4
12 Comments

Any plug-and-play SAAS reporting or user behaviour tracking tool?

I thought of building a basic one for our platform, but I figured out: "Hey, there must be something out there already built". I found heap.io, but find it a bit expensive for the moment. Any other tool out there? Have you built your own tracking system and willing to share your

  1. 1

    Depends on what you’re looking for but I’m building something in this space. Would be great to learn what you’ve looked at, what you’re looking for and provide some guidance on what competitor you’d be best suited for (my product isn’t anywhere near ready).

    1. 1

      @raleigh_user I'd be happy to know more about your project! Currently, I've looked at Heap, Mixpanel, Woopra and Metabase. I found Heap was a bit pricey and without a good free plan. I don't know exactly what we are looking for, so a permissive free plan is a must for me. I want to try Mixpanel and Metabase to see what they can offer me, especially Mixpanel since it looks like it will be a breeze for any marketer to use and to generate result with.

      1. 1

        So my project is not directly competitive with Mixpanel or Metabase. Why do you want analytics?

        1. 1

          Mostly, to understand what our user are doing on the platform. This will help for support, but mostly for marketing, user retention and platform enhancement. A plus would be to be able use this data to take concrete action on our user (send notification, modify plan, etc). We are building a B2B SaaS in our case!

          1. 1

            any interest in talking more in DM? email is [email protected] or twitter is kameronkales.com/twitter. Would be helpful for my product development & prob helpful for your search for a solution.

  2. 1

    Paid ones:
    – Mixpanel — my personal favorite. Has everything you need, gets pricey once you're over free quota.
    – Woopra — has a generous free quota and reach in functionality, but I never used it for production.
    – Tons of other options, like Databox, and gazillion others. See not very full list here: https://www.capterra.com/business-intelligence-software/.

    Free ones:

    – Metabase (https://www.metabase.com/) — something I desperately want to try, looks amazing.
    – Matomo (ex-Piwik) — free analytics system.
    (Both of the above will require self-hosting)
    – Google Analytics + Google Data Studio — Google Analytics won't allow personalized tracking, but you can do groupings by user_id and run some reports with Google Data Studio.

    Homegrown:
    You can write your own system and hook it up to some charting/Data Analysis solution, but I won't recommend it. While it will be quick to be up and running, but it will take a while to make sure everything is accurate and no data is lost. If you do decide to go this route — make sure that you have a table with all your source events, so you can always recount your metrics if you found a mistake. That was a life-saver for me when I did a homegrown tracking system for the first time.

    Good luck,
    Sergey

    1. 2

      +1 to Metabase. I wasn't part of setting it up, but we use it at my day job, and I swear by it. I use it quite often to build all kinds of data analytics. It's a fant​astic tool.

      We have it connected to a read-only replica, so we don't accidentally​ run destructive SQL against it.

      1. 1

        I've never got around to try it, but I love what they promise. Definitely setting it up for my next product.

    2. 1

      Thanks @sergey_shvets, exactly what I was looking for! I think it will be a battle between Metabase and Mixpanel, depending on how I want to use all this data. Mixpanel looks really powerful in term of taking action on the data. How fast did you hit that 5M data points mark on the free plan? After seeing this, definitely not coding anything myself, these tools look perfect for now :)

      1. 1

        I think you won't hit 5 million any time soon. This is a lot of data points. Especially if you selective in what you're tracking. 1k of free people plan is also generous. The problem, though, that they only give you 60 days of history so I might look into saving some key metrics into a spreadsheet or even automate it with their API.

        PS I still on the old structure plan where I pay for data points per month with no cap on history and I hit about 2.5-3M data points a month for about 8k active monthly users. I achieve this by actively updating my tracking and don't track events I don't need.

        1. 1

          Good stuff to know, thanks! I'll plan carefully the data points, so that we can reach 1k user without any trouble. As for the time limit, this is a good insight. Maybe I can save this data and visualise somewhere else through Metabase hehe 🤓 Thanks!

          1. 1

            You welcome! Feel free to reach out if you have questions. I'm tracking and data nerd and can talk about it forever)

Trending on Indie Hackers
How I grew a side project to 100k Unique Visitors in 7 days with 0 audience 48 comments Competing with Product Hunt: a month later 33 comments Why do you hate marketing? 28 comments $15k revenues in <4 months as a solopreneur 14 comments Use Your Product 13 comments How I Launched FrontendEase 13 comments