The Apps Have Spoken: Top 13 iOS App Analytics Platforms [2019]

It’s been a rollercoaster of a year for Apple. The tech giant celebrated the ten-year anniversary of the App Store, reached some new money milestones, saw PR highs and lows, and introduced a slew of new toys. iOS app development teams got some new technology to play with: iOS 12, Siri Shortcuts, and ARKit 2. The upcoming year promises to have plenty more in store, with 2019 predictions including more changes in screen size, improved graphics, and the iPhone 11.

With so many new innovations, mobile app professionals have their work cut out for them if they want to keep pace. Faster performance and edge-to-edge display mean less user frustration and more screen real estate to play with, but product teams should be sure that their app meets user expectations with every new update and feature.

This is where choosing the right iOS app analytics tools plays an essential role. Vendors are continuing to expand their capabilities, build additional integrations, and add new features. To help you make an educated decision on what tools to use, we created a new and updated list of the best app analytics tools on the market. We researched the analytics SDKs used by the top apps in the App Store and listed their key features and pricing. Bear in mind that building any app analytics stack often takes more than one SDK, so pay attention to the key features for each tool. Many of them offer free trials, so you can mix ‘n match until you find a combo that suits your needs.

Without any further ado, here are the 13 best iOS app analytics tools for 2019. Which one(s) will you be using to give your app its best year yet?

iOS App Analytics Tool #1: Firebase

“Firebase helps mobile app teams succeed.”

Image: Firebase

Built on Google infrastructure, Firebase is a suite of products that can be used individually or combined to expedite and improve app development, user experience, and growth. Firebase’s powerful iOS app analytics can track users from acquisition to in-app usage across different platforms. Firebase uses machine learning to offer smart user segmentation and predictive analytics. iOS developers can also use Firebase to monitor performance issues with the popular Crashlytics tool.

Features:

• Predictive analytics
• Crash reporting with Crashlytics
• Cross-platform user tracking
• Integration with Google’s suite of mobile tools

Price: Free, fixed price, and pay-as-you-go plans

Free Trial: Yes

iOS App Analytics Tool #2: Appsee

“Understand in-app experience like never before”

Image: Appsee

The market leader in qualitative app analytics, Appsee’s robust platform goes beyond numerical metrics and offers powerful out-of-the-box tools for product managers, UX/UI designers, developers, and mobile marketers. Appsee provides session recordings and touch heatmaps that show exactly how users experience each screen and feature of the app. These tools are combined with features such as conversion funnels, crash reporting, navigation paths, and UI analysis. They help ensure deep, actionable insights on user behavior, usability, navigation, and more. Appsee helps entire mobile app teams make data-driven decisions faster, reduce guesswork, and increase retention and conversion rates.

Features:

• Qualitative analytics: user session recordings, touch heatmaps
• Crash analytics and reporting via email, Slack, or SMS alerts
• Conversion funnels, action cohorts, and navigation paths
• Automatic tagging of events and gestures

Price: Free, Premium and Enterprise plans

Free Trial: Yes

iOS App Analytics Tool #3: Mixpanel

“Create products and experiences that people love.”

Image: Mixpanel

Mixpanel enables product and marketing teams to take intelligent action on their data with automatic insights powered by machine learning. Mixpanel’s extensive platform includes tools such as user flows and conversion funnels that help understand user behavior and increase engagement, retention, and loyalty. Mixpanel’s Predict feature can even make predictions on future user behavior and conversions. Mixpanel also goes beyond the analytics arena and includes tools for re-engagement through email, push notifications, and in-app messaging, and for running A/B tests within the platform.

Features:

• Automatic Insights
• Predictive Analytics
• Conversion funnels

Price: Free, Startup plan, Enterprise plan on request

Free Trial: Yes

iOS App Analytics Tool #4: Flurry

“Actionable analytics for your mobile apps”

Image: Flurry

One of the most popular iOS app analytics tools out there, Flurry can track and compare metrics in real time across your entire app portfolio, including iOS, tvOS and watchOS apps. Flurry’s customizable dashboards zoom in on user actions, acquisition, conversion, retention, and revenue. You can even use Flurry’s machine learning to get predictions of audience metrics such as age and gender. Flurry also includes classic in-depth tools such as cohorts, user paths, and conversion funnels, as well as a crash analytics feature.

Features:

• Predictive analytics
• User paths
• Customizable dashboards for acquisition, conversion, and retention

Price: Free

Free Trial: Yes

iOS App Analytics Tool #5: Adobe Analytics

“Eat, drink, and breathe insights with Adobe Analytics.”

Image: Adobe Analytics

Adobe Analytics is a tool catered towards enterprise apps , and provides a comprehensive suite of tools from attribution to marketing. These tools include advanced segmentation, user flows, and cohorting, among others. Adobe’s analytics tools collect data in real time. They also include predictive analytics based on AI and machine learning that can predict future behavior such as churn or conversion prediction.

Features:

• AI and machine learning based predictive analytics
• Automatic anomaly Detection
• User flows and cohort analysis

Price: Enterprise

Free Trial: No

iOS App Analytics Tool #6: Keen

“Ship user-facing metrics in an afternoon, not months”

Image: Keen

Keen IO is a cloud-based analytics database for developers to create “an alternative to an in-house analytics database”. It streams data on any user interaction in real time, then stores it in a database that’s optimized for storing event data. As soon as the data is collected, developers can use Keen’s APIs to run analysis on them. With simple queries, mobile app professionals can then use the platform to view custom dashboards with funnels, segmentation, cohort analysis, and more.

Features:

• Batch upload historical data
• Custom event tracking with rich attributes
• Customizable dashboards

Price: By usage

Free Trial: Yes

iOS App Analytics Tool #7: Localytics

“Real-time insights fuel smarter mobile app engagement”

Image: Localytics

Localytics combines a strong marketing automation platform with mobile analytics features for increasing engagement and improving features. Localytics analyzes entire user journeys and can even track app uninstalls. Customizable dashboards and filters enable at-a-glance insights that give each member of the mobile app team a detailed overview of the data that are most relevant to them. Localytics also includes an industry benchmarking feature so that you can compare your mobile app to others in the industry.

Features:

• Predictive analytics
• Uninstall tracking
• Industry benchmarks

Price: Upon request

Free Trial: No

iOS App Analytics Tool #8: Amplitude

“Product Analytics for Startups”

Image: Amplitude

Amplitude helps you answer your user behavior questions and increase conversion rates by analyzing each user interaction. One of Amplitude’s biggest strengths is its powerful action cohort tool, which helps understand how users interact with the app and what brings them back. Amplitude can identify different personas that are likely to convert or become loyal users. Amplitude Insight uses machine learning to send smart alerts about various KPIs, helping mobile app teams stay one step ahead of fluctuations in conversion and retention.

Features:

• Behavioral Cohorting
• Machine learning based smart alerts
• Single-user analysis

Price: Free/paid plans

Free Trial: No

iOS App Analytics Tool #9: Adjust

“Discover user behavior in real time”

Image: Adjust

Adjust provides end-to-end app analytics for mobile marketers, from attribution to uninstall/reinstall. Its customizable event tracking can cover every event and conversion goal, from the initial download and signup process to purchase completion. Adjust’s cohort analysis helps discover patterns in user behavior by segmenting users according to various metrics and filters. The Adjust dashboard is known for its sleek user-friendly design, and is also highly customizable.

Features:

• Uninstall tracking
• Funnel and cohort analytics
• Customizable event tracking

Price: Upon request

Free Trial: No

iOS App Analytics Tool #10: Apple App Analytics

“Gain Insights with Analytics”

Image: Apple

Apple’s App Analytics, via App Store Connect, is included with the Apple Developer Program membership so there’s no need for coding or complicated setups. The free iOS app analytics platform tracks basic metrics for user engagement and marketing across iOS, macOS, and tvOS apps. It also provides data on user acquisition from the App Store and a crash analytics tool that filters crashes by iOS and app versions.

Features:

• User engagement metrics
• App Store acquisition data
• Crash analytics

Price: Free

Free Trial: No

iOS App Analytics Tool #11: Pendo

“Pendo Makes Software Lovable”

Image: Pendo

Pendo offers in-depth product analytics that helps you understand who your power users are and what users actually do in the app. Pendo’s segmentation feature includes side-by-side comparisons of user behavior across various segments. If your company has multiple apps, you can use Pendo’s analytics tools across your entire portfolio of products and compare performance, engagement, and retention. You can even use Pendo to optimize your app with A/B testing and run experiments without having to write any code or even issuing version updates.

Features:

• Custom segmentation
• A/B testing
• In-app messaging, surveys, or walkthroughs

Price: Upon request

Free Trial: No

iOS App Analytics Tool #12: Countly

“Secure and extensible product analytics”

Image: Countly

Countly’s customizable dashboards use plugins that you can choose in order to track user behavior analytics, crashes, retention, and even revenue. Funnels, user flows, and cohort analytics show you how users navigate through your app and where they drop off. Countly’s “Drill” tool helps answer pressing questions by delving deeper into the app’s data with a user-friendly built-in query builder — no complex SQL required. Another useful feature displays single user journeys to let you see how specific users navigate through your app. Countly supports iOS, watchOS, tvOS and macOS.

Features:

• Funnels, cohorts, and user flows
• Easy to use query builder
• Crash analytics

Price: Free/tailored paid plans

Free Trial: Yes

iOS App Analytics Tool #13: Heap

“The New Standard in Tracking Customer Data”

Image: Heap

Heap is a code-free, point-and-click way to understand user behavior with both aggregate and single-user level iOS app analytics. It enables teams to make data-driven decisions faster by automatically collecting data on every user interaction, across different channels. Heap’s conversion funnels provide information across user segment or attribution channels to pinpoint exactly where users dropped off and help understand why. The dynamic cohorting feature enables creating segments of users and then combining them with a variety of user attributes. This helps understand user preferences and improve LTV.

Features:

• Point-and-click, code-free setup with the Event Visualizer
• Cross-channel analytics
• Conversion funnels and dynamic cohorting

Price: Free for small projects, fixed price for SMBs, price on request for enterprise

Free Trial: Yes

TL;DR:

As iOS app development teams gear up for another exciting, challenging, and action-packed year, now is the time to review your analytics stack. Choosing high-caliber analytics for your iOS app can make the difference between a substantial improvement in KPIs and a dangerous drop. Why? If you and your team don’t understand what the data from your analytics actually means, you’ll end up wasting time and resources on guesswork, confusion, and mistakes. A good analytics tool will help you answer the right questions, and instead of creating more confusing ones. Before you plunge into your 2019 roadmap, make sure you have powerful tools in your toolbox.

Shopping around for other tools, such as attribution, A/B testing, marketing, or crash analytics? Download our free Ultimate SDK Guide for a catalogue of the best mobile app SDKs of the year.

Want more advice on using mobile app analytics without losing your head?

How To Succeed in Mobile App Analytics Without Really Trying

The Apps Have Spoken: Top 13 iOS App Analytics Platforms [2019] was originally published in Hacker Noon on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.