The 14 Best Event Tracking Tools for SaaS Companies

Choosing the best event-tracking tool for your business is not easy. Many options are available, and the information online is not always complete or objective.

To make the choice a bit easier for you, we’ve created a list of the best tools for tracking events available for SaaS teams in 2023.

Let’s get right to it!

TL;DR

• An event-tracking system is an application for recording and analyzing user interactions with your product or website.
• Event tracking provides teams with insights into user behavior so that they can improve the product, its UI, and key metrics like conversion rates.
• When choosing an event-tracking tool, first decide if you need to track user behavior inside a digital product or on a website.
• If you need an in-app tracking tool, your options include dedicated analytics tools or product adoption solutions.
• Standalone analytics products like Amplitude, Mixpanel, and Heap normally offer more advanced features for tracking and analyzing user interactions but don’t give you the tools necessary to act on the insights.
• If you go for a digital adoption platform, like Userpilot, Appcues, Pendo, or Chameleon, their analytics functionality may be limited.
• Pendo has the most advanced analytics features but it’s quite pricey and doesn’t track events in real time.
• Userpilot offers the best value balance between functionality and price but supports only web apps.
• Chameleon has the least advanced analytics in the roundup, while Appcues is useful to a limited extent because of usage caps.
• Google Analytics is a free web analytics tool that allows you to receive detailed analysis reports about your visitors and their behavior. Adobe Analytics offers similar functionality but no free plans.
• Matomo is the only solution that you can install on your own servers and it offers the most features for both web traffic analysis and granular analysis of user behavior.
• FullStory, Hotjar, Clicky, and Plerdy all support heatmaps and session recordings for optimization of your UI to remove friction and drive conversions. However, only Hotjar offers them in their free plan.
• To get a taste of Userpilot’s event tracking features, book the demo.

What is an event tracking system?

An event-tracking system is a software application that allows you to track and analyze user interactions with your website or application.

What do we mean by interactions?

That’s everything that the user does in the app or on the website. Clicking, completing a form, viewing a page, closing a pop-up window – you name it.

What is the use of event tracking?

Event tracking can provide valuable insights into user behavior and preferences.

Product teams can use it to identify the most popular features and those that users don’t engage with enough, or identify friction at different touchpoints in the user journey.

Marketing teams can use the insights to optimize the website content to reduce bounce rates and help users progress through conversion funnels.

What are the must-have features of an event-tracking tool?

Here are a few key features that you should be looking out for when you’re choosing the event-tracking solution for your organization.

These include:

• Code-free event tagging or automatic capture
• Custom events
• User segmentation
• Funnel analytics
• Goal tracking
• Real-time tracking
• Data visualization
• Custom dashboards with fundamental event-tracking metrics
• Custom reports
• Integrations with analytics tools

Best analytics tools for web application event tracking

To help you make an informed decision, we look at the functionality each of the tools supports as well as the details of their pricing plans.

1. Userpilot

Userpilot is a growth platform for web-based digital products. It allows you to collect user feedback, track user behavior in-app, and design personalized onboarding experiences to drive product engagement and adoption.

The analytics features include:

• User segmentation
• Feature tagging (tracks user clicks, hovers, and form infills)
• Event tracking (either code-free from the Chrome extension or through API)

• Custom events

• Heatmaps

• Funnel analysis (coming soon)
• Goal tracking

• Real-time reporting
• Integrations with Mixpanel, Heap, Amplitude, Segment, and Google Analytics.

Userpilot pricing

Userpilot’s transparent pricing ranges from $249/month on the entry-level end to an Enterprise tier for larger companies.

Furthermore, Userpilot’s entry-level plan includes access to all UI patterns and should include everything that most mid-market SaaS businesses need to get started.

Userpilot has three paid plans to choose from:

• Starter: The entry-level Starter plan starts at $249/month and includes features like segmentation, product analytics, reporting, user engagement, NPS feedback, and customization.
• Growth: The Growth plan starts at $749/month and includes features like resource centers, advanced event-based triggers, unlimited feature tagging, AI-powered content localization, EU hosting options, and a dedicated customer success manager.
• Enterprise: The Enterprise plan uses custom pricing and includes all the features from Starter + Growth plus custom roles/permissions, access to premium integrations, priority support, custom contract, SLA, SAML SSO, activity logs, security audit, and compliance (SOC 2/GDPR).

2. Amplitude

Amplitude is a powerful standalone product analytics platform with second-to-none analytics functionality.

The key Amplitude analytics features include:

• Cohort analysis/user segmentation
• Milestone analysis for goal tracking
• Funnel analysis and conversion drivers
• Impact analysis for testing the effects of changes that you introduce
• Root cause analysis
• Custom dashboards
• Pathfinder to map out the paths leading up to events
• Real-time data reporting

Amplitude pricing

Amplitude offers three pricing plans, including a generous free Starter plan which gives you access to its core event-tracking features.

However, please note that Amplitude gives you no tools to act on the insights. To improve user activation or feature engagement you will need a 3rd party solution.

3. Mixpanel

Mixpanel is another dedicated analytics solution, just like Amplitude.

It also offers very similar features to track user behavior:

• User segmentation and cohort analysis
• Group analytics for a wholistic account or company-level analysis
• Custom events
• Funnel and drop-off analysis
• Interactive real-time reporting through Live events
• Impact analysis
• Custom dashboards

Mixpanel pricing

Mixpanel offers three pricing plans:

• Starter, free
• Growth, from $20/month
• Enterprise, from $833/month

The free Starter plan offers access to all reporting features.

4. Heap

Heap joins the line-up of specialized analytics tools that you can use to track events.

Heap’s analytics features include:

• User segmentation
• Data Autocapture for automatic code-free event tracking
• Custom events
• Journey mapping
• Funnel analysis and goal-tracking
• Cross-platform tracking as users move between devices
• Illuminate for identifying friction points
• Custom dashboards and graphs for data visualization

Apart from the standard set of event tracking features, Heap also offers session replays so that you can analyze user engagement with your product UI in detail.

Heap pricing

Heap offers four pricing plans: Free, Growth, Pro, and Premier.

Most of its key analytics features are available in the Free plan and the Growth plan comes with a free trial. The two highest plans, Pro and Premier, have custom pricing.

5. Pendo

Pendo is a digital adoption platform (DAP) with a reputation for its advanced analytics functionality.

Here’s what it offers:

• User segmentation
• Funnel analysis
• Event tracking, including custom events.
• Paths (map out all sequences of user actions leading up to or following an event)
• Custom reports to track page views, feature clicks, events, or guide views

On top of these, you can also use Pendo Polls to collect and analyze user feedback and Pendo Guides for in-app messaging.

However, when it comes to triggering contextual surveys or guidance, your options are limited because Pendo shows data with a one-hour delay.

Pendo pricing

Pendo has 4 pricing plans.

The first two ‘plans to get started’ are Free and Starter, which are most suitable for early-stage companies. Subscribing to the latter will charge you $7000/year.

The two ‘plans to scale’, Growth and Portfolio, come with custom pricing. According to Pendo users, they’re not cheap.

6. Appcues

Appcues, like Userpilot and Pendo, is a product adoption tool offering user feedback, in-app guidance, and analytics functionality.

What analytics features does it offer?

• User segmentation
• Code-free event tracking with Click-to-Track events
• Flow analytics to track engagements with in-app guidance
• Goal tracking
• Two-way integrations with Amplitude, Mixpanel, and Heap, as well as Kissmetrics and Fullstory.

Appcues shares some of Pendo’s flaws: it doesn’t display data in real-time, so you can’t trigger events contextually.

Appcues pricing

Appcues pricing is built around 3 plans:

• Essentials, starting from $249/month
• Growth, starting from $879/month
• Enterprise, with custom pricing

Most of the analytics features are available in the Essentials plan but they come with usage caps that limit their usefulness. You can only track 10 events and 5 segments.

7. Chameleon

Chameleon is a digital adoption platform (DAP). You can use it to collect user feedback and design highly customized user onboarding experiences. The latter is definitely its biggest strength. Its analytics features may not be though.

Its limited analytics functionality allows you to:

• Track engagement with in-app onboarding flows
• Monitor events in real-time and trigger event-based experiences
• Track goals

Chameleon pricing

Chameleon offers three plans: Startup, Growth, and Enterprise.

When you first look at it, the price of the lowest plan looks competitive. That’s until you start playing with the slider. Moving it from 2000 MAUs to 2500 brings the price from $279 to $349.

And you have no control over the cost. If you exceed the limit, Chamaleon charges you more, even if you’re still on the Startup plan.

Best tracking tools for website analytics

What options do you have when it comes to tracking events on websites? Here are a few products worth considering.

8. Google Analytics

Google Analytics is probably the best-known website analytics tool. While Google’s Universal Analytics is limited to tracking website traffic, its new reincarnation, Google Analytics 4 can track app events too.

Some important GA features include:

• Real-time web activity tracking
• Code-free event tracking with Google Tag Manager
• Event filtering by category, action, and label
• Audience reports – data on your website visitors, including demographics
• Acquisition reports – breakdown of acquisition channels, like, organic vs direct vs referral
• Behavior reports – insights into visitor interactions with your website (e.g. pageviews or events)
• Goal/Conversion tracking
• Funnels
• Custom dashboards
• Integration with Google Ads for campaign performance tracking

Google Analytics pricing

One of the key advantages of Google Analytics is that it’s free for most users.

Unless you need advanced features like attribution modeling. If so, you have the option of upgrading to Analytics 360, which costs $12,500 a month.

9. Adobe Analytics

Adobe Analytics is a web analytics suite that helps organizations track and analyze website user behavior. It uses machine learning for customer data analysis.

Some of the features of the platform include:

• Real-time tracking
• Multi-channel tracking for tracking user behavior on the website as well as mobile apps and social media
• Advanced segmentation
• AI-powered predictive analytics

Adobe Analytics pricing

There are 3 Adobe Analytics plans available: Select, Prime, and Ultimate. Their pricing is not available on the website, however.

10. FullStory

FullStory is a digital experience intelligence platform that allows organizations to capture, analyze and understand user interactions with their websites.

Its features include:

• Advanced behavior-based segmentation
• Auto capture for tagless tracking of all your events using a patented dx data engine
• Frustration signals recognition to identify UI issues
• Session replays to see exactly what users do on the website or inside the app
• Heatmaps for user behavior visualization
• Retention data analysis
• Journey mapping
• Custom dashboards
• Funnel analysis

FullStory pricing

There are three FullStory plans available: Enterprise, Advanced, and Business.

The website has no pricing, but FullStory offers a free 14-day trial of the lowest Business plan.

11. Hotjar

Hotjar is an all-in-one analytics and feedback platform that helps businesses understand how users interact with their websites.

What features does it offer?

• User segmentation
• Automatic data capture
• Custom event tracking
• Heatmaps
• Session recordings
• Funnel analytics tool
• User behavior pattern visualization with Trends
• A comprehensive dashboard with all the relevant metrics

Hotjar pricing

How much does Hotjar cost?

The lowest plan, which gives you access to unlimited heatmaps and 35 daily session recordings, is free.

However, to use the more advanced features, you need to use one of the paid plans:

• Plus, from $32/month
• Business, from $80/month
• Scale, from $171/month

12. Matomo

Matomo, formerly known as Piwik, is an open-source web analytics platform that provides detailed insights into website traffic.

Some of the features of Matomo include:

• Real-time event tracking
• User segmentation and cohort analysis
• Goal tracking
• Custom dimensions
• Funnel analysis
• Heatmaps and session recordings
• Custom reports
• WooCommerce analytics

Matomo pricing

As an open-source platform, Matomo offers a free On-Premise plan as long as you’re able to host it on your own servers.

If not, you can use the Cloud plan for £17/month. The advantage of the Cloud plan is that it includes functionality that costs extra with the On-Premise plan like heatmaps or custom reports.

13. Clicky

Clicky is a web analytics service that provides real-time website tracking.

And it comes with loads of features:

• User segmentation
• Highly customizable tracking
• Live data updates
• Detailed visitor reports
• Heatmaps
• Backlink analysis
• Goal and conversion tracking
• Funnel and path analysis
• Campaign tracking
• Video, email, and social media analytics.

Clicky pricing

Clicky is available in 5 different plans:

• Free
• Pro, from $9.99/month
• Pro Plus, from $14.99/month
• Platinum, from $19.99/month
• Custom

All the paid plans, apart from Pro, get access to all the premium features, including heatmaps and uptime monitoring.

14. Plerdy

Plerdy is a web analytics and conversion optimization tool that helps website owners and marketing managers improve their website performance by tracking events and providing actionable insights.

Its functionality includes

• Event-tracking
• Funnel analysis and goal-tracking
• Heatmaps
• Session replays
• E-commerce analytics
• Scroll depth reports

Plerdy pricing

Plerdy has the most complicated pricing structure of all the tools in our roundup.

First, there are the All-in-One plans giving you access to all features. There are 6 of them, and they start from $98/month.

If you’re interested in tracking only some of the events, you can choose a UX&CRO plan (heatmaps, session replays, etc), a Pop-Up plan, an SEO plan, or an E-commerce plan.

Within each of them, there are 3 different pricing tiers. That’s 15 different paid plans! And the free one.

Conclusion

The variety of available event-tracking tools is truly mind-boggling.

To choose your tool, first, decide if you need an app or website tracking tool. Then, find a tool with a pricing plan within your budget.

Finally, pick the one that offers the features you need. Or start with the features, and then look at the cost, depending on your priorities.

If you want to have a close look at Userpilot’s event tracking features, book the demo!