Building digital products comes with many uncertainties: Will users like and use your solution? How do you gain popularity with so much competition around? Is your investment going to make you a profit in the long run? There's only one way to find out – product analytics tools.

According to Forrester Research experts, over 90% of enterprises agree that their business success relies on timely, accurate and complete data. They also highlight that applying this information is a critical competitive differentiator.

So, let's find out which product analytics platform can help you stay ahead.

Best product analytics tools: Selection criteria

Why are product analytics tools important? Simply put, they track user behavior on a website or application and, as such, are the most objective way to get customer feedback and complex data that allows you to:

• Optimize performance
• Find and solve problems
• Increase customer engagement by adding value to the experience
• Determine what features you should invest more in
• Reduce churn
• Increase customer satisfaction and ROI

Features

Here's what we considered when picking the best product analytics software tools:

• User interface – A user-friendly design allows your team to navigate the tool easily, minimizing onboarding time and frustration
• User behavior tracking – What type of actions each product tracks, how well it does so and what limitations you may encounter
• Data analytics and segmentation – Raw data is valuable but not necessarily functional; clear, actionable customer insights with data grouping and visual representations are what help you make profitable, data-driven decisions

Integrations

Most likely, your team is using some sort of product discovery, communication, productivity and workflow management platforms. Integrations allow seamless data consolidation and exchange between them.

They will also come in handy when you want to scale and automate your business processes.

Pricing

While comparing the costs of each user engagement analytics tool from our list, consider the value for money rather than the cost itself. Compare the software capabilities in terms of what your company will benefit from most.

Other things to watch out for are trial periods (free demos let you validate the effectiveness of each tool) and hidden costs (some providers charge extra for certain functionalities).

5 best product analytics tools to stay competitive

91% of 6,000 surveyed CMOs state that they can't stop innovating if they want to stay competitive in their niches. Finding out what your customers want with tools that observe user behavior and collect feedback about their satisfaction levels is the perfect way to keep evolving.

Let's see what tools can help you achieve this.

Zeda.io

Zeda.io is more than a product analytics platform. Our primary purpose is to help you discover, plan, build and improve products. You can use Zeda.io to collect customer feature requests and general product feedback but also define goals and plan detailed roadmaps to help you achieve them.

Paired with an advanced product analytics tool, Zeda.io will get you far ahead of the competition with outstanding solutions your clients will love. We do that by implementing advanced AI-powered data analysis and a comprehensive set of insights (such as your product's revenue impact).

Features

• Customer insights – The user feedback dashboard provides an organized view with categorization functionalities. Typically, product analytics platforms lack options to collect information directly from customers, but you can do it with Zeda.io.

• AI data analysis – Helps to identify market trends, user behavior and customer preferences, consequently finding new, data-driven growth opportunities. It also lets you connect similar information and automatically generate tags to group data.
• Friendly UI and UX – Zeda.io focuses on functionality and transparency within the workspace. It's easy to use and highly visual, with practically no learning curve.
• Impact analysis – You can use this tool to identify the most profitable product opportunities.
• Centralized customer information database – We've created one platform to capture, group, organize and prioritize insights, identify problems and discover product development opportunities.

Integrations

Save time with the many integration options Zeda.io has to offer:

• Slack
• Teams
• Intercom
• Email
• Zendesk
• Amplitude
• Mixpanel
• HubSpot
• Gong
• Jira

If you choose to connect Zeda.io with Zapier, there are over 5,000 more workflow and business apps integrations available.

Pricing

Zeda.io has a transparent, no-strings-attached pricing plan. The Pro option is $99/creator/month, with an unlimited number of collaborators. A yearly payment option is also available – $999/creator/year with two months for free.

For more advanced needs, we offer the Custom, enterprise-level option. It covers all the Pro features + dedicated priority support, onboarding and migration help. We establish its price individually.

Sign up for the Zeda.io free 15-day trial to see if it meets your expectations.

Amplitude

Amplitude is an analytics software for mobile apps and websites. Its primary purpose is to segment users and provide funnel analytics, retention and revenue statistics.

You can use it to collect more data than basic product analytics tools, which includes conversion and retention metrics, business KPIs, revenue reports and A/B testing of experiments and new releases.

Image source: Software Advice

Features

• Behavioral platform – Creates a 360-degree view of the customer journey
• Growth engine – Generates hypotheses data based on previous customer behavior patterns
• Product improvement suggestions – Setting product strategy, improving engagement, optimizing conversion
• Benchmarking new features – You can compare these to the old ones to see if and how your product is improving

Amplitude's main downside is that it requires a lot of technical know-how. Many customer reviews confirm that it's not particularly easy to use.

Integrations

• Zeda.io
• Amazon
• Android SDK
• Facebook Ads
• Google Analytics and Google Ads
• HubSpot
• Notion
• Salesforce
• Shopify and more

Pricing

Amplitude offers several different pricing models based on your organization's size and specific needs. A free Starter plan is available; however, the rest of the pricing models are only available after contacting the sales team.

Mixpanel

Most product analytics platforms work slightly differently than Mixpanel. This software measures the actions and steps taken by people entering the monitored application rather than analyzing by page views. These can be anything from streaming a video to uploading images.

Image source: TrustRadius

With Mixpanel, you can build retroactive funnels and analyze conversion rates. However, it only features very limited advanced analytics options. You can overcome this problem and still benefit from Mixpanel's event tracking by combining its free Starter plan with Zeda.io.

Features

• Interactive reports – Highlighting the popular features and power users
• Event data tracking – A unique functionality of this tool that can come in handy when predicting customer behavior and product usage
• Customizable dashboards – With different options to manage product analytics data

Despite this tool's functionalities, it's not particularly easy to implement, and its features can be overwhelming to navigate. One of the main challenges for new users is determining whether the correct attributes are being used for generating the report.

Integrations

• Google Cloud
• Optimizely
• Zoho
• Slack and more

Pricing

• Starter plan – Free for up to 20M monthly events
• Growth plan – From $20/month for up to 100M monthly events
• Enterprise plan – From $833/month for over 100M monthly events

Pendo

Pendo is a product management analytics software tailored for customer-centric businesses, e.g., healthcare, education or finance. The tool features targeted walkthroughs and guides for easy setup, smooth onboarding and implementation.

Image source: GetApp

Features

• Data analytics tools – For effective tracking of features and product usage across your web and mobile applications, all facilitating better roadmap planning
• Managing feature requests – The Pendo Feedback option allows capturing and prioritizing these user submissions from interviews, beta testing, reviews and customer success check-ins
• Custom user segments – You can use this feature for smart targeting
• Feedback collection – By implementing polls and surveys, you can combine quantitative and qualitative data, calculate NPS and clearly understand precisely where users encounter friction

On the con side, it has limited options for tracking different types of user behavior and tracking data customization.

Integrations

• HubSpot
• Jira
• Microsoft Teams
• Slack
• Salesforce
• Gainsight

Pricing

There is a Free plan available for up to 500 monthly users. You can expand it into the Starter program for businesses with less than 100 employees. Its price ranges from $7,000 to $40,000 yearly, depending on the number of monthly active users (2,000-10,000) and billing period (year or quarter).

This tool also offers two scalable plans: Growth (for a single website or app) and Portfolio (for an unlimited number of web and mobile apps). However, their prices are available upon request.

Heap

Heap is a product analytics tool that captures how users interact with a website. It tracks user events on web and mobile apps without the need for any technical configuration.

Image source: G2

Features

• Analysis of user interactions – Including an event visualizer, path analysis and conversion charts
• Ad-hoc analytics – Such as retention, conversion, funnel, cohort analysis etc.
• Reporting and dashboards – Insights on activation, retention, conversion, engagement and other key product management metrics
• Data engine – Data dictionary and governance tools for control and organization of information

Heap is easy to use and does not need complex website integration, making its implementation fast and practical. However, it has limited customizability for reports and dashboards.

Integrations

The most popular Heap integrations include Iterable, Shopify, Salesforce, HubSpot, Marketo and Intercom. The platform also offers an ecosystem of tools integrations for comfortable cross-platform data sharing.

Pricing

Heap offers four plans. The first one is free for up to 10,000 monthly sessions and one project. The rest (Growth, Pro, Premier) don't have specified pricing on the official website.

The best product analytics tools: A quick analysis

Zeda.io

• Advanced analytics tools
• AI data analysis
• Complex customer input collection
• Easy to use, with a transparent design
• Impact analysis tool
• Centralized database

Best for: Elevating your solution with advanced product discovery tools and implementing the collected data into your business strategy

Pricing: Free trial, then a transparent plan from $99/month

Amplitude

• User segmentation
• Funnel analytics tools
• Customer retention and revenue statistics
• Benchmarking features and measuring impact

Best for: Obtaining self-serve insights, particularly for large enterprises

Pricing: Free Starter, then N/A

Mixpanel

• Interactive reports
• Detailed user journey insights
• Event data tracking
• Customizable dashboards

Best for: Analyzing user behavior data

Pricing: Free for up to 20M events/month, then from $20/month

Pendo

• Easy setup with guides and walkthroughs
• Pendo Feedback for managing feature requests
• Custom user segments for smart targeting

Best for: Managing customer feature requests

Pricing: Free for up to 500 monthly users, then from $7,000/year

Heap

• Detailed analysis of user interactions
• Easy segmenting and reviewing of user interactions
• No technical configuration needed

Best for: Tracking individual user sessions

Pricing: Free for up to 10K sessions/month, then N/A

Conclusion

According to experts: “Research has a direct ROI impact at every level of the organization.”

The best product analytics tool should provide you with a combination of quantitative and qualitative data. Sometimes, you might want to see session replays; at other times, you need to zoom in on conversion rates.

If you want to understand the what, why and how, it's best to integrate a basic, free product analytics tool with more in-depth features of feedback collection and roadmapping Zeda.io has to offer. With multiple platforms working for your success, you'll be able to combine different types of user data and plan your product development strategy accordingly.

Sign up for a free trial here to test its powerful features.