Best User Analytics Tools for SaaS in 2023

Best User Analytics Tools for SaaS in 2023 cover

When it comes to boosting your product growth, user analytics tools can make your life a lot easier. These tools offer insights into product performance, what your users are doing inside your product, and why they are doing it.

But how do you know you’re picking the right tools?

In this article, we offer you key insights on user analytics tools based on their use cases, allowing you to pick the right set of tools to help you build more successful products.

TL;DR

  • User analytics is a type of analytics that focuses on user/customer behavior inside a product/on a website.
  • User data reveals how user engagement with your product impacts user retention, conversion, revenue, and the outcomes you care about.
  • The user actions (behaviors) users take within your product are measured by firing custom events or clicks on the front end (feature tags).
  • Userpilot is a code-free platform that combines solid analytics features for actionable behavior analytics with the user sentiment and engagement layers
  • Mixpanel offers great functionality in terms of tracking and collecting user data in real-time but requires you to set up events before tracking them.
  • Heap is a comprehensive user analytics suite that tracks all sorts of in-app user interactions and requires no prior definition or configuration of events.
  • Amplitude helps you create a holistic user journey by offering valuable insights into the user experience.
  • Fullstory recreates user sessions by combining user data with the session recording to give you an accurate picture of user behavior, tracks user interactions, and lets you create funnels.
  • Adobe Analytics allows businesses to capture, aggregate, rationalize, and understand vast amounts of disparate data on user behavior patterns.
  • Google Analytics helps you understand your website audience better by tracking key metrics, including acquisition and behavioral metrics.
  • Hotjar collects data using multiple tools, including session recordings and heat maps. You can analyze data from such tools to gain a range of useful user behavior insights.
  • If you are looking for an option to collect insights and build better experiences for your users, book a Userpilot demo to see how it can help!

Try Userpilot for Collecting and Analyzing User Behavior Data!

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What is user analytics?

User analytics focuses on user behavior inside your website or product. It records user activity, groups them into behavioral segments, and analyzes key user metrics such as engagement and conversion.

User data helps you track user behaviors in relation to product engagement, retention, lifetime value, conversion rates, and ultimately revenue. You can measure user actions or behavior by firing custom events or clicking on the front end (feature tags).

With the right tools, user analytics can offer insights to understand the perceived value of your product. These user analytics tools can provide identifiable data (i.e. Userpilot) or non-identifiable data (i.e. Google Analytics).

Why is user analytics important for SaaS?

Understanding your users in SaaS is a must if you want to create better products and more effective marketing strategies, streamline your ad spend, and most importantly – improve your retention.

But user data has no meaning without user analytics.

User analytics plays a key role in understanding how your users are interacting with your product. You can understand the user journey better by assessing the user behavior that happens across all touchpoints in the user journey.

For example, if you notice users failing to adopt a feature even after requesting it, it might mean that the feature is not in an intuitive place in your product or they need help with more in-app guidance.

How to choose the right user analytics platform?

A range of factors can come into play while choosing the right user analytics tools, including your product and business goals.

Your business goals will act as a guide while identifying the KPIs you need to improve. This will help you create your data taxonomy, which will act as the base for the analysis done by the User Analytics tools.

Apart from these, here are some of the criteria you should consider while choosing user analytics tools:

  • What does it measure?
  • How does it collect and measure data?
  • Does it measure website user activity or in-app user activity? Pageviews or all clicks?
  • Does it measure identifiable data (e.g., so you can identify the user by unique ID, email, and more) or anonymized data (which is impossible to identify)?
  • What type of analytics is it? Quantitative event-based analytics or qualitative session recordings?
  • How easy is it to set up?
  • How does it fit in with your existing tech stack and technology?

Once you’ve decided what criteria you’re prioritizing, you can go through the list we’ve compiled for you to help you find the right User Analytics tool for your SaaS business.

Best in-app user analytics tools for SaaS

With the ability to comprehensively understand user behavior, these tools pave the way for data-driven decision-making and improved in-app user experiences. Here are some of the leading options for in-app user analytics that can elevate your SaaS business:

Userpilot

Userpilot is a product growth platform that drives user activation, feature adoption, and expansion revenue. It also helps product teams collect user feedback, streamline onboarding, and gather actionable insights from analytics.

With Userpilot, you’ll be able to track both quantitative and qualitative data to get a holistic view of how customers use your product — which will guide future development, improve the user experience, and inform your growth efforts.

Here’s an overview of Userpilot’s user analytics features:

  • Users dashboard: Userpilot’s users dashboard gives you an overview of all user data in one place. You’ll be able to filter by segments, which companies users are from, or when they were last seen active. You can also export data in bulk as a CSV or perform actions on individual users.
Userpilot’s users dashboard
Userpilot’s users dashboard
  • Audience insights: Much like the overview dashboard, the Insights section lets you filter metrics by segment, company, and time period. You’ll be able to choose between a daily, weekly, or monthly view and then compare data between the current and previous time periods.
Audience insights in Userpilot
Audience insights in Userpilot
  • Conditional segmentation: Practical use cases for user analytics include creating segments for all users that meet certain conditions. For instance, you could reach out to companies in a certain country when creating a new flow or target customers who have tried certain features.
Conditional segmentation for triggering in-app flows
Conditional segmentation for triggering in-app flows
  • Saved reports: The saved reports dashboard lets you view, edit, duplicate, or delete any trend and funnel reports you’ve created. You’ll also be able to sort by report type, filter by the teammate who created the report, or export in bulk if you need a CSV of your user analytics.
Analytics reports in Userpilot
Analytics reports in 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.

Transparent pricing plans on Userpilot
Transparent pricing plans on Userpilot

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, user feedback, and customization.
  • Growth: The Growth plan starts at $499/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).

Try Userpilot for Collecting and Analyzing User Behavior Data!

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  • 14 Day Trial
  • No Credit Card Required

Mixpanel

When it comes to in-app user analytics, Mixpanel is an analytics platform that offers great functionality in terms of tracking and collecting user data in real-time.

Conversion analysis in Mixpanel
Conversion analysis in Mixpanel

But if you’re a beginner in user analytics, Mixpanel can be quite a complex tool for you. Mixpanel requires users to define any event before capturing it. Although it excels in tracking and collating real-time user data, Mixpanel can be quite hard to implement compared to other traditional analytics tools.

Setting up reports is necessary to make the best use of the collected data. But this is quite a tricky and time-consuming process with Mixpanel.

Despite all its shortcomings, Mixpanel can be a great option for large companies with in-house data and analytics teams. These organizations usually have complex data analytics needs that feed on a vast collection of data that require a highly technical tool like Mixpanel to generate actionable insights.

Pricing

Mixpanel doesn’t come cheap. Although its Growth package is just $25 per month, you’re more likely to be disappointed with it. This is a tool that offers the most to enterprise users.

In general, Mixpanel’s pricing plan is divided into 3 plans; the starter plan, the enterprise plan, and the growth plan.

Here’s an overview of the pricing plans and features of each plan:

  • Starter plan: This plan features essentials to find product-market fit. It is free and allows up to 20M monthly events.
  • Growth plan: This plan costs $20+ per month for up to 100M monthly events. You get all features in the starter plan plus unlimited saved reports to monitor, update, and iterate on KPIs, Mixpanel modeling layer, and group analytics and data pipeline add-ons.
  • Enterprise plan: This plan empowers your team, especially if you have a large organization. It costs $833+ per month for up to 5M-100M+ monthly events.

Heap

Heap tracks all sorts of in-app user interactions and offers a comprehensive user analytics suite.

Heap’s dashboard
Heap’s dashboard

Unlike Mixpanel (which requires an extensive setup before tracking data), Heap starts tracking user activity from day one just through the installation of a code snippet.

Since Heap tracks everything, you won’t find event data in the analytics dashboard except for session and pageview.

To see specific details of other events, you have to use Event Visualizer, which is a point-and-click interface to label events. As you give it a name, you can see all the details relating to the event in Heap’s Explore event dashboard.

Event Visualizer in Heap
Event Visualizer in Heap

Moreover, you get user and account-level tracking and create custom events. You can use these custom events in funnels and cohorts. Besides, you can combine tracked data into your own custom “virtual events”.

Heap also enables analysis along multiple axes and behavioral segments. You can use its mobile app to stay updated on the go.

Heap’s segment criteria

Pricing

So, what’s the catch?

Heap doesn’t come cheap. Its free package is fairly restricted in usage terms, and the pricing of its paid plans starts from $3,600 per year. Nevertheless, it does offer a 14-day free trial for you to see if it works for your SaaS company.

Amplitude

Amplitude is another popular user analytics tool, which is more focused on user journey analytics. It also comes equipped with a wide range of two-way integrations with other platforms.

PathFinder in Amplitude

If you’re looking for an analytics solution to track single-user tracking across different products, Amplitude can be a good option for you.

Amplitude’s focus on data security is also worth mentioning. Its robust data governance and security features can be attractive to users given the increasing concern about data security in recent years.

However, similar to Mixpanel, Amplitude requires you to configure certain events before you start tracking them.

Pricing

One aspect where Amplitude stands out from the rest is its generous free plan, which allows you to track up to 10 million actions. This is a lot by any standards. Apart from this, Amplitude pricing for paid plans isn’t quite affordable and can get increasingly expensive at an alarming rate.

FullStory

FullStory is one of the best web analytics tools for session recordings, but it can also be quite handy as a user analytics tool because of its ability to track user interactions and create conversion funnels to analyze user behavior.

Define events to track user behavior in FullStory

By using a combination of session recordings, click map, and scroll map, you can see how users interact with your products. You can easily track and measure “rage clicks” – which lets you know when a user is venting their “rage” on their mouse.

Track and measure “rage clicks” using FullStory

Pricing

So… is there a catch?

Well, yes – this is not one of the free web analytics tools you are looking for! You can only get a price quote from FullStory upon request, which leads us to suspect that it might be rather high. Nevertheless, it offers a 14-day free trial, and its paid plans – Business and Enterprise – are negotiable.

Best web user analytics tools for SaaS

Analyzing user behavior on your web platform is a fundamental aspect of improving your SaaS product’s performance. So let’s go over some of the top web user analytics tools for your product.

Adobe Analytics

Adobe Analytics is one of the leading traditional web analytics tools that offers a deep understanding of user behavior patterns and data insights.

One of the key differentiators of Adobe Analytics is its ability to collect and analyze vast amounts of data accurately and reliably without the need for sampling.

It allows businesses to capture, aggregate, rationalize, and understand vast amounts of disparate data and translate that data into singular customer profiles.

With advanced segmentation tools, users can group and analyze specific data to gain deeper insights about their users.

Segmentation dashboard in Adobe analytics
Segmentation dashboard in Adobe analytics

This provides users with a more detailed and accurate view of their customers’ behavior, which can be used to identify trends, patterns, and problems.

However, the complex user interface can be overwhelming for first-time users, and it can be an expensive choice for most small and medium-sized businesses.

Pricing

Adobe Analytics can cost more than $100,000 a year, depending on how many hits you have.

Google Analytics

It is a free web analytics software for any SaaS business. But it isn’t just for web and user analytics; it’s also for user analytics. Businesses use Google Analytics to analyze user actions, website traffic, and product achievements.

Here are some ways SaaS companies can use Google Analytics for user analytics:

  • Event tracking: You’ll find a number of auto-collected events that are mainly for marketing analytics and conversion purposes. But if you need to track product events, you have to define events and set trigger conditions in Google Tag Manager – which is often a bit complex for non-tech users.
Auto-collected event list in Google Analytics
Auto-collected event list in Google Analytics
  • Product data import: The product data import feature is excellent for tracking user behavior and conversions. Users can import data into Google Analytics. This simplifies and reduces the amount of data you need to send by importing product data.
  • Customer Journey Report: With charts like funnels and paths, you can allow you to visualize and analyze the steps users take before completing a desired action.
Funnel analysis in Google Analytics 4
Funnel analysis in Google Analytics 4

The only best part about Google Analytics is that it’s a free web analytics tool, which offers enough functionality for small to medium-sized businesses.

Hotjar

Hotjar is another robust user and website analytics tool that comes with a brilliant heatmapping feature and can be a great option for implicit in-app feedback.

As one of the popular web analytics tools, it allows you to record the browser actions of your users while they are on your website. This includes clicks, scrolls, and mouse movements. Its session recording functionality can open a whole new world of insights into user activity.

You can identify areas of friction in your customer adoption journey, which you can promptly fix to reduce Time to Value and increase your retention rates. You can also improve user experience by finding out where your UX is broken or buggy.

Session recordings in Hotjar
Session recordings in Hotjar

Moreover, you can optimize your marketing funnels by figuring out where your users are bouncing. When you put all these insights together, you can effectively map out the entirety of your user life cycle, from the moment they come to your website to the moment they become a power user.

Besides, nothing is stopping you from revisiting your session recordings multiple times to deepen your level of analysis.

Hotjar offers you reliable qualitative data, which can work together with the quantitative data you get from its in-app surveys like NPS to offer you a unique look into user engagement with your website.

Pricing

Hotjar offers a range of plans under different categories (Hotjar Observe, Hotjar Ask, Hotjar Engage), as well as custom packages, providing flexibility for users to find a plan that suits their requirements. In general, Hotjar has 3 different plans as follows:

  • Plus starts at $39.00 per month.
  • Business starts at $99.00 per month.
  • Scale starts at $389.00 per month.

It also comes with a Free Forever Plan with limited features.

Conclusion

It might take a good amount of effort on your part to just pick the right set of user analytics tools to use. To summarize the process, you need to identify your business and product goals, set the criteria according to your needs, and pick the tools that meet these criteria.

Want to get started with User analytics? Get a Userpilot Demo and see how you can get actionable user analytics and insights for your SaaS product.

Try Userpilot for Collecting and Analyzing User Behavior Data!

GET A DEMO

  • 14 Day Trial
  • No Credit Card Required

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