Alternatives to Pendo

As a small startup we are very conscious about picking up the tools we use to run the project. After suffering with a mess of using at the same time Trello , Slack , Telegram and what not, we arrived at a small set of tools that cover all our current needs. For product management, file sharing, team communication etc we chose Basecamp and couldn't be more happy about it. For Customer Support and Sales Intercom works amazingly well. We are using MailChimp for email marketing since over 4 years and it still covers all our needs. Then on payment side combination of Stripe and Octobat helps us to process all the payments and generate compliant invoices. On techie side we use Rollbar and GitLab (for both code and CI). For corporate email we picked G Suite. That all costs us in total around 300$ a month, which is quite okay.

Sometimes #ad-blocking addons can cause a real headache when working with JavaScript apps. Onboarding assistants (Appcues + elevio ), chat (Intercom) and product usage insight (Hotjar) have all landed on their blacklists. I guess there is a perfectly good reason for this that I just don't know.

In order to fix this, we had to set up our own content delivery service. We chose Amazon CloudFront and Amazon S3 to do the job because it has a good synergy with Heroku PaaS we are already using.

Functionally, Amplitude and Mixpanel are incredibly similar. They both offer almost all the same functionality around tracking and visualizing user actions for analytics. You can track A/B test results in both. We ended up going with Amplitude at BaseDash because it has a more generous free tier for our uses (10 million actions per month, versus Mixpanel's 1000 monthly tracked users).

Segment isn't meant to compete with these tools, but instead acts as an API to send actions to them, and other analytics tools. If you're just sending event data to one of these tools, you probably don't need Segment. If you're using other analytics tools like Google Analytics and FullStory, Segment makes it easy to send events to all your tools at once.

Adopting Amplitude was one of the best decisions we've made. We didn't try any of the alternatives- the free tier was really generous so it was easy to justify trying it out (via Segment). We've had Google Analytics since inception, but just for logged out traffic. We knew we'd need some sort of #FunnelAnalysisAnalytics solution, so it came down to just a few solutions.

We had heard good things about Amplitude from friends and even had a consultant/advisor who was an Amplitude pro from using it as his company, so he kinda convinced us to splurge on the Enterprise tier for the behavioral cohorts alone. Writing the queries they provide via a few clicks in their UI would take days/weeks to craft in SQL. The behavioral cohorts allow us to create a lot of useful retention charts.

Another really useful feature is kinda minor but kinda not. When you change a saved chart, a new URL gets generated and is visible in your browser (chartURL/edit) and that URL is immediately available to share with your team. It may sound inconsequential, but in practice, it makes it really easy to share and iterate on graphs. Only complaint is that you have to explicitly tag other team members as owners of whatever chart you're creating for them to be able to edit it and save it. I can see why this is the case, but more often than not, the people I'm sharing the chart with are the ones I want to edit it 🤷🏾‍♂️

The Engagement Matrix feature is also really helpful (once you filter out the noisy events). Charts and dashboards are also great and make it easy for us to focus on the important metrics. We've been using Amplitude in production for about 6 months now. There's a bunch of other features we don't use regularly like Pathfinder, etc that I personally don't fully understand yet but I'm sure we'll start using them eventually.

Again, haven't tried any of the alternatives like Heap, Mixpanel, or Kissmetrics so can't speak to those, but Amplitude works great for us.

#analytics analyticsstack

This is my stack in Application & Data

JavaScript PHP HTML5 jQuery Redis Amazon EC2 Ubuntu Sass Vue.js Firebase Laravel Lumen Amazon RDS GraphQL MariaDB

My Utilities Tools

Google Analytics Postman Elasticsearch

My Devops Tools

Git GitHub GitLab npm Visual Studio Code Kibana Sentry BrowserStack

My Business Tools

Slack

Functionally, Amplitude and Mixpanel are incredibly similar. They both offer almost all the same functionality around tracking and visualizing user actions for analytics. You can track A/B test results in both. We ended up going with Amplitude at BaseDash because it has a more generous free tier for our uses (10 million actions per month, versus Mixpanel's 1000 monthly tracked users).

Segment isn't meant to compete with these tools, but instead acts as an API to send actions to them, and other analytics tools. If you're just sending event data to one of these tools, you probably don't need Segment. If you're using other analytics tools like Google Analytics and FullStory, Segment makes it easy to send events to all your tools at once.

Functionally, Amplitude and Mixpanel are incredibly similar. They both offer almost all the same functionality around tracking and visualizing user actions for analytics. You can track A/B test results in both. We ended up going with Amplitude at BaseDash because it has a more generous free tier for our uses (10 million actions per month, versus Mixpanel's 1000 monthly tracked users).

Segment isn't meant to compete with these tools, but instead acts as an API to send actions to them, and other analytics tools. If you're just sending event data to one of these tools, you probably don't need Segment. If you're using other analytics tools like Google Analytics and FullStory, Segment makes it easy to send events to all your tools at once.

Hi there, we are a seed-stage startup in the personal development space. I am looking at building the marketing stack tool to have an accurate view of the user experience from acquisition through to adoption and retention for our upcoming React Native Mobile app. We qualify for the startup program of Segment and Mixpanel, which seems like a good option to get rolling and scale for free to learn how our current 60K free members will interact in the new subscription-based platform. I was considering AppsFlyer for attribution, and I am now looking at an affordable yet scalable Mobile Marketing tool vs. building in-house. Braze looks great, so does Leanplum, but the price points are 30K to start, which we can't do. I looked at OneSignal, but it doesn't have user flow visualization. I am now looking into Urban Airship and Iterable. Any advice would be much appreciated!

Sometimes #ad-blocking addons can cause a real headache when working with JavaScript apps. Onboarding assistants (Appcues + elevio ), chat (Intercom) and product usage insight (Hotjar) have all landed on their blacklists. I guess there is a perfectly good reason for this that I just don't know.

In order to fix this, we had to set up our own content delivery service. We chose Amazon CloudFront and Amazon S3 to do the job because it has a good synergy with Heroku PaaS we are already using.

Hello, We are a medical technology company looking to integrate an in-app analytics tool. We've evaluated Mixpanel, Pendo, and Heap and are most impressed that Heap will solve our issues. We'd like to be able to determine not only clicks (con of Pendo) but also swipes and other user gestures within our app. Not sold on all three of these, can also look at other tools. We use Cordova, so hoping to find something compatible with that. Any advice?

Thanks

One of the challenges we've had to deal with as our product surface area has grown, is identifying and reproducing bugs. We use Sentry for exception monitoring, however, it's usually difficult to try to reproduce bugs. I first heard about FullStory from our friends over at Flexport (check out the Stack Story and you'll hear them mention it: https://stackshare.io/posts/how-flexport-builds-software-to-move-over-1-billion-dollars-in-merchandise). FullStory let's you record user sessions, and play them back to help you identify bugs and UX issues. You're even able to view the console errors live as they happen during the sessions!

We were pretty blown away at how comprehensive the product was at first, and it seems to be getting better every time I use it. Only complaint is that it's super expensive once you're in the hundreds of thousands of sessions so we had to stop trying to record logged out sessions, we only use it for auth'd sessions. We also started out using it via Segment but once we needed to watch out for the number of sessions we were recording we realized that it was impossible to restrict FullStory recordings on a per-page basis without ripping it out of Segment, so we ended up just using their JS snippet and putting that in the Rails views that we wanted to monitor closely.

The ability to share specific portions of sessions, speed them up, skip inactivity, and all sorts of other little features all add up to a really solid product that helps both our PMs and engineers improve our own product much quicker. I officially requested a Sentry + FullStory integration a while back https://twitter.com/yonasbe/status/871987738777616384, still waiting on this! #UserFeedbackAsAService #reproducing-bugs #sessionrecording #bug-squashing

We chose Webflow to build up websites faster and to make possible for particular employees to fix some misspellings or add an easy element to the page on their own - it is like Adobe Photoshop. To work with the incoming traffic we use our own product, that I can't pin here. It helps to make nurture visitors from the first session into the signing up and further activation into the product. In addition to @Carrrot we use Google Analytics to traffic source awareness, to monitor customers inside the product FullStory helps is a lot with its fury clicking and abandoned links. Activation and retention are done by our own product through the pop-ups, live chat, and emails that all based on customer behavior.