A guide to product analytics tools for startups

(I used to work at Heap.)

I think the post is spot on and it shows the Satchel team put did a ton of research into the post. There are two comments I would make on top of the post. First, know if the advice applies to you. If you are pre-product market fit it's probably too early to think about event based analytics. If you have a small number of users and are able to talk with all of them, you will get much more meaningful data getting to know them than if you were to set up product analytics. You probably don't have enough users to get meaningful data from product analytics anyways.

Second, while the autotrack functionality at Heap is fantastic, what I saw was that a significant portion of Heap's customers were not able to use it. This primarily happened because in addition to using Heap's autotrack to collect data, a lot of Heap's customers were also using Segment to collect and route the data between different tools. This created two different sources of truth for the data and Segment usually wound up winning. For that reason, I left Heap ~18 months ago to start Freshpaint (freshpaint.io). Freshpaint is an autotrack based alternative to Segment, allowing you to autotrack data and feed that same dataset into all your different tools. That way you get all the advantages of autotrack without needing to maintain two sources of truth.

I know PostHog is only lightly mentioned in the article, but I would highly recommend checking them out! [0] (They're also open-source and provide a self-hosted solution. [1])

[0] https://posthog.com/

[1] https://github.com/posthog/posthog

Google analytics v4 taking it another level also.

When using event based goals, Google Analytics removes the ability to visualize funnels.

In my day-to-day this is a big drawback.

I’m always suspicious of articles like these that keep bringing up one company that fits their criteria. That tells me the criteria was constructed around a specific offering, not the other way around.