8 Best User Behavior Analytics Software for SaaS
Tracking user behavior for product analytics is more than just tracking conversion rates. You need to clearly understand how different users engage with your product through qualitative and quantitative methods.
In this article, we’ll help you understand how you can measure user behavior, the best tools out there, and how to implement the collected data.
TL;DR
- User behavior analytics involves recording user activity, grouping them into behavioral cohorts, and analyzing metrics such as engagement and conversions.
- It helps you identify the hurdles that your users come across so that you can find ways to ensure a smoother user experience.
- By leveraging user behavior analytics tools, you can understand what your customers are up to and how they’re navigating through the app.
- When deciding on user behavior analytics tools, you should look for features such as event tracking, user journey tracking and mapping, segmentation, user behavior reports, etc.
- To help you narrow down the options, here are the top choices for user behavior analytics software. For collecting and analyzing qualitative user behavior data, we have:
- Userpilot is a product growth platform that drives user activation, feature adoption, and expansion revenue. It also helps product teams collect voice of the user feedback, streamline onboarding, and gather actionable insights from analytics.
- Heap is a robust product analytics platform that provides users with a plethora of in-depth insights into user behavior and needs.
- Mixpanel is a simple and powerful user behavior analytics tool that allows product teams to track and analyze in-app product engagement.
- Amplitude is a powerful analytics tool that gives organizations in-depth, real-time insights into product usage and user behavior.
- If you are looking for the best user behavior analytics tool yet free, Google Analytics is the right fit. It is a web analytics service offered by Google that tracks and reports website or app traffic and events, currently as a platform inside the Google Marketing Platform brand.
- For collecting and analyzing quantitative user behavior data, we have:
- FullStory is a customer analytics tool that helps you track a broad range of metrics through the likes of pre-recorded and real-time customer sessions.
- Hotjar is another robust customer and website analytics tool that comes with a brilliant heatmapping feature and can be a great option for implicit in-app feedback.
- Baremetrics is a subscription analytics and insights management platform that helps businesses get hundreds of valuable metrics and insights, achieving real-time growth.
- If you need a user behavior analytics option that also allows you to act on collected data, book a Userpilot demo to see how it empowers your business and drives growth!
Try Userpilot for Collecting and Analyzing User Behavior Data!
What is user behavior analytics?
User behavior analytics (UBA) involves recording user activity, grouping them into behavioral cohorts, and analyzing metrics such as engagement and conversions.
Moreover, you can monitor how users are interacting with your product and how efficiently they’re passing through multiple stages of the user journey.
User behavior analytics also helps you identify the hurdles that your users come across so that you can find ways to ensure a smoother user experience.
Why do you need user behavior analytics tools?
User behavior analytics tools track user behavior and user’s journey step-by-step. It helps you to understand what your customers are up to and how they’re navigating through the app. Here’s what more they bring to the table:
- Improve user experience: With user behavior analytics tools, you can track (and remove) friction areas that cause confusion and result in your users dropping off.
- Create personalized experiences: You can tailor the user onboarding experience by segmenting users based on their product usage data. With this information, you can deliver personalized messages to enhance product adoption and retention rates.
- Monitor feature adoption: User behavior analytics tools help to track a feature’s power users, how often the feature is used, and when it’s being dropped. With this information, you can educate users with in-app guidance and improve the feature adoption rates.
Must have features of user behavior analytics tools
User behavior analytics tools are critical for improving product performance by providing an overview of user interactions and influencing strategic decisions. Here’s what to consider before opting for one:
- Event tracking – so you can track user behavior and activity.
- Goal-based tracking for keeping track of how users make progress toward a goal and identifying bottlenecks.
- User journey tracking and mapping – so you can monitor user engagement across different touch points of the customer journey.
- Behavioral heat maps for visualizing user interactions with heat maps that highlight popular and underutilized UI areas (i.e. feature heat maps).
- Segmentation based on in-app behavior, usage patterns, feedback, and personas — to create personalized, well-timed messages.
- Features to create automated in-app experiences, such as interactive in-app messages and announcements based on specific user actions that offer timely guidance.
Best user behavior analytics software for qualitative data
Qualitative data analysis is crucial for understanding user behavior on a deeper level, allowing businesses to make informed decisions. Let’s explore some of the best user behavior analytics tools that excel in collecting and interpreting qualitative data.
Userpilot
Userpilot is a product growth platform that drives user activation, feature adoption, and expansion revenue. It also helps product teams collect voice of the user feedback, streamline onboarding, and gather actionable insights from analytics.
With Userpilot, you’ll be able to track both product usage and user behavior to get a holistic view of how users use your product — which will guide future development, improve the user experience, and inform your growth efforts.
Main features
For user behavior analytics, Userpilot lets you filter through users from a unified dashboard, extract insights from specific segments or time periods, and create custom segments for all users who meet certain conditions.
Here’s an overview of Userpilot’s analytics features:
- Users dashboard: Userpilot’s users dashboard gives you an overview of all user data in one place. You’ll be able to filter by segments, which companies users are from, or when they were last seen active. You can also export data in bulk as a CSV or perform actions on individual users.
- Audience insights: Much like the overview dashboard, the Insights section lets you filter metrics by segment, company, and time period. You’ll be able to choose between a daily, weekly, or monthly view and then compare data between the current and previous time periods.
- Conditional segmentation: Practical use cases for user behavior analytics include creating segments for all users that meet certain conditions. For instance, you could reach out to companies in a certain country when creating a new flow or target users who have tried certain features.
- Customer survey and survey analytics: Userpilot lets you build and send customer surveys no-code. It also offers survey analytics functionalities that help you understand customer loyalty drivers.
- Saved reports: The saved reports dashboard lets you view, edit, duplicate, or delete any trend and funnel reports you’ve created. You’ll also be able to sort by report type, filter by the teammate who created the report, or export in bulk if you need a CSV of your user behavior analytics.
Pricing
Userpilot’s transparent pricing ranges from $249/month on the entry-level end to an Enterprise tier for larger companies.
Furthermore, Userpilot’s entry-level plan includes access to all UI patterns and should include everything that most mid-market SaaS businesses need to get started.
Userpilot has three paid plans to choose from:
- Starter: The entry-level Starter plan starts at $249/month and includes features like segmentation, product analytics, reporting, user engagement, user feedback, and customization.
- Growth: The Growth plan starts at $499/month and includes features like resource centers, advanced event-based triggers, unlimited feature tagging, AI-powered content localization, EU hosting options, and a dedicated customer success manager.
- Enterprise: The Enterprise plan uses custom pricing and includes all the features from Starter + Growth plus custom roles/permissions, access to premium integrations, priority support, custom contract, SLA, SAML SSO, activity logs, security audit, and compliance (SOC 2/GDPR).
Heap
Heap is a robust product analytics platform that provides users with a plethora of in-depth insights into user behavior and needs. With Heap, you can collect user behavior data in real time across all touch points within your product.
Insights from Heap help you dig deeper into the paths users take when navigating your product and identify precise points of friction. Plus, the platform uses sophisticated data science capabilities to help you make better-informed, data-driven decisions to improve user experience.
Main features
Heap offers several features to help you track user actions, behavior, and properties. It lets you dig deeper into how users navigate your product and interact with different elements on a page.
The particularly useful features include:
- You can use a variety of heatmaps (Clickmaps, Scroll Depth, and Attention Maps) to understand user intent, identify points of friction, and improve UI.
- The Session Replays feature lets you visualize the exact user journey when they perform an action.
- You can use the Funnels, Journey Maps, Engagement, and Retention analysis features for a more detailed look at how users interact with your product.
- You can segment users into different groups and filter all kinds of data for each segment. Loads of segment criteria are offered by Heap too.
- The Pro and Premier plans also offer account-based analytics to help you monitor account health and churn. It’s particularly valuable for B2B companies and helps minimize churn.
Pricing
Pricing for Heap is available on request. You’ll have to contact the sales team for a quote. The final price will depend on various factors, including the number of sessions and integrations you need.
That said, Heap offers a free plan that lets you track up to 10,000 user sessions per month and stores your data for 6 months. Review platforms like G2 say that paid plans start at $3,600 per year. All paid plans come with a 14-day free trial, too.
Mixpanel
Mixpanel is a simple and powerful user behavior analytics tool that allows product teams to track and analyze in-app product engagement. It allows your team to see every moment of the user experience clearly, so you can make changes that work.
In addition, it lets you explore data freely without using SQL. Set up your metrics to measure growth and retention. Slice and dice data to uncover trends and see live updates on how people use your app.
Main features
Mixpanel has features for behavioral analytics that help product teams and developers understand users’ actions.
Below are features that are accessible for use when analyzing user behavior on Mixpanel:
- Funnels: To track users’ progress toward outcomes such as purchases or signups, Mixpanel’s funnel feature can help you with funnel reports. Funnels display a series of stages in a user journey and how many users progress from one stage to the next—for example, from download to sign up and purchase. If one stage has a low conversion rate, it’s a signal that that stage needs attention.
- A/B test segmentation: Mixpanel’s segmentation helps teams build more complete customer profiles and create cohorts (defined segments of users based on common important characteristics or experiences). Armed with this information, you can adjust your product and marketing to better address the specific needs of each segment or of the business.
- Data association: Each data point corresponds to a unique user ID, connecting events like sign-ups, cart additions, and interactions.
- Data customization: Mixpanel’s customizable data parameters allow precise user behavior insights, enabling behavioral segmentation for targeted campaigns.
- User activity tracking: Daily, weekly, and monthly active user reports (DAU, WAU, MAU) provide insights into user engagement trends.
- Integration flexibility: Mixpanel seamlessly integrates with tools like Segment, streamlining data sharing. SDKs and an import API further enhance data management.
Pricing
Mixpanel’s pricing plan is divided into 3 plans; the starter plan, the enterprise plan, and the growth plan.
Here’s an overview of the pricing plans and features of each plan:
- Starter plan: This plan features essentials to find product-market fit. It is free and allows up to 20M monthly events.
- Growth plan: This plan costs $20+ per month for up to 100M monthly events. You get all features in the starter plan plus unlimited saved reports to monitor, update, and iterate on KPIs, Mixpanel modeling layer, and group analytics and data pipeline add-ons.
- Enterprise plan: This plan empowers your team, especially if you have a large organization. It costs $833+ per month for up to 5M-100M+ monthly events.
Amplitude
Amplitude is a powerful analytics tool that gives organizations in-depth, real-time insights into product usage and user behavior.
With Amplitude, you can create a custom dashboard to collate multiple charts and reports on a single page. Amplitude’s robust behavior analytics help product and growth teams improve product adoption, identify new monetization opportunities, and maximize customer lifetime value.
Main features
It offers various features, including event segmentation, funnel analysis, user cohorts, and retention analysis. With Amplitude, you can create a custom dashboard to collate multiple charts and reports on a single page.
When it comes to user behavior analytics, the most helpful features include:
- Event tracking – You can set up and track custom events to monitor user actions.
- User segmentation – You can group users into different segments and monitor how each segment navigates your product.
- User journey mapping – Amplitude’s Pathfinder feature helps you understand how individual users move through your product.
- Other features, such as user cohorts and retention analysis, also come in handy.
Pricing
Amplitude offers three distinct pricing tiers:
- Starter – A free plan suitable for small teams.
- Growth – Suitable for teams that need to scale fast; pricing is available on request and depends on your requirements.
- Enterprise – Includes advanced governance and security features; pricing is available on request.
However, it’s worth noting that Amplitude’s pricing plans are complex because they’re based on the number of monthly events or features. Other tools like Mixpanel and Userpilot offer more transparent pricing based on the number of monthly active users.
Google Analytics
If you are looking for the best user behavior analytics tool yet free, Google Analytics is the right fit. It is a web analytics service offered by Google that tracks and reports website or app traffic and events, currently as a platform inside the Google Marketing Platform brand.
Main features
Here’s a closer look at some of Google Analytics features for user behavior analytics:
- Users and Active Users: Google Analytics displays the number of users who viewed or interacted with the site or app. Teams can access the Active Users report to see the number of unique users who started sessions on the site or app within a specific timeframe.
- New vs. Returning User: Cookies allow Google to monitor user activity. Cookies are unique to each browser and device. Google creates a distinct ID for each user’s browser or device and stores it in GA when they visit a website. And distinguish between new users (first-time visitors) and returning users (previous visitors).
- User Exploration: You can use Google Analytics’s User Explorer to get detailed information about specific groups of users. For example, a group of users who interacted with your app and website.
The GA4 reports these activities, including views, events, purchases, and goal achievements.
However, you should note that Google Analytics cannot be used to perform cohort analysis, as the data is not identifiable. However, it is still great for time-based analytics.
Pricing
It is a free product analytics tool with paid upgrades available for advanced features. It has two price plans: the free and 360 plans respectively:
- Google Analytics offers a free version that provides a wide range of features for basic website analytics. It’s suitable for individuals, small businesses, and websites with relatively low traffic.
- GA 360 (now GA4) provides higher data limits, BigQuery integration, service level agreements, and more with costs starting from $12,500 per month and $150,000 per year.
Best user behavior analytics software for quantitative data
These tools are designed to capture and interpret numerical data, providing valuable insights into user interactions, patterns, and metrics. Let’s explore some of the top choices for extracting quantitative data.
FullStory
It is a user behavior analytics tool that helps you track a broad range of metrics through the likes of pre-recorded and real-time customer sessions. And it’s brilliant for helping you identify opportunities to improve your customer experience by highlighting aspects within specific sessions that are causing friction.
Main features
Here are the key features in FullStory that help with customer analytics:
- Defined events: You can report on trends and behaviors observed in Session Replays by selecting and naming specific elements of interest in Inspect Mode. When building segments, you can also create events which helps streamline the process of segmenting users based on specific event criteria.
- Funnels: It allows you to track and analyze user behavior for specific goals by defining the steps they should take. You can see how many users complete each step, where drop-offs occur, and why.
- In FullStory, Metrics are fundamental components used to create Analytics dashboards. They include an event, aggregation type, and data format for tracking specific information.
- In FullStory, Dashboards are customized visual displays that bring together Metrics, Funnels, and Defined Events to provide a comprehensive view of key customer data points.
Pricing
FullStory offers a pricing structure that caters to enterprise users but does not provide transparent pricing on its website. It offers a 14-day free trial and its paid plans – Business and Enterprise – are negotiable.
Hotjar
Hotjar is another robust customer and website analytics tool that comes with a brilliant heatmapping feature and can be a great option for implicit in-app feedback.
As one of the popular web analytics tools, it allows you to record the browser actions of your customers while they are on your website. This includes clicks, scrolls, and mouse movements.
Main features
For customer analytics, here’s what Hotjar has to offer:
- Hotjar’s heatmaps allow businesses to visualize how their website visitors interact with their website by tracking mouse movements, clicks, and scrolls, and displaying the data in a visual format.
- The Recordings feature captures website sessions, including mouse movements, clicks, and scrolls, providing you with a detailed view of how users interact with your site.
- Surveys: This feature allows you to gather feedback from website visitors through custom surveys. You can target specific visitor segments to deliver your surveys based on their behavior.
- With the Funnels feature, you can track user journeys towards specific goals, such as completing a purchase or filling out a form.
- Hotjar’s Forms feature tracks customer interactions with online forms, including completion time, skipped fields, and errors.
Pricing
Hotjar offers a range of plans under different categories (Hotjar Observe, Hotjar Ask, Hotjar Engage), as well as custom packages, providing flexibility for users to find a plan that suits their requirements. In general, Hotjar has 3 different plans as follows:
- Plus starts at $39.00 per month.
- Business starts at $99.00 per month.
- Scale starts at $389.00 per month.
It also comes with a Free Forever Plan with limited features. Apart from that, if you only want survey features, you can try it out with a 30-day free trial offer for businesses.
Baremetrics
Baremetrics is a subscription analytics and insights management platform that helps businesses get hundreds of valuable metrics and insights, achieving real-time growth.
This software is the easiest way to get the insights you need to understand your performance and where to focus next.
Main features
Baremetrics primarily focuses on subscription analytics, but it does offer some user behavior analytics features that can be helpful:
- User segmentation: With Baremetric’s new segmentation, you can create and save groupings of all your customers in seconds. Baremetrics allows you to segment your user base based on various criteria such as subscription plans, location, signup date, etc. This segmentation helps you understand different user groups and their behaviors.
- User churn analysis: When you are tracking user cancellations and the reasons behind them, Baremetrics helps you identify patterns in user churn. This information can be used to improve your product or service and address pain points that lead to cancellations.
- Trial insights feature: You can Improve your conversion rates by monitoring exactly what’s going on while your customers are on trial. With trial insights, you will keep track of conversion rate, average trial length, active trials, and new trials with up-to-the-minute data.
Pricing
Baremetrics has 4 different plans for SaaS companies looking to scale their subscription-based business model. These plans range from a core suite of metrics to many modules that can supercharge your SaaS growth, reduce churn, recover failed charges, and plan for the future.
Here’s a brief overview of the features of each plan and their price tags:
Note: Each pricing plan value depends on your current MRR. So, we are using the $0K value as a benchmark to review the different plans.
- Metrics plan: $108/mo. Features include—smart dashboards, benchmarks, export data, data enrichment, etc.
- Recover plan: $58/mo. The pros of this plan include—Automated Email reminders to delinquent users, recovery of more than your entire Baremetrics cost or next month is on them, and more.
- Cancellation insights plan: $108/mo. Features include customizing your reasons for cancellation, recovering more than your entire Baremetrics cost, personalized email questionnaires, etc.
- Forecast+ plan: With this plan, you can see intelligent MRR projections with configurable options. It is included with metrics.
Conclusion
As you might have realized by now, you have lots of options to choose from when it comes to tracking user behavior and generating relevant insights.
The best way to approach this is by combining tools that use quantitative and qualitative methods. As most of these tools offer free plans, you’ll be able to easily test and see what works best for you!
Want more help in creating better user experiences with all that data? Book a demo with Userpilot!
Try Userpilot for Collecting and Analyzing User Behavior Data!