7 Reasons Why Usermaven Is The Best Alternative To Amplitude

Amplitude and Usermaven are analytics tools that help businesses track user behavior and analyze data to make data-driven decisions.

However, there exist key focal differences between the two tools. Amplitude, like Mixpanel, is geared specifically toward product analytics, while Usermaven is a comprehensive product and website analytics solution.

This article compares the two and explains how Usermaven better meets the diverse analytics needs of a digital business.

What is Usermaven?

Usermaven combines product and website analytics in one tool for online businesses looking to use their statistics to make meaningful changes to their marketing campaigns, product features, conversion rates, and other business goals.

Having a single source of truth is crucial for businesses looking to understand their customers better and make informed decisions that lead to growth.

What is Amplitude?

Amplitude Amplitude is a digital analytics tool that helps companies analyze customer data and journeys. It empowers teams across departments to gain insights for sound decision-making.

Amplitude is privacy-friendly and features event tracking, segmentation, funnels, user tracking, and access management.

What are product and website analytics?

SaaS businesses mainly use two broad categories of analytics: product analytics and website analytics. Website analytics are primarily used by the marketing team.

However, product analytics are used by the product team and product owners, in addition to the marketing team. While both product and website analytics are powerful tools, they address different SaaS business needs.

Product analytics

Usermaven helps companies understand how their customers use the product. It provides information related to customer behavior regarding SaaS product usage.

This data is used to improve the product experience, leading to increased customer retention. Many product analytics software and tools are available for businesses to measure and keep track of their product’s performance and help identify hidden opportunities for product growth.

Website analytics

Website analytics Website analytics measures website performance and offers insights into user behavior as they visit a website. Website analytics is related to identifying website data, like how visitors use different website components to accomplish their tasks.

The data obtained from web analytics platforms can help businesses turn anonymous traffic into customers. The main goal of website analytics is to improve the website’s visitors' experience by providing companies with critical insights for traffic channels' optimization.

Why do we need to keep track of these analytics?

Keeping track of product and website analytics allows businesses to monitor their product’s performance and get a better understanding of visitors, such as where they are located (geographical information) and how they behave while using the website, etc.

These analytics can:

• Identify the parts of the product that are causing confusion or frustration.
• Know more about customers' behavioral analytics and user engagement.
• Direct product development and design.
• Lead you to make profitable decisions in order to improve their user experience.
• Identify the business’s weaknesses and strengths.
• Measure business performance by tracking KPIs that reveal the scale of business progress.
• Understand market demographics and target its desired audience more accurately.
• Optimize the website’s performance and visitors’ website experience.
• Optimize and track marketing campaigns and traffic channels.
• Identify what pages perform well and how to improve the user journey.

Therefore, keeping track of both product and website analytics can help businesses to deliver value and stay competitive in today’s fast-evolving technology space.

Why product teams seek out Amplitude alternatives

Apart from being a famous tool focusing majorly on user behavior, it has some limitations that cause product teams to seek out alternatives. These limitations are given below:

Limitations of Amplitude

• Requires expertise - The tool requires a lot of expertise and extensive engineering resources to utilize completely.
• Steep learning curve - Due to its strong analytics capabilities, the tool can be hard for people who do not have any data analysis background. So, a certain level of expertise is required to interpret and analyze the gained data.
• Limited integration - Even though Amplitude supports third-party integrations with many popular tools like Segment, Mixpanel, etc., it still lacks integrations with some third-party tools that can be a business requirement.
• Difficult to set up - The initial setup is not straightforward. Amplitude supports event tagging, allowing users to tag the site or product with appropriate events to measure data about its user behavior. This tagging process is tricky as you require the engineering team to place them with custom code (manual event setup).
• Manual event tagging - Moreover, Amplitude is not flexible when it comes to adding new events. Each time any new update comes to your site, the tagging needs to be updated. Thus, tracking additional events can create difficulty in consistent analysis.
• Lacks transparent pricing - Although Amplitude offers various paid plans, there is a significant pricing gap from free to paid ones. Lack of pricing transparency is another concern highlighted by its users.
• Data export limitations - Limited connectivity with other warehouses is another limitation of Amplitude. Large companies and enterprises find challenges in moving data to data warehouses and other BI tools.

Why choose Usermaven over Amplitude?

Usermaven is an analytics solution designed for product and marketing teams. Here’s why choosing Usermaven adds value to your SaaS company.

1. Easy setup and use

The usability of a tool helps improve user acceptance and user experience. Users are more likely to learn the features of a tool with high usability and retain its knowledge. They can get value from utilizing the tool to its full capacity.

Thus, Usermaven is centered around usability. It eliminates the need to rely on developers and data scientists to track user activity across websites and products. You can quickly set up Usermaven and implement no-code event tracking.

Book a FREE Demo with us to see how our user-friendly platform can help you get the insights you need to optimize your website and drive growth.

On the contrary, Amplitude users find the tool overwhelming and difficult to set up. It requires certain expertise to make the most out of it. Non-analyst get confused with all the features, data slicing, and visualization options. The initial setup is not straightforward, and it has a learning curve.

Not only is initial tagging difficult, but you also need to update it whenever a new update to your product or website occurs. Although powerful, Amplitude is not a beginner-friendly analytics solution.

2. First-party cookies and cookie-less option

Cookies collect user browsing behavior and preferences data for analytics tools to optimize user experiences and make data-driven decisions. Businesses must comply with privacy laws and provide transparent information about cookie usage.

Third-party cookies can be invasive and used for targeted ads, while first-party cookies are managed by the visited domain and used to optimize the user experience.

Amplitude uses both first-party and third-party cookies to collect user data which can raise a concern for privacy-oriented companies. The safety of both the first and third-party cookies depends on how they are used. Do they respect users’ privacy and comply with privacy regulations? The answer to this question is subjective.

On the other hand, Usermaven’s pixel white labeling uses cookie-less tracking to provide 99% accurate stats by bypassing adblockers that other analytics tools like Amplitude are subject to as they use cookie-based tracking.

Hence, Usermaven saves the day by offering cookie-less tracking because cookie-less tracking:

• Offers enhanced privacy as it doesn’t rely on cookies to collect information.
• Provides accurate and reliable user behavior data as it doesn't rely on cookies that can be deleted or blocked.
• Uses contextual targeting and analyzing server logs to deliver an improved user experience.
• Complies with regulations related to online data collection and usage. Thus, companies can overcome user privacy concerns.

3. Multiple projects and unlimited users

You can create multiple projects within your Amplitude account to track data for different websites, mobile apps, or other digital products and invite as many users as needed to collaborate on those projects.

With Amplitude, you can also set up permissions and roles for different users, allowing you to control who has access to specific data and features within your account. Additionally, Amplitude offers features such as collaboration tools and shared dashboards.

Similarly, you can have multiple teams leveraging Usermaven’s analytics capabilities. All teams associated with your product, such as product, marketing, and customer success, can get what they need for holistic product growth.

Usermaven offers team access, unlimited users, and dashboard sharing, giving all the stakeholders a unified product and website performance.

In addition to the above, Usermaven is an agency-friendly analytics platform. You can enjoy client workspaces with unlimited users and dashboard sharing - a perfect partner for marketing agencies to track user behavior and engagement across a wide range of digital products and services.

4. Auto-capture events

With Usermaven’s auto-capture feature, event tracking becomes effortless and codeless. You can automatically track every button click, form submission, and page visit with a quick 5-minute setup. In case of design changes, you can use retroactive data tracking to find insights from past data.

• It captures all digital experiences to uncover the unknowns in your data related to user behavior.
• It eliminates errors and ensures data is captured consistently across all pages and interactions.
• It speeds up the development cycle and improves time-to-market for new features and updates, requiring less time and resources that would otherwise be spent coding and tracking events manually.
• Auto event capturing makes adapting to changes and updates in your website and product’s functionality easy by eliminating the need to modify code for each event.
• Provides enhanced insights with accurate and consistent data.
• Setting and managing tracking configuration gets easier for non-technical users.

Amplitude does not offer event auto-capture resulting in tedious tracking configuration. Also, the learning curve is steep with Amplitude as it takes technical expertise to set up.

5. Privacy-friendly analytics (GDPR & CCPA Compliant)

In today’s technology world, privacy concerns are heightened, and various regulations have surfaced to safeguard users' privacy and provide protection against any maleficent use of their data. Thus, companies must comply with privacy laws and regulations to avoid getting fined and losing customer trust.

Privacy-oriented analytics tools serve the purpose of protecting users’ personal data and providing insights to businesses, all while complying with privacy regulations. Amplitude and Usermaven are compliant with GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) and CCPA (California Consumer Privacy Act)

6. Website and product analytics (A complete analytics solution)

Usermaven is a complete solution to your data analytics needs, offering website and product analytics. You won’t have to rely on multiple tools to get a full picture of your product and website performance.

Amplitude is mainly designed as a product analytics solution rather than a website analytics tool. Although it offers event tracking and can track website events and user behavior, it is not specifically optimized for website analytics. It may not provide all the required features for a comprehensive website analytics solution.

On the other hand, GA4 is not completely privacy-friendly by default. It collects and processes user data, and you are responsible for ensuring that you are using the tool in compliance with data privacy regulations and user expectations. It is important to review and configure the privacy settings and features of GA4 to ensure that it is appropriate for your organization's privacy policies and data privacy requirements. All of this can impede privacy-oriented business. Thus, Usermaven is a great privacy-friendly alternative offering powerful analytics capabilities without compromising user data privacy.

7. Affordable & transparent pricing

Every business’s needs vary with the growth stage. What works for an enterprise will not be sustainable for a startup. Thus, catering to businesses' varying needs, Usermaven comes with transparent and affordable pricing plans.

It has a free plan (Starter plan) for small businesses, offering website and product analytics. Businesses that only need website analytics can choose the Pro plan. The Premium plan allows SaaS enterprises to enjoy company-level website and product analytics and many other features.

Amplitude lacks transparent pricing. You only get to find out the pricing upon request. Users report a significant gap in the pricing of free and paid Amplitude plans. Their Starter plan is free for small business but only offer product analytics. The Growth plan is for product teams requiring full customer journey visibility. And the Enterprise plan is for large organizations with custom requirements.

Top 8 Usermaven features

Here are a few of the Usermaven awesome features:

1. Retention tracking

Usermaven offers two reports to track how your product is performing in terms of retaining customers.

Slipping away users gives you the number and list of users that haven’t returned to use your product for specific days, such as 7, 14, 30, 60, and 90 days. With the list of users, you can tailor your marketing message to communicate with and retain them.

Weekly/ monthly user retention lets you see how many users are coming back to use your product after they sign up. You can segment your audience and perform retention cohort analysis to analyze how different user groups engage with your product.

2. Unique user and page view tracking

Determining the unique users and page views offers important information used in marketing analytics. The unique user tracking feature provides real-time insights into the number of individual users visiting your website or app rather than just the total number of sessions or page views.

This information helps you understand the size of your audience and how many unique visitors you attract over time. You can also identify patterns in user behavior, such as how frequently users return to your website or app and how many new users are being acquired.

The page view tracking feature provides insights into how many times each page on your website or app is being viewed and by how many unique users. You can find the most popular or engaging pages among your audience and the pages needing improvement. You can better understand how users navigate your website or app and where they may encounter issues or drop-off points.

3. UTM tracking

UTM (Urchin Tracking Module) tracking feature of Usermaven allows you to track the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns and traffic sources.

By adding various UTM tracking parameters to the URL of your landing pages, you can track where your traffic is coming from and identify which marketing campaigns are driving the most traffic and conversions.

Different UTM parameters that you can add to your web links are the following:

1. Source: The traffic source, such as a search engine or a social media platform.
2. Medium: The marketing medium used to drive traffic, such as email, paid search, or social media.
3. Campaign: The specific campaign or promotion that is being tracked.
4. Content: The specific content or ad within a campaign that is being tracked.
5. Term: The specific keyword that triggered the ad or link.

4. User profiles

With Usermaven, you can have a 360 profile view of individual users based on their behavior on your website or app. The user profiling feature collects data on individual users, such as their demographics, browsing history, and actions taken on your website or app.

This data is then used to create each user's profile, including information such as their age, gender, location, interests, and purchasing behavior.

User profiling can help you better understand your audience and create targeted marketing campaigns that resonate with specific segments of your user base. For example, you may use user profiling to identify high-value customers who are more likely to make repeat purchases and create targeted promotions or loyalty programs to retain their business.

It is important to note that Usermaven complies with privacy regulations such as GDPR and CCPA in user profiling.

5. Funnel analysis

The funnel analysis feature lets you visualize user behavior across various funnels on your website and product. You can identify how many users are entering and exiting the funnel.

By doing the drop-off and conversion funnel analysis at the various funnel stages, you can better understand when, where, and why visitors leave your product. You can use this information to optimize your website or app analytics and remove friction in the user journey.

With Usermaven, you can set up multiple funnels analysis and breakdown funnels based on time, location, and technology. You can track the conversion rate and drop-off step.

6. Cohorts

The cohort analysis feature of Usermaven lets you track the behavior and performance of a group of users who share a common characteristic, such as the month they signed up for your service or the product they purchased.

By analyzing these predictive analytics gained from cohorts, you can gain insights into the factors contributing to their behavior and identify opportunities to improve customer retention and acquisition.

7. Path analysis

To track the paths users take on your website or app and analyze their behavior along those paths, Usermaven offers a path analysis feature.

Path analysis uses a visual representation, such as a flowchart or graph, to show users' different paths as they navigate your website or app. By analyzing the paths users take, you can identify common patterns or bottlenecks in the user experience that may be causing users to drop off or abandon their sessions.

Path analysis can be particularly useful for identifying which pages or features on your website or app are most engaging or effective at driving conversions and which pages or features may need improvement.

For example, users may drop off at a particular point in the checkout process, indicating a problem with the payment gateway or a confusing interface. Moreover, path analysis can also help you understand the effectiveness of different marketing channels, such as social media or email campaigns.

8. Multi-channel attribution

With multi-channel attribution, you can discover what touchpoints in the customer journey led to conversion.

Usermaven uses different attribution models, such as last-touch, first-touch, linear, and position decay attribution, to identify which touchpoint resulted in the user taking the desired action rather than assigning ROI to the last touchpoint before conversion.

By using multi-channel attribution in analytics tools, you can better understand the impact of your marketing efforts across different channels and make informed decisions about where to allocate your resources to maximize conversions and ROI.

Usermaven pricing

Usermaven has a transparent, simple, and fair pricing model. It offers three packages based on the growth stage of a company as follows. Additionally, businesses can avail custom plans depending on their unique needs.

• Starter plan - For small businesses (web & product analytics): It is designed for small entrepreneurial setups and is free forever. It allows one user & workspace, six-month data backup, and tracking up to 1 million monthly events.
• Pro plan - For all online businesses (only web analytics): It starts at 14$ per month. This package allows unlimited users, three workspaces, two-year data history, privacy law compliance and tracking up to 100,000 events per month. It offers pixel-white labeling with enterprise-grade infrastructure.
• Premium plan - For SaaS enterprises (web & product analytics): Starting at 99$ per month, this package is for all SaaS businesses. You can enjoy unlimited user access, unlimited workspaces, and infinite work history with company-level analytics. Track up to 1 million monthly events with pixel-white labeling, privacy compliance, and enterprise-grade infrastructure.
• Custom plan: You can also enjoy a custom plan specific to your needs. Just hit us up and we'll discuss the numbers.

10 more Amplitude competitors and alternatives

Some of the shortcomings of Amplitude that lead its users to consider its alternatives include the following:

• Lacks dashboard customization when you want to trim and examine your data from different viewpoints.
• Non-analyst gets overwhelmed due to its extended functionalities and features. And adapting to the tool is not intuitive for non-analyst.
• Software updates and changes impact events and require repeatedly checking in to ensure they are triggering.
• Lacks flexibility, and third-party integration can be a pain.
• Dashboard views on the mobile app can be further improved.
• User support for low-tier plans is challenging.

Below is a list of alternatives to the Amplitude analytics solution.

1. Heap
2. Google Analytics
3. Adobe Analytics
4. Mixpanel
5. Kissmetrics
6. Fathom
7. Matomo
8. Plausible
9. Innertrends
10. Countly

Coming soon to Usermaven

Our team at Usermaven is continuously working to maximize delivering value to its users. We believe in user feedback and use it to craft a seamless and cutting-edge product experience. You can visit our announcements page to find out the new features our team is working on bringing to life.

You are also highly encouraged to add any feature recommendations

Usermaven has just taken flight and aims to grow exponentially with its users. Look at our roadmap to find the exciting features in our development and design pipeline.