Tools Shortlist
Here’s the list of the best free product analytics platforms that I’ll cover in this article.
If they are to succeed in the market, software developers need to ensure that their products are continuously improving. Every product needs a roadmap which defines which new features and functions will be added.
But how can developers know which features to prioritize? What if existing features have missed the mark and are frustrating users more than helping them? That’s where product analytics tools come in. These Saas products provide insights into how customers interact with software tools.
They highlight problem areas that may need attention and give invaluable user feedback regarding what users want and expect. Guided by this information, software developers can then ensure that their product stays on track and delivers maximum customer satisfaction.
In this article, I’ll review the top free product analytics tools available today. I’ll show you what each one does best and help you make the right selection for your business.
Comparison Criteria
For these free tools, pricing is not an issue. So what do I look for when I select the best free product analytics apps? Here’s a summary of my evaluation criteria:
- User Interface (UI): I look for an interface that surfaces the most important information to help developers prioritize their actions
- Usability: I’m seeking free product analytics tools that are intuitive and easy to use, offering a positive customer experience
- Integrations: I look for integrations with the software that developers regularly use on a day-to-day basis
Free Product Analytics Tools: Key Features
These are the features I look for when evaluating free product analytics tools:
- Detailed user segmentation: the ability to get granular when analyzing user groups for detailed behavior data
- Automatic data capturing: effortless gathering of information to aid the evaluation process
- Detailed session segmentation: options for drilling down into sessions to get the detail needed
- Custom segments and reports: the ability to tailor reporting in the way that makes most sense for the application
- Key KPI dashboards: overviews of key performance indicator data in a format that’s easy to make sense of
- Ability to add and analyze events: ways to customize events to suit the needs of a particular use case
- Data funnels: the ability to follow a group of users as they work through the app
- Date-based data filtering: options for breaking down the data according to the time of each session
- Dashboard customization: options for tailoring overviews to suit specific requirements
- User journey drill-down: a means of drilling down into individual user journeys to analyze problems and frustrations
Overviews Of The 10 Best Free Product Analytics Tools
Here’s a brief description of each free product management solution to showcase each tool’s best use case, some noteworthy features, and screenshots to give a snapshot of the user interface.
Google Analytics
Best for a universally-popular choice
Google Analytics is the de facto web analytics tool for good reason. As well as being a free solution, this platform has the backing of the Google brand and a long history of continuous improvement.You can use this tool to gain real-time insights into activity on both websites and mobile apps.
Flexible and easy to use, it uses state-of-the-art conversion attribution and A/B testing tools to help people build better user experiences. Google Analytics helps organizations determine their top sources of traffic, measure the success of social media campaigns, and track goal completions.
Key features include data analysis, visualization, monitoring, and reporting. This tool integrates with a wide variety of applications, including WordPress, Shopify, ZenDesk, and HootSuite.
Google Analytics is free for most users.
Mixpanel
Best for interactive reporting
Mixpanel is a self-serve product analytics tool that helps you engage, convert and retain more users. Features include analytics reports that allow you to query and visualize data in seconds. Using this data, you can determine how the product is used, who your power users are, and who stays onsite the longest. You can also build retroactive funnels and analyze conversion rates on the fly. It’s easy to build funnels that show top user flows and segment people into cohorts.
Mixpanel also reads directly from any data lake, without the need to install SDKs or build customized data import processes.
Mixpanel integrates with data platforms such as Snowflake, BigQuery, and Redshift. The free Mixpanel plan supports up to 100,000 monthly tracked users. Paid plans cost from $20/month/account.
Hotjar
Best for heatmaps of user activity
Hotjar is a cloud-based platform that helps businesses track and analyze visitors’ click, scrolling, or tap actions. Heatmaps give a clear visual picture of how people interact with the website. Analysts can view users’ sessions anonymously and surface usability or navigation issues that may need improvement.They can also add tags to recordings, replay sessions, add notes, and share recordings with colleagues.
It’s also possible to set up custom user behavior triggers while creating surveys. Visitors can leave visual feedback so that sentiment across pages can be measured.
This tool integrates with popular third-party applications such as Slack, HubSpot, WooCommerce, Wix, and Joomla.
Hotjar’s free plan allows for up to 35 daily sessions and 1050 recordings per month.
SimilarWeb
Best for digital research
SimilarWeb is a cloud-based website traffic analysis platform. Features include data export, performance metrics, custom dashboards, and conversion analysis.The software helps businesses optimize their budget, discover new keywords, and identify referral opportunities.
Retailers can monitor shoppers’ buying and browsing patterns, track category performance, and create retail search strategies.Marketing teams benefit from the ability to view demographics, analyze customer behavior and discover new opportunities.
This tool integrates with platforms such as Salesforce through an API.A free plan is available for a single user only.
Pendo
Best for product-led organizations
Pendo is a product analytics tool that helps businesses improve user onboarding, customer retention, and product roadmap planning. It tracks product usage across both web and mobile applications. You can distribute surveys and polls to generate both quantitative and qualitative insights into customer sentiment.
Using the product roadmap module, you can also visualize product strategy and create plans based on features, timeline, and segment. You can also capture, manage and prioritize feature requests from customers. This data can then be used to improve products, facilitate customer success and generate additional revenue.
This tool integrates with popular business platforms such as Jira, Microsoft Teams, Slack, Salesforce, and Tableau.
Pendo is free for websites or apps with up to 1000 monthly active users.
Heap
Best for surfacing hidden opportunities
Heap is a digital insights platform that brings together a complete trustworthy dataset. It uses automation to capture every data point in the user journey, integrating data science to surface hidden friction in the user experience and reduce churn.
Using Heap, you can eliminate problems and bottlenecks to build better digital experiences. You get visibility into the complete user journey with no gaps in the real-time data.
Heap can be implemented with a single snippet of code. This tool integrates with major business and ecommerce tools such as Salesforce, HubSpot, Amazon S3, and Shopify. Heap is free for up to 10,000 sessions a month.
Amplitude
Best for analyzing customer journeys
Amplitude is a popular product analytics suite that tracks website visitors using collaborative analytics. The software uses custom behavior reports and notifications to offer a better understanding of how visitors interact, as well as provide actionable insights to accelerate product development.
Key features include analysis of the customer product experience, a growth engine for product iteration, and SQL access for custom queries. Users get a 360-degree view of the customer’s journey.
Amplitude also offers the ability to set product strategies, improve customer engagement and optimize conversions. It can also be used to benchmark new features against old ones.
This tool integrates with business applications such as Google Play, iTunes, Adjust, and Iterable.
The Amplitude free plan supports up to 10 million actions per month.
Creabl
Best for tracking customer retention
Creabl is a customer experience software that helps businesses track user behavior, understand their audience base, and improve product adoption. The software offers session recording, heatmaps, and user segmentation and cohort analysis to help users dig deeper into their data and uncover insights.
Tracking user data and behavior starts with website users. Teams can watch session recordings to understand how people navigate their site and purchase their product or service. The software also collects data on who these visitors are, providing teams with audience insights. Custom sales funnels can be built in the software, helping to move users through the sales funnel and further understand the customer journey.
Once leads have converted, the software can be used to track their progress through onboarding and feature utilization. The system's retention tracking module helps teams analyze what factors are making or breaking the customer experience. Finally, the software can be used to create a self-serve help center and other customer support content, such as email campaigns.
A 30-day free trial is available, and paid plans start from $36 per month when paid annually.
Open Web Analytics
Best for open-source data analytics
Open Web Analytics is a free, open-source web analytics framework. Using this tool, you can monitor analytics via the dashboard or see heatmaps of where users click. You can also view the details of usage on any web page, examine pageviews or examine the clickstream of anonymized users sessions.
The software also allows you to track an unlimited number of custom site actions, as well as tracking which search terms are referring visitors and producing rankings. You can track clicks on all elements on web pages and analyze visitor frequency.
You can also customize the workflow and web analytics framework to suit your business needs.
This tool integrates with major web platforms such as WordPress. Open Web Analytics can be used free with no restrictions.
Matomo
Best for enhanced search engine optimization (SEO)
Matomo (formerly Piwik) is a web analytics platform that is committed to complete customer privacy. It’s also fully compliant with GDPR, HIPAA, CCPA, and PECR. This tool includes a built-in tag manager, so you can track and monitor performance across various marketing campaigns.
Features include custom data retention, SAML, and LDAP authentication, activity logs, media analytics, and customizable reports. Matomo offers white-label capabilities. Users can personalize the interface using their own themes, logos, colors, and fonts.
This tool integrates with business apps such as WordPress, Magento, PrestaShop, and Drupal.Matomo is free when hosted on your own servers.
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The 10 Best Free Product Analytics Tools Summary
Tool | Free Option | Price | ||
---|---|---|---|---|
1 | Google Analytics Best for a universally-popular choice | Not available | Free to use | Visit Website |
2 | Mixpanel Best for interactive reporting | Freemium plan available | From $20/month | Visit Website |
3 | Hotjar Best for heatmaps of user activity | 15-day free trial | From $39/user/month | Visit Website |
4 | SimilarWeb Best for digital research | Free Plan | Visit Website | |
5 | Pendo Best for product-led organizations | Free trial + free plan available | From $7,000/year (up to 2,000 users/month) | Visit Website |
6 | Heap Best for surfacing hidden opportunities | 14-day free trial + free demo | Pricing upon request | Visit Website |
7 | Amplitude Best for analyzing customer journeys | Free version | Pricing upon request | Visit Website |
8 | Creabl Best for tracking customer retention | Creabl offers a 30-day free trial upon sign-up. | When paid annually, Creabl’s Pro plan starts at $36 per month. | Visit Website |
9 | Open Web Analytics Best for open-source data analytics | Free Use | Visit Website | |
10 | Matomo Best for enhanced search engine optimization (SEO) | 21-day free trial available | Plans start at $21/month | Visit Website |
Other Options
Here are a few more that didn’t make the top list.
- Smartlook - Best for qualitative insight widgets
- Indicative - Connects directly to your data warehouse
- Totango - Runs customer journeys at scale
- Woopra - Best for syncing existing data
- Countly - Industrial grade analytics and marketing
Related Read: ALM Software For Managing Digital Product Life Cycles
What do you think about this list?
What do you make of my evaluations? Did I pick the best free software, or would you make different suggestions? Let us know in the comments below. Also, remember to sign up for our free newsletter to get the latest ideas from top professionals in this niche.
You may also want to check out our guide to product analytics, or read about the 10 best product analytics tools. And, of course, be sure to add this blog to your regular reading list. We’ve always added informative articles that give you real insights into the product management world.
Related Read: Notable Product Analytics Certification & If They’re Worth It
Also Worth Checking Out: Best Product Requirements Software