When it comes to boosting your product growth, user tracking tools can make your life a lot easier. They offer insights into product performance, what your users are doing inside your product, and why they are doing it.

But how do you know you’re picking the right tools?

In this article, we share key insights on user tracking tools based on their use cases, which will hopefully help you make up your mind.

What is user tracking?

User tracking is the process of collecting, organizing, and interpreting data into coherent, actionable, and valuable insights about user behavior.

The goal of user tracking is to know pressing user concerns derived from user behavior and to address them for the benefit of both the customer and the business.

What should you look for in a user tracking tool?

There is a sizeable catalog of tracking tools in the market that come with a ton of features and functions. The best ones have these properties that you should look out for:

• Ease of use. A clunky tool can cause more frustration than satisfaction. Good tracking tools are easy to use in addition to delivering solid information. Look for tools that are easily navigable, intuitive, and possess a user-friendly interface.
• Analytics features. User tracking falls under the broad category of analytics tools and should, as such, be useful in collecting and analyzing data. Look for tools that have powerful digital analytics features, from commonplace to niche.
• Visualization options. Data should be readable if teams want to gain valuable insights from them. Good tools should possess robust visualization options like charts, graphs, funnels, paths, and more within their arsenal.
• APIs and Integrations. As powerful as tools are, no such tool can do it all. Good tools must be capable of giving and receiving information from other tools.
• Data security. In an increasingly interconnected world, user information is becoming more precious. Tools that can censor personally identifiable information (PII) are a net positive if not an outright necessity. Being GDPR- and CCPA-compliant can also secure a good reputation.

14 Best user tracking tools for collecting valuable insights

Considering all the good properties we’ve listed, here are 14 of the best user tracking tools for collecting actionable insights into user behavior.

1. Userpilot – the best user journey tracking tool for web analytics

Userpilot is a product growth platform for enterprises possessing user tracking software for web analytics to increase adoption and reduce churn.

Main Features

Here’s a brief overview of Userpilot’s tracking tools for user journeys:

• Feature tags and heat maps. In Userpilot, you can tag UI elements to monitor how users interact with them. The tags can track what users click, where they hover, and what form they fill. With its heatmaps tool, Userpilot displays high or low areas of engagement through color-coded heatmaps.

• Custom event tracking. With custom event tracking, teams can create their own events to track in Userpilot. Track relevant milestones in a customer journey that reflect desirable user behavior, like downloading a Chrome extension, and then monitor how many users behave in that manner.

• Analytics dashboards. Userpilot’s analytics dashboard lets teams place relevant metrics (such as active users, session duration, feature adoption, etc.) into different dashboards for their convenience. In a future update, Userpilot will offer dashboard customizability that will let teams house metrics of their choosing.

• Funnel analysis. The funnel analysis tool lets teams gauge the efficacy of their user funnels by showing how users progress through each step of the funnel. Discover areas where users fail to proceed, identify drop-off points, and optimize stages that hamper conversions.

• Path analysis. With path analysis, you choose a starting point and see where users proceed next. This enables you to analyze the efficacy of different paths and discover the best path users take the most.

• Retention tables. The retention table feature lets you monitor the retention rates of different cohorts. Analyze data by cohort and see which of your segments behave positively and which of your segments require increased marketing efforts.

• Customer profiles. Userpilot’s customer profiles feature lets you analyze individual users and gain insights on a granular level. Understand user behavior by tracking in-app events and collecting the user feedback of each user.

• Data integrations. You can import from and export data to different tools and get a more holistic picture of user behavior. Currently, Userpilot supports integrations with Google Analytics, Mixpanel, Kissmetrics, Heap, Amplitude, Google Tag Manager, Segment, Intercom, HubSpot (two-way), and Salesforce (two-way).

Pricing

Here’s an overview of Userpilot’s pricing plans:

• Starter. Starts at $249/month and supports up to 2000 MAU,  10 user segments, 10 feature tags, a built-in NPS dashboard, and access to third-party integrations (except HubSpot/Salesforce).
• Growth. Starts at $749/month and includes everything in Starter plus unlimited feature tagging, an in-app resource center, A/B testing options, AI-powered content localization, analytics dashboards, event-based content triggering, a dedicated customer success manager, and extra integrations like HubSpot/Salesforce.
• Enterprise. Uses quote-based pricing and includes enterprise features such as custom roles, permission management, premium integrations, priority support, activity logs, security audits, SOC 2/GDPR compliance, and more.

2. Google Analytics – best website visitor tracking software

Google Analytics is a freemium website visitor tracking software and is considered one of the best website analytics tools.

Main Features

Here’s a brief overview of Google Analytics website visitor tracking tools.

• Real-time reporting. Google Analytics lets you analyze data as soon as it’s collected. Take advantage of website tracking and visitor tracking data as soon as they arrive, ensuring your insights are up-to-date.
• Engagement reports. The events report takes data from event tracking efforts to show a detailed view of user interactions. Conversion reports show the effectiveness of marketing strategies, and screen reports indicate the landing pages that users interact with the most.
• Cohort and user exploration. Cohort explorations let you do user segmentation, collecting things like demographic data, and user explorations let you go granular in understanding customer experience.

Pricing

Google Analytics employs a freemium model for its tools. The free plan is accessible for all teams, while the premium version is available for enterprises upon request.

3. Pendo – best for tracking mobile users

Pendo is a product experience and digital adoption platform that is also an effective analytics software for mobile users.

Main Features

Here’s a brief overview of Pendo’s tracking tools.

• Session replay. One of Pendo’s newest key features, session replay, depicts user sessions to uncover explanations behind user actions, from conversion to churn. Pendo keeps user information private for every session recording.
• Feedback collection. Pendo can collect data directly from customers via user feedback. You can easily build a feedback form and collect information with Pendo’s no-code in-app surveys.
• Paths tracking. The paths feature in Pendo lets you conduct a path analysis of the entire customer journey. You can filter paths into different criteria, like visitor identification, date, etc.

Pricing

Pendo uses a quote-based pricing model for all of its subscription tiers. They also offer a free plan with basic features, no credit card required.

4. Mixpanel – best cross-platform user behavior tracking tool

Mixpanel is an event analytics software that tracks user interactions with web and mobile applications.

Main Features

Here’s a brief overview of Mixpanel’s cross-platform user behavior tracking tools.

• Flow analysis. Mixpanel empowers teams to observe and monitor customer journeys with the flow analysis tool. The tool can create funnels that indicate drop-offs and show previous actions before they dropped off.
• Marketing analytics. This tool comes with a variety of features, like multi-touch attribution that correlates events with results, or identity resolution that pairs users with specific behaviors.
• Data integrations. Mixpanel has integrations with many other industry-leading tools, from product growth platforms like Userpilot to customer experience optimization tools like AB Tasty, and many more.

Pricing

Mixpanel offers two paid plans: Growth, priced at $24/month, and Enterprise, price available upon request.

Mixpanel also offers a free plan. For startups founded less than five years ago, Mixpanel offers the first year of their Growth plan for free.

5. Amplitude – best event tracking software

Amplitude is product analytics software best known for its advanced event-tracking capabilities.

Main Features

Here’s a brief overview of Amplitude’s event-tracking tools.

• Goal tracking. Amplitude allows teams to target goals and measure how well they’re doing compared to their key performance indicators.
• Funnel analysis. Amplitude’s funnel analysis tool is simple but effective, offering a visualized report of how website visitors proceed through the funnel. You can also make the report more nuanced by exploring how different user segments behave.
• Session replay. With integrated insights, teams can directly watch a session recording associated with the behavior. Individual user sessions will feature what users click, where users scroll, and other seemingly simple events.

Pricing

Amplitude offers three paid plans. The lowest paying tier, Plus, costs $49/month billed annually. The next two tiers, Growth and Enterprise, use a quote-based pricing model. Amplitude also offers a free plan as well as a 14-day free trial.

6. Hotjar – best tool for tracking users with session recordings

Hotjar is a behavior analytics tool best known for its heatmaps and session recordings feature.

Main Features

Here’s a brief overview of Hotjar’s session recordings and qualitative data analytics tools.

• Session recordings. Hotjar’s session recordings feature recreates user sessions correlating customer experience with qualitative data. The session recordings will feature prominent frustration signals indicating friction points that need addressing.
• Heatmaps and scroll maps. The heatmaps and scroll maps tools create a visual report that reflects user behavior as accurately as it can. Heatmaps show website visitors’ areas of interest, and scroll maps show how far users scroll.
• Surveys. Hotjar lets teams gather direct user feedback with its survey tool. Validate hypotheses with answers from website visitors and launch surveys at critical moments. Hotjar uses artificial intelligence to generate surveys, allowing you to focus on analytics.

Pricing

For its heatmaps and recordings features, bundled together as Observe, Hotjar offers two paid plans (starting with Plus’ $32/month billed annually, up to Business’ $56/month billed annually). It also offers a free plan and a 15-day free trial.

7. Crazy Egg – best heatmap analytics tool for tracking website visitors

Crazy Egg is a product optimization tool equipped with website visitor tracking tools, specifically heatmap analytics tools.

Main Features

Here’s a summary of Crazy Egg’s heatmap analytics tools for website visitor tracking.

• Snapshots. Snapshots is Crazy Egg’s premier heatmap tool. As one of its key features, snapshots give you five visual reports for a single snapshot. Get common reports like its heatmaps and scroll maps report, or utilize the confetti report that doubles as a cohort analysis tool.
• Traffic analysis. Crazy Egg’s website visitor tracking tools allow you to discover your top 10 traffic sources and analyze the performances of your marketing campaigns from different platforms.
• Errors tracking. Javascript errors can be disastrous for your conversion and retention rates. Crazy Egg notifies you when errors happen and provides a session recording to give a qualitative account you can’t get from numbers. Crazy Egg also gathers as much contextual information as possible regarding the error, from visitor identification to IP addresses and more.

Pricing

Crazy Egg offers three paid plans (starting at Standard’s $49/month billed annually up to Enterprise’s $249/month billed annually) and a 30-day free trial.

8. Tableau – best user data visualization tool

Tableau is a business intelligence and analytics software focusing heavily on data visualization.

Main Features

Here’s a summary of Tableau’s data visualization tool.

• Dashboards. Tableau’s dashboards are the best in the business. Tableau accelerators offer teams ready-to-use and fully customizable dashboards that can depict relevant, industry-specific metrics in a single glance.
• AI-powered insights. Tableau Pulse’s insights platform automatically detects drivers, trends, and outliers for metrics you track, complete with visualizations that carefully and completely present a rundown.
• Data connectors. Data connectors give Tableau more data than it collected, increasing the scope of data visualization and analysis. ODBC connectors allow Tableau to access and utilize data from different databases, making your data analysis more nuanced but clear-cut.

Pricing

Tableau offers three paid plans (starting at Tableau Viewer’s $15/month billed annually, up to Tableau Creator’s $75/month billed annually), and a plan for enterprises available upon request. Tableau also offers a 14-day free trial for prospective users.

9. SimilarWeb – best tool for tracking website traffic

SimilarWeb is a data aggregation tool specializing in web analytics, web traffic, and performance.

Main Features

Here’s a brief overview of SimilarWeb’s website tracking tools.

• Website visitor tracking dashboard. SimilarWeb’s dashboard contains metrics such as monthly visitors, geography, referring sites, social and search traffic that point to your inbound and outbound traffic, etc.
• Website ranking. This free functionality ranks websites according to the number of page visits. SimilarWeb also includes metrics like bounce rate, visit duration, and pages per visit.
• Competitive analysis. SimilarWeb’s competitive analysis tool is a premium feature that shows how competitors are faring compared to you and other industry leaders. Discover competitor’s SEO, PPC, and other marketing strategies, then dig into insights that will provide a competitive edge.

Pricing

SimilarWeb offers two paid plans for individuals and startups (starting at Starter’s $125/month billed annually, up to Professional’s $333/month billed annually). SimilarWeb also offers premium tiers for businesses and enterprises. These tiers, named Team and Enterprise, are available upon request.

SimilarWeb offers some of its basic tools for free, and a 7-day free trial for its Starter and Professional tiers.

10. Zendesk – best for tracking user interactions with customer service team

Zendesk is an AI-bolstered customer service software with visitor tracking capabilities for customer service teams.

Main Features

Here’s a summary of Zendesk’s visitor tracking tools for customer service teams.

• Embedded analytics. Zendesk’s embedded analytics tool lets teams gather and analyze incoming data embedded directly into the product or application. Teams also have the option to set up as a standalone portal.
• Reports. Zendesk Explore is Zendesk’s reporting feature, delivering premium insights into user experience. Gain access to historical data to understand trends or make quick adaptations with real-time data. Utilize their pre-built dashboards or build a custom one.

Pricing

Zendesk offers three paid plans for individuals and small teams (starting at Suite Team’s $55/month billed annually per agent, up to Suite Professional’s $115/month billed annually per agent). Zendesk’s highest tier, Suite Enterprise, is available for businesses and enterprises upon request.

Zendesk also offers a basic plan with limited features for $19/month, as well as a 30-day free trial for Suite Team up to Suite Professional.

11. Salesforce – best user tracking tool for sales and marketing teams

Salesforce is a visitor identification tool and customer retention management software for marketing and sales teams.

Main Features

Here’s a summary of Salesforce’s visitor identification tools for marketing and sales teams.

• Opportunity health signals. Salesforce’s pipeline insights feature health signals from customers. Whether a sale is about to close or customers are about to drop, get notified of changes and grab opportunities before they pass.
• Customer 360-degree view. With this feature, customer data from every step of their journey is captured in one place. This shared view enables teams to work together to deliver personalized experiences and trusted relationships with customers.
• Augmented marketing analysis. With Salesforce’s Einstein AI, you can augment your reports with out-of-the-box insights, or create forecasts that predict user behavior.

Pricing

Salesforce’s small business pricing offers two paid tiers (starting at Starter Suite’s $25/month per user, up to Pro Suite’s $25/month per user) billed annually. Salesforce also offers a 30-day free trial.

12. Sprout Social – best tool for tracking user engagement across social media

Sprout Social is a social media management and web analytics tool with user engagement and customer analytics as key features.

Main Features

Here’s a brief overview of Sprout Social’s social media engagement tracking tools.

• Social listening. Sprout Social’s social listening feature scours the millions of social media posts made every day to gauge your brand perception among your customer base.
• Crisis notifications. Sprout Social notifies businesses of potential PR disasters with message spike alerts. When Sprout Social detects an anomalous increase in @mentions, they notify teams to address the issue before it becomes a broader crisis.
• Audience engagement maximization. Discover the optimal time to post with Sprout Social’s Optimal Send Times feature. Sprout Social scours through as much as 16 weeks of audience data to calculate the best times to post for your audience.

Pricing

Sprout Social offers four paid plans (starting at Standard’s $249/month up to Advanced’s $499/month). Its highest tier, Enterprise, operated a quote-based pricing model. Sprout Social also offers a 30-day free trial, no credit card required.

13. ChartMogul – best subscription and revenue tracking software

ChartMogul is an analytics platform and revenue-tracking software for subscriptions.

Main Features

Here’s a summary of ChartMogul’s subscription and revenue-tracking software.

• Subscription analytics. ChartMogul’s subscription analytics tools help track user behavior that translates to significant changes in your ARR. In addition, investigate the impact forex movements are making on your metrics.
• Customer retention insights. ChartMogul’s new CRM platform gives teams access to different analytics tools, like sales funnel analyses and revenue forecasts, that present a clearer picture of your performance.

Pricing

ChartMogul offers two paid plans for both SMEs and large enterprises. The paid plan for SMEs, called Scale, uses a sliding scale pricing model.

The paid plan for large enterprises, called volume, is available only upon request.

14. AppDynamics – best infrastructure tracking software

AppDynamics is an observability platform and infrastructure tracking software for performance insights and lifecycle management.

Main Features

Here’s a brief overview of AppDynamics’s infrastructure tracking software.

• Infrastructure optimization. AppDynamics’s strengths lie in its infrastructure optimization tools. You can take metrics and events from user journeys to identify weak points in your infrastructure.
• Application performance monitoring. APM tools from AppDynamics keep users satisfied with their experience, correlating business outcomes with faults found within IT performance.
• Customer journey insights. Conduct funnel analysis and correlate drop-offs with backend issues in the IT infrastructure.

Conclusion

User tracking tools empower businesses to act according to pressing customer needs, enabling users to have the best customer experience and businesses to experience sustainable growth.

Are you interested in what user tracking software can do for you? Sign up for a free Userpilot demo today and reap the benefits of user tracking tools!

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