Keen vs Snowplow: What are the differences?

What is Keen? Keen is the embedded analytics API that makes shipping custom user-facing analytics easy and seamless. Keen is a set of powerful APIs that allow you to collect, analyze, and visualize events from anything connected to the internet. Send all your data – any event, from any source, all the time, any time. Keen IO was specifically built to capture and store event data — those constant little interactions that happen all day, every day, in your apps. Event data can be anything, and Keen IO gives you the ability to grab as much of it as you want, then store it forever on our cloud database.

What is Snowplow? Enterprise-strength web, mobile, and event analytics, powered by Hadoop, Kinesis, Redshift and Elasticsearch. Every single event, from your website(s), mobile app(s), desktop applications and server-side systems, stored in your own data warehouse and available to action in real-time.

Keen and Snowplow belong to "Custom Analytics" category of the tech stack.

Some of the features offered by Keen are:

• You can track any kind of interaction that is happening in your website, mobile app, or backend. Simply insert some code to start sending a particular event to Keen IO whenever it happens. For example, if you want to track button taps, you put some code in your app to send an event to Keen IO whenever someone clicks that button.
• Run counts, sums, funnels, averages, segmentation and much more, using simple queries
• Draw and chart your data and display it in a custom dashboard, an analytics tab in your app, or white labeled for your customers

On the other hand, Snowplow provides the following key features:

• Record events from your website, mobile app, server side systems, third party systems and any type of connected device , so that you have a record of what happened, when, and to whom
• Processes that data including validating, enriching and modeling it
• Load that data into your own datawarehouse to power sophisticted analytics

"Very powerful API" is the primary reason why developers consider Keen over the competitors, whereas "Can track any type of digital event" was stated as the key factor in picking Snowplow.

Snowplow is an open source tool with 4.82K GitHub stars and 1K GitHub forks. Here's a link to Snowplow's open source repository on GitHub.

StackShare, ebay, and Heroku are some of the popular companies that use Keen, whereas Snowplow is used by Tilt, StumbleUpon, and Opower. Keen has a broader approval, being mentioned in 106 company stacks & 14 developers stacks; compared to Snowplow, which is listed in 23 company stacks and 7 developer stacks.