Product analytics involves collecting and analyzing user data to understand how they engage with a product. This enables businesses to track, visualize, and analyze user behavior to make informed decisions.
These insights help make data-driven product decisions, such as introducing new features or making UI modifications to enhance the user experience.
Heap Analytics is a popular analytics tool, but it has its drawbacks. In this article, we'll dive into Heap Analytics and showcase a few alternatives that might suit you better.
- What is Heap Analytics?
- Heap Analytics Pricing
- Heap Analytics Reviews
- Alternatives to Heap Analytics
- What to look for in an analytics tool
- Final Thoughts
What is Heap Analytics?
Heap is a product analytics tool with features like session replay, heatmap, and user journey. Its primary role is to be the single source of truth for all product-related metrics.
Anyone using Heap can customize it as per their requirements, as it allows users to create custom dashboards and charts. Heap is widely used in the industry for funnel optimization and to improve product adoption.
Heap Analytics Pricing
Heap is an enterprise-grade software tool with three paid plans, Growth, Pro, and Premier. The pricing isn’t publicly available on their website. However, some review sites say it starts at $3,600/year for 300K sessions/year (25K sessions/month).
Do note that the starting pricing doesn't contain all the features that Heap offers; you’d have to upgrade to a higher plan.
Heap Analytics Reviews
What do you like best about Heap?
I like the sheer * amount * of information I can access with Heap. I can parse out a lot of data and gain a ton of insight by using this tool. I also enjoy the dashboards, and that I can create my own for the charts and funnels that are relevant to my work.
What do you dislike about Heap?
Two things come to mind: first, I don't find it overly intuitive to use. As someone who works primarily in social media and copywriting, running data analyses isn't my #1 skill, but it's still a necessary part of my job; so some of the more technical aspects of the tool make it seem unnecessarily complicated (and a lot of times, I feel like I need to confirm my queries with people who are more well-versed in the tool). Second, I've been hamstringed by queries simply... not loading the data I need it to. I've reached out to CX about this and their response has been that there's simply too much data for the query to run successfully, which is unacceptable.
What problems is Heap solving and how is that benefiting you?
Heap helps me determine how much traffic our social media posts are driving to our marketplace, and therefore how much of an impact our work is having on GMV. I can also analyze a specific post through our UTM links.
Alternatives to Heap Analytics
Heap Analytics provides businesses with the insights they need to improve their products. However, it has its limitations. For companies exploring alternatives, there are several options available.
One of the critical limitations of Heap Analytics is its pricing structure. As mentioned earlier, their pricing is based on the number of monthly sessions. This can become quite expensive for businesses with high levels of traffic.
Lets check out some alternatives!
Simple Analytics
Simple Analytics is a robust and user-friendly product analytics alternative to Snowplow. It is a straightforward and affordable analytics tool that prioritizes user privacy, but still has most features in place.
Pros of using Simple Analytics
- Simplified UI - Simple Analytics offers a straightforward user interface that makes analysis easier. It's 10x easier to work with than GA4. Checkout the public dashboard to see what that looks like.
- Affordable Pricing - Simple Analytics starts at a reasonable price.
- No cookie banner - Simple Analytics gives you the insights you need without using cookies or trackers. Hence, no need for an annoying cookiebanner on your website.
- Chat with your analytics - Simple Analytics AI is the latest features that lets you chat with your analytics and get insights directly.
Cons of using Simple Analytics
The user interface of Simple Analytics is made to look simple and easy to understand so everyone, be it the founder or marketing teams, can use it easily. A Product Manager may need a few more screens, but that is something that can be quickly built with goals.
Pricing of Simple Analytics:
Simple Analytics is one of the most cost-efficient tools available in its segment. The product is perfect for businesses. It caters to companies and has plans for individuals and businesses. Therefore it ensures that the best features are available at a very reasonable price.
The pricing of Simple Analytics starts at a low $9/month, making it a pocket-friendly tool for all businesses.
Pendo
Pendo is a product analytics tool that enables product managers to proactively engage with customers and understand how their product is being used. Also, yes, tools like Pendo are better to be used by a PM and not the best choice for solopreneurs or small teams.
It also has many features that help you provide personalized user onboarding and in-app training, which is an added feature of Pendo. Furthermore, these features are available on mobile too
Pros
- Provides additional features such as an onboarding tool for SaaS
- Provides detailed product analytics
Cons
- Too many features make the UI cluttered
- Expensive tool
Pricing
Pendo is a software targeted towards enterprises, which also shows up in its pricing. You’ll have to pay $7000/year for up to 2000 monthly active users.
It’s indeed pricey and certainly not recommended if you are just starting. Better to stick to something affordable and simple.
Kissmetrics
Kissmetrics is a product analytics tool that primarily focuses on even analytics. The provided solutions mainly target the analysis of customer behavior. It also focuses on providing data discovery and visualization support on its platform and also tracks keywords. In addition, Kissmetrics is also used for funnel analysis and goal tracking.
Pros
- Advanced tracking and segmentation capabilities
- Offers powerful automation and engagement tools
- Provides customer journey mapping and funnel analysis
- Easy to integrate with other platforms and tools
Cons
- It can be expensive for small businesses
- The steep learning curve for new users
- Limited reporting capabilities
Pricing
Kissmetrics offers three pricing plans: a Silver plan that starts at $299/month, a Gold plan that starts at $499/month, and a custom Platinum plan. Unfortunately, the price of the enterprise plan is private.
Smartlook
Smartlook is a product analytics platform that allows businesses to track user behavior and interactions on their websites and mobile applications. As a result, it provides insights that help companies to improve user experiences and conversion rates.
Also, Smartlook is in the process of being acquired by Cisco, which might bring lots of product changes soon.
Pros
- Affordable pricing
- Provides additional features such as crash reports
Cons
- Pricing can be expensive for high-traffic sites
- Uncertain future as it’s in the process of being acquired
Pricing
Smartlook offers three pricing plans: a free plan with limited features, a pro plan that starts at $55/month, and an enterprise plan with private pricing.
Recently Cisco has shown intent to acquire Smartlook, which may affect their product pricing as Cisco might want to make it a more enterprise-focused tool.
Woopra
Woopra is a customer analytics tool designed to track user journeys from start to end. The data provided by Woopra can be used to understand user journeys, analyze trends and improve user retention. It also comes with additional automation to help engage users in real time.
Pros
- Generous free plan
- Supports multiple single-click integrations
Cons
- Poor data retention policy
- Unclear GDPR compliance
Pricing
Woopra offers many plans with varying prices. It has a generous free plan, but if you move to the paid options, most will feel expensive. It starts with the pro plan for $999/month for 5 million actions in the Pro plan. The Enterprise plan goes beyond that, but its pricing is undisclosed.
You can contact the Woopra team and get a quote with pricing depending on the actions tracked per month. For companies requiring even more actions, tailored options are available.
PostHog
PostHog provides businesses with product analytics that assists in obtaining insights into their user behaviour. It is a GDPR-compliant platform that empowers entities to monitor user interactions and scrutinize data instantly.
Using it, companies can establish personal events to track explicit actions on their website or app, like button clicks or page views. PostHog also integrates with well-known tools like Slack, Segment, and Zapier.
Pros
- Affordable paid plan and generous free plan
- Open-source
- GDPR-compliant
Cons
- Customer support isn’t available for every plan
- Too complex for many
Pricing of Posthog
PostHog offers a paid plan starting at $0.0003068/event and $0.005/recording. There are also custom plans available for larger companies. It’s relatively affordable; however, if you want to have support, you’ll need to upgrade.
Mixpanel
Mixpanel is one of the most popular product analytics tools out there and is used by companies like Netflix and CNN. The founders of Mixpanel believed that metrics like registered users, page views, and app downloads were just vanity metrics and could have been easily inflated. Mixpanel was built to solve this by providing absolute product clarity with their metrics.
It offers many ways to customize for the unique needs of businesses from different industries. With its customizable dashboard, Mixpanel allows its users a lot of room to keep track of their numbers.
Pros
- Provides in-depth product analytics
- Custom dashboards and charts can be created
Cons
- Using it is hard without dedicated product knowledge
- Expensive for most businesses if all features need to be unlocked
Pricing
Mixpanel offers a variety of pricing plans to suit different business needs, with options for startups, small businesses, and enterprises. Prices start at $20/month for the Growth plan, which includes unlimited reports and data pipeline add-ons. The Enterprise plan starts at a heavy $833/ month and includes advanced machine learning and predictive analytics features.
Snowplow
Snowplow is an open-source event analytics tool that collects and analyzes behavioral data and passes the same to business information tools, machine learning models, or for advanced data analytics.
It’s a complex tool specially built for large organizations to make data-driven product decisions at scale.
Pros
- Provides accurate data to make decisions.
- Solves the problem of understanding users at scale.
Cons
- Complex, and most users don’t have the resources to implement it
- Requires to be connected to other tools for a complete analytics
- Expensive tool
Pricing
Snowplow is an open-source tool, meaning you can self-host some parts, but their core behavioral data platform pricing starts at $800/month. This pricing might suit large-sized organizations but is unsuitable for most businesses.
What to look for in an analytics tool
Selecting a tool for your analytics is a crucial decision. Be sure to go through this checklist before making a choice. You're good to go if the tool provides these:
Ease of Use: You shouldn’t spend your time on a complex web analytics tool that takes time and experience to get familiar with.
Accuracy: Getting an accurate picture of what’s happening on your website is important.
Straightforward UI: Most of the time, you don’t need 75 custom dashboards (looking at you, Google).
Lightweight: Installing an analytics script has an impact on your page speed. Choose an analytics tool that doesn’t slow your website down.
Privacy: The world is moving in a direction where privacy is becoming increasingly important.
Integration: Your analytics should be able to integrate with other tools.
Pricing: Consider the tool's pricing and ensure it aligns with your budget.
Although this checklist can assist you in getting started, there may be other factors for your organization that you need to consider.
Final Thoughts
If you want a tool that checks these boxes, then check out Simple Analytics. It provides the insights you need in a straightforward dashboard while being 100% GDPR compliant.
Want to see what that looks like? Check our public dashboard here
We believe the internet should be an independent place that is friendly to website visitors. By opting for Simple Analytics, you’ll be supporting us in our mission and protecting the privacy of your website visitors. If this resonates with you, feel free to give us a try.