving too much data in a format that takes too long to make actionable. This is where product analytics tools come in. These tools source, arrange, and display valuable UX data so that developers, designers, product managers, and product marketers can find drop-offs and improve retention, spot opportunities in the product development process, increase market share, and improve the overall customer experience.
In this article, we’ve pulled together what we consider to be the ten best currently available product analytics tools. Below we offer our summary of what each has to offer. First, of course, we should outline our selection criteria.
What to look for in product analytics software
Here are the things we think all good product analytics solutions should provide:
- Easy to read, customizable dashboards and reports
- Data privacy and security features
- Full UX journey analytics
- Minimal code footprint
- A/B testing
- Sales funnel building features
- Good support and training resources
- Affordable price tiers
- Free demo trial
Many of the products featured below offer added extras, but we feel these are the must-haves.
10 best product analytics tools in 2023
Here are our picks for the top product analytics platforms:
Okay, let’s dive a bit deeper into each one.
1. Mixpanel
Mixpanel combines the funnel-building features of a sales and marketing tool with an analytics focus which turns every customer action into a useful data point. The platform permits a “slice and dice” approach to data, letting you follow individual customer journeys both before and after a purchase, grouping users into cohorts, or identifying power users.
You can compare localities with regard to conversions and different steps in the adoption journey and display these in dashboards and reports which are easy to read and share. The platform has been built for both start-ups and established companies. The latter can perform group-wide analytics, comparing the performance of a range of products at once.
Additional data can be uploaded manually, and there are over 50 integrations, including data warehouse systems like Snowflake, BigQuery, or Redshift. Other integrations include AWS, Facebook and Google Ads, HubSpot, Mailchimp, and Salesforce. One clever feature is the ability to A/B test different conversion funnels and present statistics side-by-side.
Users like the ability to segment and target audiences with ad hoc funnels and the ease of automation of push notifications and marketing campaigns. There is some criticism of the steep learning curve for beginners, but this is common with complex, advanced products.
Support and resources are particularly good with Mixpanel, with two blogs (one aimed at analysts, the other at engineers), FAQs, and a user community. The product is attractive and well-designed, with the ability to annotate any shared reports for ease of third-party comprehension.
Top features include:
- A/B Testing & Cohort Segmentation
- Group-Wide Product Analytics
- Excellent Support
Pricing: Free tier, $25 per month, bespoke enterprise pricing
2. Amplitude
Amplitude is proud to be the number one tool for product analytics (on G2 in 2023), and it certainly has some impressive adopters, particularly in ecommerce. Shopify, Ford Motors, Peloton, and Instacart are among Amplitude’s top clients.
At its core, Amplitude uses something called a product/experience flywheel. This is a term borrowed from machine engineering, which Amplitude describes as “the collection of variables, levers, and interactions driving your business growth.” In other words, Amplitude aims to help you set up virtuous cycles which drive adoption and growth.
Amplitude aims to present a 360-degree view of user journeys across all channels, devices, and products. They differentiate their offering from older generations of analytic tools, which aren’t sufficiently detailed or deliver unusable data. The product is a suite of tools that incorporates Amplitude Experiment, a virtual laboratory for measuring the success or failure of product changes, and Amplitude Recommend, a “personalization engine” to create highly targeted marketing campaigns.
Segmentation and in-depth user journey analysis are both very strong in Amplitude, and users love the ability to build unlimited custom dashboards easily. There is some criticism for the lack of a mobile version for logging in on the go.
Top features include:
- Funnel Building
- Lab feature for A/B Testing
- Complete UX Journey Analysis
Pricing: Free tier, then bespoke pricing in two tiers
3. Pendo
Pendo takes a very different tack from Amplitude or Mixpanel, aiming for clarity and simplicity over zillions of features. It might suit a start-up or young company more than a global brand.
Pendo aims to perform “retroactive analytics,” tracking a user’s journey back to examine how they reached the platform and allowing you to remove friction from future user experiences. Unlike other sites which incorporate loads of features for engineers, Pendo assumes no such skills, making it ideal for small non-technical product teams.
Insights are easy to analyze with attractive yet data-rich graphs and spider diagrams. One aspect that’s quite unique about Pendo is the ability to trigger in-app guides, which means that if you identify a feature of your product that’s underused, you can produce a prompt to assist users rather than re-engineer the whole thing. However, this feature has received some criticism from users for its highly linear structure.
The platform is particularly good for web apps and works best when each page has a separate URL. If your product analysts aren’t also developers, Pendo might be a sensible choice. It scores highly for support and for making improvements based on user feedback.
Top features include:
- Clear, attractive reports and dashboards
- In-App guide feature
- Shallow learning curve
Pricing: Free tier, then bespoke pricing in 3 tiers
4. Heap
Heap seems especially popular with large-scale data-driven industries such as banking, insurance, and ecommerce. It describes itself as a “digital insights platform that combines quantitative and qualitative analytics,” and it aims to be one of the most complete data analytics tools on the market, recording and analyzing every single action taken by every user on your site.
Heap then uses data science and other AI marketing tools to analyze trends and patterns within the data and deliver insights for product improvement, messaging, and funnel optimization. Like Pendo, Heap bills itself as being low on coding and strong on intuitive data visualization.
Heap is one of the strongest platforms in terms of integrations, with over 100 at the time of writing, including Salesforce, Shopify, and AWS. Their website is very easy to follow, particularly for those new to “digital insights” in user experience.
Users report that Heap can be a little time-consuming when first set up, but there are useful blog articles, weekly live demos, and bookable demos to tour the product before you commit.
Top features include:
- Unparalleled depth of behavioral data
- Loads of Integrations
- Great support and training features
Pricing: Free tier, then bespoke pricing in 3 tiers
5. FullStory
Describing itself as a “digital experience intelligence” platform, FullStory boasts Forbes, GMC, and Pelaton among its biggest clients. It aims to use its collated UX data to increase revenue, reduce churn and improve efficiency. Insights are in-depth and combine facts and data with more subjective assessments of user behavior such as “rage” and “error clicks.”
Users enjoy being able to view user journeys in real-time and see exactly when navigation mistakes or unfulfilled searches take place. FullStory calls this the qualitative and quantitative approach — combining session reviews with hard metrics for the bigger picture.
Both web and mobile users are analyzed, then presented in simple graphs and dashboards. These are colorful but “no frills” for ease of communication across your organization.
With a 4.6-star rating on Capterra, this is one of the best-reviewed product analysis tools on the market but does receive criticism for its pricing strategy, with no figures quoted on the website. Still, a 400% ROI, if true as advertised on their site, is not to be scorned.
Top features include:
- Realtime journey tracking and user flows
- Large range of product metrics
- Web and mobile app compatible
Pricing: Free trial, then bespoke pricing
6. UXCam
As its name suggests, UXCam is all about user experience. It’s particularly focused on mobile apps, and users include Nandos, Costa Coffee, and Virgin Mobile. In fact, it’s the market leader in UX analytics for mobile apps, with over 30,000 apps incorporating it within their workflow.
Like FullStory, it records everything from a session, including “rage taps”, UI freezes, and gestures. This aspect is pretty much ready to roll out of the box, in fact. Dashboards are attractive, easy to follow, and allow comparisons across app events, sessions, user segments, and more.
UXCam is especially strong in the area of error and crash analytics, an important facet of mobile app analytics. Conversion funnels are rather simple compared to some of the options here, and there is a little pushback from users on the slightly dated dashboard design. Overall, however, it’s a great tool and you could be up and running within hours.
Top features include:
- Highly intuitive dashboards
- Great bug and crash analytics
- Lots of comparison features
Pricing: Free tier, then bespoke pricing in 2 tiers
7. Plus
Plus is a tool that aims to locate all your data in one place and make it accessible to any and all of your team members in a format they prefer, without dozens of integrations. Anything which can simplify an ever-growing tech stack is certainly welcome!
Reports displaying data and trends are very simple and accessible and can be embedded within productivity tools, circulated via Slack, or shared with an email invite. These reports include ones focused on UX, but also display conversions, daily active users, user engagement, and NPS data (net promoter scores indicating the degree of positive or negative customer feedback).
Since Plus is primarily a data-sharing tool, rather than a UX tool per se, it may not prove as all-encompassing as some of the other platforms in this list, but it’s reportedly well-liked across a range of teams and automates data for recurring reporting functions.
A/B test tracking is supported and there are even “just for fun” use cases suggested, including monitoring your crypto portfolio or mapping out your to-do list. Truly a one size fits all solution.
Top features include:
- Embeddable reports
- Wide range of analytics
- A/B test tracking
Pricing: Free tier, then pricing upon request
8. Plausible
Plausible bills itself as a secure and simple alternative to Google Analytics (see below), built and hosted in the EU with GDPR compliance and privacy as a strong component. It’s open source and designed to walk the line between maximum data extraction and increased user confidence.
It would therefore be a great tool to employ for the public sector, fintech, or medical applications and already boasts more than 7000 adopters just three years after launch. Being open source, you can host Plausible on your own server if you want to ensure total control over data flow.
Plausible has the following USPs, which make it a viable choice instead of Google’s in-house offerings: simple analytics and menus, a tiny script footprint (more than 25% smaller than Google), no cookie use (therefore no irritating pop-ups) and simple shareability.
Designed to be the antithesis of the secretive data wrangling of global giants, Plausible would suit smaller companies and start-ups with ethical sustainability as one of their key tenets. At just $9 a month, it’s also one of the cheapest product analytic solutions around (for smaller companies, at least).
Top features include:
- Highly privacy compliant
- Open-source code
- Accessible, sharable reports
Pricing: By pageview ($9 per month for 10K up to $169 for 10 million; or bespoke)
9. LogRocket
Whilst also stressing data security compliance, LogRocket has been rated number one for session replay, the ability to minutely analyze the behavior of anonymized individual user actions, as well as aggregate these behaviors into actionable insights.
It’s a particularly good tool for developers to log and fix bugs and other performance-related issues. This functionality-first approach extends into its product analytic dashboards, with unfussy, simple, and at times stark graphs and charts giving you valuable metrics and KPIs.
Like many of the other high-end tools here, you can customize funnels and create your own metrics to measure performance and increase conversions. Revenue estimation is a strong feature that should help motivate those painful but necessary UX changes!
Timeseries analysis (frequency of key events over time) and alerts are unusual features that set LogRocket apart. The platform will suit developers and product designers of an analytic bent, who don’t need to produce reports for everyone from interns to the CEO.
The lack of heatmaps and slightly jaded design are among the few recurring user complaints. Higher-level analytics are available at the more expensive subscription tiers.
Top features include:
- Session replay
- Revenue estimator
- Timeseries analysis
Pricing: Free tier, then $99 or $500 per month; bespoke pricing over 25K sessions per month
10. Google Analytics
Of course, no overview would be complete without a look at Google Analytics, which boasts the major advantage for lean marketing teams of being free. Steep through the learning curve may be, Google Analytics draws upon the immense user data-wrangling capabilities of Google to plug some serious firepower into your web app.
Another key advantage of going with Google is the ease with which you can integrate other Google products into your product workflow, including Google Search and Ads. Of course, it’s only really going to give you insight into how traffic moves to your site or app and from when a session first starts. For complex analytics on how well your UX is working when customers have found you and signed up, you’ll need to look elsewhere.
However, for improving SEO, targeting cohorts of potential new customers, and identifying bounce rates and visitor point of origin, there’s still nothing better while Google retains its primacy amongst search engines (it was favored by over 92% of internet users in June 2021 according to Statista). After all, nobody is saying “Bing it” or “Edge it.”
There are plenty of more user-friendly and attractive product analytic tools available. However, for sheer value for money and ease of access, little beats Google Analytics, at least for start-ups looking to save money.
Top features include:
- Integration with Google Ads
- SEO Optimization
- Deep Traffic Insights
Pricing: Free
Why are product analytics tools important?
One of the early appreciators of the power of data, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, aka the creator of Sherlock Holmes, once had his legendary detective remark, “it is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data.” He could scarcely have known how prophetic such a statement would become in the 21st century.
Product analytics gives product managers, designers, developers, entrepreneurs, and product marketers the data they need to make product decisions, improve conversion rates, enhance user onboarding, and improve customer success rates. With literally billions of data points at your fingertips, however, the problem is where to start.
Data analytic tools provide a platform in which to make sense of trends within the data and institute revenue-generating improvements.
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