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The Top 9 Product Analytics Tools

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    Launching or upgrading B2B SaaS apps today must include a data-driven approach. Gone are the days of taking shots in the dark and hoping it sticks. Product Analytics tools are helping achieve this by uncovering usage patterns and engagement trends. But which one is best for you? This detailed guide will help you get started.

    What are Product Analytics Tools?

    Product analytics tools are solutions that provide SaaS vendors with actionable insights about customers’ engagement and interactions with their applications or online services. They collect insightful data from crucial touchpoints in the applications and analyze how users are interacting with various features. These tools help businesses feel the pulse and make better roadmap-related decisions.

    Product analysis tools help understand key engagement information:

    • User Behavior Patterns – These tools help track user behavior in real time and understand what makes them tick. For example, which features are the most popular or features that are time consuming to build but no one uses. There is also the need to determine how active users are (MAU/DAU).
    • Feature Engagement – Developing and implementing new features is a good thing, but users need to start using them as well. Product analytics tools help understand what features are more popular and attract more users.
    • Ongoing Monitoring and Tracking – Product analytics tools offer added visibility and analytical capabilities with a centralized dashboard where all relevant notifications are displayed for optimal performance calibration.

    Gaining visibility into application engagement and usage has become extremely important today. It helps understand feature adoption levels, frequency of usage, underlying trends, and also creates the foundation for proper SWOT analysis.  

    Related: Top 10 Productivity Tools for the Modern CSM

    Product Analytics Tools: The Key Features 

    Looking for a new product analytics tool? You need to understand what key features to look out for before shortlisting a few of them. The best practice is to find a proven and tested solution that ticks most of the following boxes for best results.

    Here are the key features your product analytics tool should have today:

    1. Tracking – This is probably the most important feature. Your product analytics tools should have to give you end-to-end visibility across your app – think tracking page visits, clicks on CTA buttons, and creating journey funnels.
    2. Segmentation – Your toll of choice should also be capable of identifying users based on their geolocation and their specific industries, or custom segments per your needs. 
    3. Profiling – This is another important functionality where you can establish user profiles based on specific criteria based on your use cases and needs.
    4. Measurement tools – Your product analytics tool should be able to quantify and evaluate the feature usage and engagement, ideally in real time.
    5. Centralized dashboard – The UX should be simple enough so you should be able to use the interface to gain (and share) insights with just a few clicks.
    6. Notifications and alerts – You should also be able to act on user behavior insights, and implement customizable alerts, notifications or flows to improve adoption.
    7. Funnels and A/B testing – The product analytics tool to provide me with funnel investigation and tracking. It means that we can define specific flows we wish users to go through and see where they drop, or detect in-app friction. The tool should also show you the different funnels users go through, and show what users are actually doing and how they navigate.

    Comparison Criteria

    With SaaS consumption coming from different entities, product analytics tools need to address even the most complex use cases. We have shortlisted the best solutions based on the most important parameters that are needed in today’s ecosystems.

    Here are the evaluation criteria we have taken into consideration:

    • Onboarding/Usability: The focus here is on features that allow all users to get started with minimal issues and low onboarding friction.
    • User Interface (UI): Having advanced features is great, but the product analytics tool need to have a easy-to-use interface that’s easy to utilize
    • Integrations: With SaaS ecosystems using more and more complex, the solutions need to integrate well out-of-the-box or have dev-friendly APIs.
    • Customer Service: Quickly getting answers to questions and having a professional support pipeline is no longer a luxury, it’s a necessity 
    • Pricing: With even enterprise-size companies now becoming budget-conscious, pricing is something you will need to keep an eye on

    Related: Top 10 Productivity Tools for the Modern CSM

    Top 9 Product Analytics Tools

    Without further ado, let’s get started with the product analytics tool list.

    1. Pendo

    Pendo is a popular product analytics solution that’s helping onboard users more effectively with in-app messaging capabilities as a bonus. It’s a proven and tested customer retention booster thanks to advanced features like feature adoption monitoring and usage pattern monitoring. Its sister-offering, Pendo Feedback also helps collect feedback and understand what feature requests may help with growth.

    Founded: 2013
    Pros:
    Good integration capabilities
    Exceptional support
    Highly Configurable

    Cons: 
    Setting up can get tricky
    Can get pricey for Startups and SMBs

    Main Features: 
    User onboarding
    Engagement tracking
    Feedback collection 

    Pricing: Free trial available, paid plans not shown on website

    2. Smartlook

    Smartlook helps analyze user behavior and create qualitative insights that help improve adoption and engagement rates. With clients like Volvo, Sky, Vogue, and Kiwi.com already enjoying its services, Smartlook has become a true force you must consider. Session recordings are taken care of, with drop-off analysis available on tap. The detailed and real-time heatmaps are also highly recommended by users.

    Founded: 2016
    Pros:
    Great onboarding
    Best in class recordings and heatmaps
    Good support

    Cons:
    Too pricey for startups
    Comes with a learning curve

    Main Features: 
    Session Recordings
    Heatmaps
    Funnels and events tracking
    Mobile Analytics

    Pricing: Free for up to 1500 sessions/month, paid plans start at $39/month

    3. Heap

    Heap is seen by many SaaS businesses as a leading free ad-hoc product analytics and reporting platform. It captures all user actions and uses this data for in-depth reporting. Top features include path analysis, conversion charts, and also an event visualization. Heap can do complex tracking and funnel management, but it also comes with a steep learning curve. The Freemium version is also very capable.

    Founded: 2013
    Pros:
    Quick integration and onboarding|
    Good Freemium Version

    Cons:
    Sharing and collaboration problems
    Limited dashboard customization

    Main Features:
    Conversion charts
    Path analysis
    Event visualization

    Pricing: freemium (up to 10k sessions/month), paid plans start at $3,600 annually

    4. WhatFix

    Whatfix is a product analytics tool that focuses on reducing in-app friction and reduces overhead by 45% as per the company’s claims. With clients like Cisco, UPS, Microsoft, and Sentry, we tend to believe that the claims are credible. It offers customizable app flows that can be tailored to specific use cases for elevated engagement and adoption levels. 

    Founded: 2014
    Pros: 
    Good documentation
    Strong support
    Active post-Sales pipeline

    Cons: 
    Lack of customization
    Outdated UI/UX
    No automatic translation 

    Main Features: 
    Granular insights
    Behavior Analytics
    Interactive in-app widgets

    Pricing: Free for startups, paid plans not shown on website

    5. Amplitude Analytics

    Amplitude is a product analytics tool with hundreds of satisfied customers, a pattern that’s only trending up. It is a comprehensive end-to-end solution with useful features like cross-platform tracking and real-time insights. Attribution modeling is strong, as is the user interface. Amplitude Analytics offers a fully customizable dashboard that quickly elevates performance and data sharing capabilities.

    Founded: 2012
    Pros: 
    Strong customer support
    Focus on security, fits enterprises
    Good visualization

    Cons:
    Can be complex for newbies
    Integration can get tricky

    Main Features: 
    Unlimited data streams
    Collaboration tools
    User management

    Pricing: Free for startups, paid plans not shown on website

    6. Mixpanel

    Mixpanel enables organizations, both enterprise-level and SMBs, to analyze user behavior. This product analysis solution generates interactive activity reports, shows which new features are gaining traction, and even highlights power users. This information can help you create better retroactive funnels and perform better conversion rate analysis. All user actions and steps are recorded and analyzed. 

    Founded: 2009
    Pros:
    Good integration capabilities
    Great reporting capabilities

    Cons:
    Comes with a learning curve
    Lackluster alert customization
    Support issues

    Main Features: 
    Customized report generation
    Engagement tracking and analysis

    Pricing: Free for startups, Growth plans start at $25/month

    7. FullStory

    FullStory offers SaaS businesses a Digital Experience Intelligence (DXI) platform that captures every user interaction within the application and uses it to create action-driven insights. A unique feature FullStory offers is the ability to “retroactively” capture user actions and create a Session Replay to enable better analysis. Privacy is taken care of with text element masking performed at the source.

    Founded: 2014
    Pros:
    Interactive interface
    Strong customer support
    Good click tracking

    Cons:
    Many reviews mention bugs and stability issues
    Pricey

    Main Features:
    Customer segmentation
    Record entire sessions
    Error tracking

    Pricing: Free for startups, paid plans not shown on website

    8. Quantum Metric

    Driven by the power of ML and big data, Quantum Analytics gives SaaS businesses an insightful overview (user logs) of how customers are behaving and also provides actionable insights with dynamic heatmaps. All of this is achieved by implementing interactive customer experience journeys with multiple strategic touchpoints that are crucial for success. There’s also integration for Slack, Salesforce, and more.

    Founded: 2015
    Pros:
    Solid integration capabilities
    Data based features
    User-friendly interface

    Cons:
    Integration and setup can get messy
    Can get pricey

    Main Features: 
    Customer experience journeys
    Heatmaps
    Session replay

    Pricing: No free trial, paid plans not shown on website

    9. LogRocket

    LogRocket helps SaaS businesses fix software problems, increase adoption, elevate engagement, and improve conversion rates. It offers a wide range of useful features such as  product analytics data, session replay, and performance tracking, all via one centralized dashboard. The actionable insights can then be implemented to create a better product experience. Integration is available for GitHub, Jira, Trello, and more. 

    Founded: 2016
    Pros: 
    Strong integration capabilities
    Engaging interface

    Cons:
    Slow and buggy performance
    Iffy support, limited featured suite

    Main Features: 
    User session replays
    UX analytics
    Performance monitoring

    Pricing:
    Free for startups (1000 sessions/month)
    Paid plans start from $99/month

    product analytics tools
    All Platforms Are Graded On a 5-Star Scale (5 Maximum Score, 1 Lowest Score)
    Based on User Reviews from the G2, TrustRadius, and Capterra Platforms

    Product Analytics is Dandy, But What About Human Analytics?

    Any one of the aforementioned product analytics tools should put you in a good place and help you track applications adoption and engagement. But in the B2B realm relationships are still playing a big role in your account’s health. What’s on their minds? What relationship changes are affecting the health of your enterprise accounts? Are you picking up the right customer cues that may lead to churn?

    The only answer to all these questions – a Human Analytics platform.

    Staircase AI is a next-gen platform that leverages AI to analyze millions of customer communications (emails, Slack chats, calls, product analytics, and more.) to discover churn risks and potential opportunities you can’t possibly be reach manually. Staircase AI paints a full picture of your customer behavior to cut through the noise and boost NRR.