The Top 9 Product Analytics Tools

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 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.