Alternatives to Google Analytics

Functionally, Amplitude and Mixpanel are incredibly similar. They both offer almost all the same functionality around tracking and visualizing user actions for analytics. You can track A/B test results in both. We ended up going with Amplitude at BaseDash because it has a more generous free tier for our uses (10 million actions per month, versus Mixpanel's 1000 monthly tracked users).

Segment isn't meant to compete with these tools, but instead acts as an API to send actions to them, and other analytics tools. If you're just sending event data to one of these tools, you probably don't need Segment. If you're using other analytics tools like Google Analytics and FullStory, Segment makes it easy to send events to all your tools at once.

Hi there, we are a seed-stage startup in the personal development space. I am looking at building the marketing stack tool to have an accurate view of the user experience from acquisition through to adoption and retention for our upcoming React Native Mobile app. We qualify for the startup program of Segment and Mixpanel, which seems like a good option to get rolling and scale for free to learn how our current 60K free members will interact in the new subscription-based platform. I was considering AppsFlyer for attribution, and I am now looking at an affordable yet scalable Mobile Marketing tool vs. building in-house. Braze looks great, so does Leanplum, but the price points are 30K to start, which we can't do. I looked at OneSignal, but it doesn't have user flow visualization. I am now looking into Urban Airship and Iterable. Any advice would be much appreciated!

Hi,

This is a question for best practice regarding Segment and Google Tag Manager. I would love to use Segment and GTM together when we need to implement a lot of additional tools, such as Amplitude, Appsfyler, or any other engagement tool since we can send event data without additional SDK implementation, etc.

So, my question is, if you use Segment and Google Tag Manager, how did you define what you will push through Segment and what will you push through Google Tag Manager? For example, when implementing a Facebook Pixel or any other 3rd party marketing tag?

From my point of view, implementing marketing pixels should stay in GTM because of the tag/trigger control.

If you are using Segment and GTM together, I would love to learn more about your best practice.

Thanks!

Functionally, Amplitude and Mixpanel are incredibly similar. They both offer almost all the same functionality around tracking and visualizing user actions for analytics. You can track A/B test results in both. We ended up going with Amplitude at BaseDash because it has a more generous free tier for our uses (10 million actions per month, versus Mixpanel's 1000 monthly tracked users).

Segment isn't meant to compete with these tools, but instead acts as an API to send actions to them, and other analytics tools. If you're just sending event data to one of these tools, you probably don't need Segment. If you're using other analytics tools like Google Analytics and FullStory, Segment makes it easy to send events to all your tools at once.

Adopting Amplitude was one of the best decisions we've made. We didn't try any of the alternatives- the free tier was really generous so it was easy to justify trying it out (via Segment). We've had Google Analytics since inception, but just for logged out traffic. We knew we'd need some sort of #FunnelAnalysisAnalytics solution, so it came down to just a few solutions.

We had heard good things about Amplitude from friends and even had a consultant/advisor who was an Amplitude pro from using it as his company, so he kinda convinced us to splurge on the Enterprise tier for the behavioral cohorts alone. Writing the queries they provide via a few clicks in their UI would take days/weeks to craft in SQL. The behavioral cohorts allow us to create a lot of useful retention charts.

Another really useful feature is kinda minor but kinda not. When you change a saved chart, a new URL gets generated and is visible in your browser (chartURL/edit) and that URL is immediately available to share with your team. It may sound inconsequential, but in practice, it makes it really easy to share and iterate on graphs. Only complaint is that you have to explicitly tag other team members as owners of whatever chart you're creating for them to be able to edit it and save it. I can see why this is the case, but more often than not, the people I'm sharing the chart with are the ones I want to edit it 🤷🏾‍♂️

The Engagement Matrix feature is also really helpful (once you filter out the noisy events). Charts and dashboards are also great and make it easy for us to focus on the important metrics. We've been using Amplitude in production for about 6 months now. There's a bunch of other features we don't use regularly like Pathfinder, etc that I personally don't fully understand yet but I'm sure we'll start using them eventually.

Again, haven't tried any of the alternatives like Heap, Mixpanel, or Kissmetrics so can't speak to those, but Amplitude works great for us.

#analytics analyticsstack

Hello, We are a medical technology company looking to integrate an in-app analytics tool. We've evaluated Mixpanel, Pendo, and Heap and are most impressed that Heap will solve our issues. We'd like to be able to determine not only clicks (con of Pendo) but also swipes and other user gestures within our app. Not sold on all three of these, can also look at other tools. We use Cordova, so hoping to find something compatible with that. Any advice?

Thanks

Our primary source of monitoring and alerting is Datadog. We’ve got prebuilt dashboards for every scenario and integration with PagerDuty to manage routing any alerts. We’ve definitely scaled past the point where managing dashboards is easy, but we haven’t had time to invest in using features like Anomaly Detection. We’ve started using Honeycomb for some targeted debugging of complex production issues and we are liking what we’ve seen. We capture any unhandled exceptions with Rollbar and, if we realize one will keep happening, we quickly convert the metrics to point back to Datadog, to keep Rollbar as clean as possible.

We use Segment to consolidate all of our trackers, the most important of which goes to Amplitude to analyze user patterns. However, if we need a more consolidated view, we push all of our data to our own data warehouse running PostgreSQL; this is available for analytics and dashboard creation through Looker.

Functionally, Amplitude and Mixpanel are incredibly similar. They both offer almost all the same functionality around tracking and visualizing user actions for analytics. You can track A/B test results in both. We ended up going with Amplitude at BaseDash because it has a more generous free tier for our uses (10 million actions per month, versus Mixpanel's 1000 monthly tracked users).

Segment isn't meant to compete with these tools, but instead acts as an API to send actions to them, and other analytics tools. If you're just sending event data to one of these tools, you probably don't need Segment. If you're using other analytics tools like Google Analytics and FullStory, Segment makes it easy to send events to all your tools at once.

Looking for the best analytics software for a medium-large-sized firm. We currently use a Microsoft SQL Server database that is analyzed in Tableau desktop/published to Tableau online for users to access dashboards. Is it worth the cost savings/time to switch over to using SSRS or Power BI? Does anyone have experience migrating from Tableau to SSRS /or Power BI? Our other option is to consider using Tableau on-premises instead of online. Using custom SQL with over 3 million rows really decreases performances and results in processing times that greatly exceed our typical experience. Thanks.

Hello, We are a medical technology company looking to integrate an in-app analytics tool. We've evaluated Mixpanel, Pendo, and Heap and are most impressed that Heap will solve our issues. We'd like to be able to determine not only clicks (con of Pendo) but also swipes and other user gestures within our app. Not sold on all three of these, can also look at other tools. We use Cordova, so hoping to find something compatible with that. Any advice?

Thanks

Can either of these (Pendo, and Amplitude) also function as a data warehouse for data we want to retain? How well can they accept data from other systems? I know they focused on session behavior. I would like to hear if anyone took their implementation further than session behavior?