Alternatives to Google Analytics & GA 360

Shortcomings of Google Analytics

Where Google Analytics falls short:

• Focuses on acquisition rather than activation and retention

• Extremely limited segmentation capabilities

• Can’t track conversion data out of the box

• Requires customization with Google Tag Manager to track events

• Doesn’t track user-specific behavioral metrics

Setting up GA beyond the limited default settings requires deep knowledge of the tool, and getting meaningful insights requires a great deal of customization. While it’s possible out of the box to set up a few predefined conversion goals based on URL visits and time on site, you’ll have to use Google Tag Manager (more on that later) to track behaviors like clicks, form submissions, or video plays. If you set up your tracking incorrectly or want to later change the way you name an event, you’ll have to track new data for that event – and this new data won’t be consistent with your historical data.

Even if your setup is perfect, the data you’ll receive will mostly be around traffic acquisition, pageviews, bounce rate, and paid campaign metrics. If you want behavioral or product-related metrics, or data on how people act further down the funnel, you’re out of luck.

Another shortcoming is that GA makes it difficult to track customer data at the individual user level. Because its terms of service prohibit customers from storing personally identifiable information (PII), it takes significant work to get GA to combine user identities across platform, channel, and device. If a user visits your site from different platforms and devices, GA tends to see these as different visitors. This is a significant limitation that makes it hard to understand the impact of device and platform on your site traffic.

GA does have a feature called User ID to address this issue, but User ID only works when you can assign a unique ID in your system for each user. If your users don’t have to log in to use your site or product, you can’t do this.

GA’s lack of support also makes it easy to run up against roadblocks like this that stop you from putting your data to use. In general, troubleshooting GA involves scouring forums and documentation to find a potential solution.

The big problem with Google Analytics: incomplete data

Assuming you’ve been able to set up a decent tagging system, are using custom goals for conversion tracking, and didn’t make any mistakes during setup, you’re still up against a significant obstacle: the lack of reliable, exact data. Google Analytics is built to supply aggregate data, showing you trends rather than providing detailed insights about individual users. With GA, you can’t track a specific user’s path or understand how one event might lead to another as the user navigates your product.

Finally, GA’s limited dashboarding capabilities make it difficult to display the data you need. If you want to examine traffic over a longer time frame, the GA interface can’t pull the data together. For high traffic sites, if you aren’t using GA 360, you have to pull your data one day at a time and then munge it back together to achieve the view you need. This is tedious, unnecessary work, and tends to produce inaccurate results.

To help you avoid these issues, we’ve chosen nine alternatives to Google Analytics to help you figure out which tool is right for your stack.

#1 Heap

Heap is an analytics platform that helps you understand how and why customers engage with your product or site. With product analytics that track behavior in your website and your apps, the platform gives you detailed information about your users that goes well beyond Google Analytics’ session and pageview metrics.

Top features:

• Powerful product analytics

• Autocapture for all event data

• Heap Connect to automatically bring data into your data warehouse

Use cases:

• Optimize conversions across channels and platforms

• Drive engagement in your product and website

• Better tailor the in-app experience

• Improve retention at all stages

While Heap easily covers the basic features of Google Analytics—tracking website acquisition, paid channels, and simple conversion goals—it more importantly allows you to see how users behave in all stages of the customer journey. A single javascript snippet installed on your site automatically collects data on everything users do, including which channels drive them to your site, which behaviors lead to conversion, and how different users engage with your product.

Tracking user and customer behavior is where Heap shines. Unlike GA, where you have to set up and maintain many triggers and tag combinations to track user events, Heap automatically captures all activity from the start. There’s no need to organize tags, ask engineering to add new tags, or clean up your older tags. Any time you have a question, you can access your historical data and find an answer. Unlike Google Tag Manager, Heap’s event layer directly integrates with iOS and Android native apps. Heap can also pull in data from over 20 third-party integrations, including Shopify, Salesforce, and more.

For product, marketing, and customer support teams, Heap’s approach is game-changing. You get all the data you need without needing engineering to create new tags, change tracking codes, or build reports. Heap’s flexible, self-serve capabilities make it a critical tool for companies that need to deliver a compelling online experience.

As far as reporting goes, Heap offers far more than GA. Heap lets you report on user and event properties, get granular insights into where users experience friction, and answer questions without having to go back and revisit your tracking plan. Heap’s simple setup and ability to scale makes it the best choice for companies that need enterprise-grade analytics at any size.

Final word: Heap’s flexibility in tracking the entire user journey, its ease of use, and its ability to autocapture all user data creates the perfect option for companies looking to understand their users without getting bogged down by manual setup and maintenance.

Sign up for a free version of Heap

#2 Matomo

If you’re concerned about security or you’d rather just host on prem, Matomo is a good option that will give you more or less the same functionality as GA. The open source project allows you 100% data ownership and user privacy protection at a nominal monthly fee (19EUR), but that pricing tier doesn’t include several key features that GA does for free, like heatmaps, session recording, or paid analytics tracking. Nor does it include key features like A/B testing and multi-channel attribution that GA also lacks.

Top features:

• Web analytics

• Conversion optimization

• Visitor profiles

• Tag manager

Use cases:

• Deploy an on-prem web analytics solution

• Analyze content interactions

• View media analytics

Implementation can be easy if you don’t do on-prem, and a bit more time consuming if you do. Security and control are the selling points here, and it’s well-liked by customers, so it’s a great alternative to Google Analytics for the right company.

Final word: For companies that want ultimate control and ownership of data and features about on par with GA (but not much more), Matomo might be the best bet.

#3 StatCounter

StatCounter is an affordable alternative to GA that adds alerts, fraud detection, and user information tagging to its offering of comparable GA features. Pricing starts at free and moves on a sliding scale based on your monthly pageviews.

Top features:

• Web analytics

• Summary statistics

• Visitor alerts

• Data filters

• Data export

Use cases:

• Analyze your traffic trends over time

• Sync Google keyword data

• Tag visitors with identity information

• Detect click fraud

Even in the free version, StatCounter offers email support. This alone may be enough to sway you if you’re frustrated with GA implementation and maintenance.

Final word: For a close-to-free GA alternative that boasts proactive reporting features and offers better support, check out StatCounter.

#4 Amplitude

Amplitude is a user-focused solution that aims to pinpoint valuable behavioral patterns. It allows you to look beyond the acquisition and paid analytics that GA offers and dig into mobile and app analytics. While it does offer a free version, the jump to the next pricing level is significant. Because Amplitude requires manual tagging, it also requires significant administrative and engineering resources to collect the data you need.

Top features:

• Behavioral analytics

• First-party behavioral data

• Customizable data structure

Use cases:

• Product strategy

• Improve user engagement

• Optimize conversion

• Drive retention

Reviews of Amplitude’s implementation process are generally positive. However, like many GA alternatives, you’ll still have to decide on the exact events you want to track, and there’s no guarantee that you’ll end up with the data you need. The tool is especially helpful for companies with a large but relatively low LTV customer base, like home goods or apparel brands.

Final word: A platform for behavioral analytics that can go head to head with GA 360, Amplitude is a good contender but still doesn’t eliminate tedious event tracking.

What is Product Intelligence? Learn more here!

#5 Adobe Analytics

Adobe has always boasted a large product suite, and its analytics solution is no different. Like most of Adobe’s products, Adobe Analytics has complex pricing that includes features like website analytics, marketing analytics, attribution, and predictive analytics. There is no free version, but if you’re in the market for enterprise pricing you may be able to beat Google Analytics 360’s offering on certain features, like piping data to a data warehouse.

Top features:

• Web analytics

• Multi-channel data collection

• Segmentation and customer journey analytics

• Predictive analysis

Use cases:

• Get 360 customer views

• Understand attribution for new customers

• Predict your most valuable users

Adobe’s implementation can be cumbersome—you’ll need to go through many steps and define a detailed event tracking plan to make sure you’re gathering the data you need. Adobe allows you to track the entire funnel across channels, and provides the same level of detail for Google Ads as GA does. Like GA, Adobe requires manual tagging, which should raise a red flag if you’re worried about being efficient with resources.

Final word: Adobe is a commitment, but it’s feature rich and works especially well with other products in the Adobe suite. A good alternative if you’re considering GA360.

Interested in alternatives to Adobe Analytics? Check out our complete guide!

#6 Mixpanel

Mixpanel Logo

Mixpanel is a popular product analytics platform that lets you analyze web, mobile, and smart devices to see how and why users engage, convert, and return to your site. Unlike GA, the tool tracks behavioral analytics, although like Amplitude, GA, and Adobe, Mixpanel requires manual tracking and all the headaches that come with it.

Top features:

• Behavioral analytics

• Data science

• Infrastructure

• Messaging and testing

• Data governance

Use cases:

• Get insights into how people interact with your products

• Drive marketing engagement and conversions

• Get high quality data and custom analysis

One of Mixpanel’s strengths lies in measuring the success of launches and campaigns. If you have a large user base and need to track many small events (like microtransactions from in-app purchases), Mixpanel can be very helpful.

Mixpanel recently released a new approach to identity management that makes it easier to merge IDs into a single user identity, but reviews seem to be mixed as to whether it’s much of an improvement over GA. Pricing after the free plan starts at $89, then moves up to enterprise.

Final word: Mixpanel doesn’t solve the problem of painful event tracking, but it might be a good option if individual campaign metrics are at the top of your KPIs.

For a deeper look, read about top alternatives to Mixpanel.

#7 Kissmetrics

Kissmetrics is a tool for product and marketing teams that focuses on advanced web analytics. It’s a great alternative to Google Analytics if your product is mostly web based—it tracks in-depth metrics about key user behavior like signups, trial starts, feature adoption, and churn. If your product is iOS or Android-based, you’ll want to look elsewhere.

Top features:

• Dashboard with KPIs at a glance

• Cohort reporting

• Funnel reporting

• A/B testing

Use cases:

• Understand SaaS metrics

• Optimize your ecommerce funnel

Kissmetrics isn’t for those looking or free or cheap alternatives. Its lowest plans start at $299 a month, but it does do something key that GA doesn’t: tie website activity back to user identity.

As for implementation, Kissmetrics is similar to most website analytics products. You’ll need to install a tracking code and come up with a tracking plan to make sure you’re capturing the right metrics up front. The process is cumbersome, according to some users.

Final word: If you’re a SaaS or ecommerce company whose product is mostly web-based and don’t mind spending more, Kissmetrics will give you user-based data in far more granularity than Google Analytics.

#8 Pendo

Pendo is built primarily for product teams and offers insights about the product journey. The platform offers several features outside the scope of GA, like employee and user onboarding, but for teams looking for more than just analytics it may be a good choice.

Features:

• Sentiment tracking

• In-app guidance

• Product insights and feedback

• Product roadmap guidance

Use cases:

• Onboard new users

• Retain more customers

• Increase growth and adoption

If you’re looking for the ability to really dig into customer data and compare different groups of users, Pendo falls short. However, if you’re looking for a suite of features, it still may be a good alternative to GA360.

Final word: Although Pendo has a broader feature set, like GA it lacks contextual, real-time information about the user journey.

#9 Fathom

Fathom is a lightweight, privacy-focused option for those seeking Google Analytics alternatives. The tool’s aim is on providing access to simple, fast website metrics for as many sites as needed. Features:

• Unlimited sites

• Unlimited email reports

• Unlimited custom domains

• Cookie-free tracking

Use cases:

• Get more data privacy than with GA

• Stay  GDPR + CCPA compliant

• Make decisions quickly with a single dashboard

Fathom isn’t free, but they do a good job of explaining why. The company offers a reasonably-priced product (starting at $14/month) for increased data privacy and security compared to GA.

Final word: Fathom is a good alternative to the free version of GA that eliminates worrying about the security of personal data, but it isn’t an option for those who need product analytics.