Online presence is necessary in today's business environment. Everyone's dying for user attention, and the competition is absolutely fierce. A mediocre online presence does not cut it anymore.
Failing to live up to today's standards means losing out on many customers, and that's every product's nightmare. This is why companies rely heavily on product analytics to ensure they provide the best possible experience for their users.
FullStory allows you to observe how users engage with it and interact with your product. All you have to do is record and playback user sessions to check how they use your app.
FullStory comes with its drawbacks as well. In this article, we’ll look at FullStory and propose an alternative that might suit your needs better.
- FullStory
- FullStory Reviews
- Simple Analytics: A better choice
- Feature comparison between FullStory and Simple Analytics
- Conclusion
- FAQs: A Better Alternative to FullStory
FullStory
FullStory has several robust user analytics and activity tracking capabilities, such as metrics like sessions, basic event tracking, and custom event tracking. It also offers real-time reporting, segmentation, and administration tools for performance, reliability, user, role, and access management.
It has proven to help gather detailed user session data and evaluate user activity on a web product. The tool has a good support team. However, it can become slow and lags a lot at times.
Pros of FullStory
- Comprehensive user session data collection
- Responsive and helpful customer support
- Offers session replay functionality
- It can integrate with various third-party tools and platforms
Cons of FullStory
- Limited data retention policy; you’ll have to pay extra to store for a longer period
- Expensive plans
FullStory Reviews
"Get an in-depth understanding of your customers' experience"
What do you like best about FullStory?
Full Story is well-designed and easy to use and onboard new teammates. You can get insights about how customers interact with your website quickly and easily so you can make informed decisions about what needs improving.
What do you dislike about FullStory?
Due to the high subscription prices, we're forced to pick and choose which sections we want to track and when to turn Full Story on or off. This limits the value that we get from FullStory as it has so much more potential.
What problems is FullStory solving and how is that benefiting you?
The problem that Full Story is solving for us is the ability to get an in-depth perspective of how customers interact with the user interface of our product, which helps us see things from the customers perspective when making decisions about what needs improving.
*Milos D. Enterprise*
Source: G2
"Outstanding product with a high price"
What do you like best about FullStory?
Fullstory is one of the most innovative session replay tools in the market. Their product analytics, debugging tools, session metrics and search function are among the best in the market. Further, their integration with Intercom and related support tools is powerful and robust.
What do you dislike about FullStory?
The pricing and packaging. FullStory not only charges more than leading competitors, but it also charges a lot more for premium features like conversions, journeys and detections. Plus, beware of their contract renewal terms; it can be confusing.
What problems is FullStory solving and how is that benefiting you?
The main reasons for using Fullstory are
1. Support tooling for session replay, live troubleshooting
2. Product analytics to understand key metrics over time and track feature success
3. Product discovery with heatmaps and funnels to understand user behavior and innovate new products
*Nathan W. Mid-Market*
Source: G2
Simple Analytics: A better choice
Simple Analytics is an easy-to-use analytics tool that gives you the insights you need while being 100% GDPR-compliant.
It was founded by Adriaan van Rossum shortly after the GDPR was approved. Since its inception, Simple Analytics has had customers of all sizes, notable ones being: Michelin, Havas Media, Nomadlist, and the UK Government.
Though Simple Analytics might sound like a simple minimal analytics tool, it does pack some powerful features that many marketers love, such as automated event collection, goal tracking, e-commerce analytics, bypassing ad blockers (as it’s privacy-friendly), and much more.
Let's explore a few reasons why it's become a preferred choice for businesses seeking reliable and affordable analytics tools.
Pros of using Simple Analytics
- Simple UI: Most product analytics tools like FullStory come with a complex UI which takes time to understand if you’re not a regular user. On the other hand, Simple Analytics focuses on a clean and easy-to-understand UI that even non-marketers can easily understand.
- Affordable: Tracking website and product metrics is pretty affordable with Simple Analytics. For just $9/month, you can track 100,000 data points (pageviews + events). Additionally, you get features that you would find in much more expensive tools.
- Privacy First: The world is moving in a direction where privacy is becoming increasingly important. Google Analytics has been declared illegal in multiple EU countries. You would rather avoid getting caught up in this mess. Take privacy or compliance with regulations into account.
- Mini Websites: Have you ever seen “t.co” as a referrer in your web analytics? If you have, you must have broken your head trying to find the source. Simple Analytics helps you find the exact tweet that referred/mentioned to your website.
- Lightweight: Your website is your storefront on the internet. Providing the best possible experience matters. Installing an analytics script has an impact on page speed. Choose an analytics tool that won’t slow your website down. Even Google recommends having a website that loads quickly.
- Integration: Installing and integrating Simple Analytics is also super easy. It has 20+ integrations to select from, so you can get it added quickly.
Cons of using Simple Analytics
Due to privacy laws, Simple Analytics doesn’t store IPs and user identifiers, which makes it lack a couple of metrics, such as bounce rate, but it does have time on page to give you an idea of user stickiness.
Pricing of Simple Analytics
Simple Analytics offers one of the most affordable pricing structures in its segment. The plans start at just $9/month, which lets you track 100,000 data points.
If you need more features, such as team access, the pricing goes up to $49/month, increasing the data points limit from 100,000 to 1,000,000.
Feature comparison between FullStory and Simple Analytics
| Simple Analytics | Fullstory | |
|---|---|---|
| Account Management | ||
| Trackable Items | Unlimited | 1 (Unlimited in Enterprise plan) |
| User Seats | 1 to Unlimited users | 3 users to Unlimited users |
| User Roles | Available | Available |
| Account Security | Passwordless Login | Two-Factor Authentication, Single Sign-on |
| Data Processing | ||
| Data Retention | Unlimited | Starts with 1 year |
| Data Center Locations | European Economic Area (EEA) | European Economic Area (EEA), United States |
| Data Import | GA importer included | JavaScript, CRM, API |
| Data Ownership | You | You |
| Software Hosting | Public Cloud | Public Cloud |
| Compliance | GDPR, PECR, CCPA | GDPR, CCPA, Privacy Shield and EU-U.S. and Swiss-U.S. Privacy Shield |
| Data Freshness | Realtime | Realtime |
| Data Export | As CSV or via API | As CSV or JSON |
| Cookieless | Simple Analytics is cookieless | Fullstory relies on First-party cookies |
| Reporting | ||
| Funnel Reporting | Available | Available |
| Device Reporting | Available (based on OS and screen sizes) | Available |
| Segmentation | Available | Available |
| Trend Reporting | Available | Available |
| Alerts & Automation | ||
| Integrations | 20+ Available and can send a request to the Simple Analytics team for more | 40+ Available |
| Email Reports | Weekly, monthly | Daily, weekly, monthly |
| Customizability | ||
| Annotations | Available | Available |
| Custom Events | Available | Available |
Conclusion
After studying FullStory's advantages and disadvantages, it clearly gives companies strong product analytics skills. However, not every firm can afford the high costs and complicated setup. Simple Analytics is the superior option if you're looking for a seamless analytics solution.
The pricing of the FullStory paid plan compared to Simple Analytics is very high, plus the dashboard is a complex screen that takes a ton of time and patience to understand.
Simple Analytics provides the insights you need while being 100% GDPR compliant. They believe the internet should be an independent place that is friendly to website visitors. If this resonates with you, feel free to give it a try!
FAQs: A Better Alternative to FullStory
What services does FullStory software provide?
FullStory is a digital intelligence system that can help you better understand and serve your customers. With FullStory, you can track and monitor your clients' activities, from clicks to page transitions. This indexing of customer activity provides insights and allows you to make data-driven decisions to improve your website or application.
Where does FullStory save my data?
FullStory processes and stores your data using the robust infrastructure the Google Cloud Platform offers. FullStory's production data is securely stored in Google's data centers in the United States and the European Union. This assures the highest levels of security and dependability for your vital data.
Is there anything I can't do using the FullStory API?
Yes, FullStory has a payload size limit for each Client API call. The maximum allowable payload size is 512KB. It will be refused if you attempt to submit a payload that exceeds this limit. Remembering this while using the FullStory API for integration is critical.
How does Simple Analytics stack up against FullStory?
Simple Analytics provides an appealing alternative to FullStory with its user-friendly UI and privacy-focused approach. Simple Analytics, unlike FullStory, stresses privacy and gives significant insights without compromising user data. Furthermore, Simple Analytics secures data on its servers worldwide, ensuring consumer data protection and privacy.