Learn / Guides / Web analytics report
Top 20 web analytics tools from our survey of 2000+ experts
In our State of Web Analytics report, we asked 2000+ professionals to name the web analytics tools they currently rely on. Here’s a closer look at the results, including the: Top 9 traditional analytics tools, and 8 most popular behavior analytics tools Plus, we go one step further by introducing 3 new(ish) cookieless analytics options for you to consider.
Last updated
16 Sep 2021
Top 9 web analytics tools used by professionals
When the topic of analytics comes up, people might immediately think of the industry leader, Google Analytics; but that’s just the tip of a vast web analytics iceberg.
Here are the top nine web analytics tools used by over 2000 professionals, in order of popularity:
1. Google Analytics
What it is: traffic analytics tool from Google
What it’s used for: analyzing website traffic, users, bounce rates, goal conversions, and real-time visitor count
Price: free
74% of the 2000+ analytics professionals we surveyed use Google Analytics (GA). This didn’t surprise us, since GA is by far the market leader in the web analytics space, used on at least 30 million websites according to BuiltWith. GA is free for everyone, but data sampling will occur at high volumes unless you pay for Google 360.
⏫ Power up: get more from your Google Analytics data by combining it with Hotjar’s heatmap, session recording, and feedback tools. Here are 5 ways to use Google Analytics and Hotjar together to grow your business.
2. Adobe Analytics
What it is: traffic analytics and multichannel data collection tool from Adobe
What it’s used for: an enterprise alternative to Google Analytics
Price: on request
4% of experts surveyed use Adobe Analytics. As an enterprise alternative to Google Analytics, Adobe Analytics is a specialist analytics tool, offering multichannel data collection spanning web, voice, OTT (over-the-top), and IoT (Internet of Things). The focus is on machine learning and predictive algorithms for advanced insights.
3. Mixpanel
What it is: advanced product and business analytics platform
What it’s used for: tracking customer behavior and KPIs across websites and mobile apps
Price: from free for 1,000 monthly tracked users
Another 4% of the analytics experts we surveyed use Mixpanel. Unlike traffic analytics tools, Mixpanel is designed to help SaaS and website owners get real-time data insights into how people interact with a product.
4. Matomo
What it is: free and open-source traffic analytics
What it’s used for: measuring website traffic and user behavior
Price: from free for self-hosted users
Used by 2% of polled experts, Matomo (formerly known as Piwik) is a privacy-focused free analytics platform. You can self-host Matomo on your own server or WordPress installation, or pay for a cloud account.
5. Statcounter
What it is: web traffic analytics
What it’s used for: tracking website traffic, sessions, pageviews, and real-time visitors
Price: from free for 500 pageviews
2% of analytics professionals in our survey use Statcounter. Data-points on the latest 500 pageviews are available for free, or users can upgrade to a premium account for more features, including landing page analysis and paid traffic tracking.
6. Yandex Metrica
What it is: free all-in-one website analytics from Russian search engine Yandex
What it’s used for: traffic metrics and user behavior data
Price: free
Another 2% of polled experts use Yandex Metrica as their web analytics tool of choice. Unlike GA, Yandex Metrica offers unsampled data, even at high traffic volumes. Yandex Metrica also includes behavior analytics tools, including session replays, click maps, and scroll heatmaps.
7. Amplitude
What it is: product intelligence.
What it’s used for: tracking product usage, user behavior, and funnel conversions
Price: from free for up to 10 million actions per month
1% of our polled analytics users chose Amplitude. Unlike GA, Amplitude is focused on tracking user experience and offers advanced features like behavior cohorting, and persona and user profile data.
8. Baidu Analytics
What it is: traffic analytics from Chinese search engine Baidu
What it’s used for: recording website visitors, traffic sources, and conversions
Price: from free
Another 1% of our 2000+ analytics experts use Baidu Analytics (also known as Baidu Tongji). Baidu Analytics offers standard traffic analytics data, integrates with Baidu’s PPC platform (Baidu Tuiguang) to provide ad performance metrics, and shows organic search keyword data from Baidu’s search engine.
9. HubSpot
What it is: marketing platform and sales analytics software
What it’s used for: measuring traffic, managing leads, email automation, and conversion rate optimization (CRO)
Price: from $40/month
Used by 1% of polled analytics professionals, Hubspot is an all-in-one customer lifecycle analytics tool. Hubspot has a lot of functionality, from landing page creation to social media mention tracking, email performance measurement, and lead nurturing.
🤓 Learn more: we teamed up with HubSpot to give you this free 30-minute lesson on how to speed up your website.
Top 4 free website analytics tools to use in 2021
Just getting started with web analytics? Then you’re probably looking to use a free tool while you figure things out and grow your site.
We took the most popular tools from our survey and created this list of the top four free website analytics tools to use in 2021:
Why traditional web analytics tools are useful
Traditional web analytics tools help you understand who visits your website, and what user interaction is taking place. For example, you can collect data like:
Traffic: find out how many people view your website, where they are coming from, and whether they are
Time on page: see how long visitors spend browsing your most important pages
Bounce rate: learn how many visitors leave your website after visiting a single page
With this information, you can start to optimize your website performance and make significant improvements.
But there is a caveat:
Eventually, you’ll reach the point where traditional analytics data won’t be enough to really understand how visitors are experiencing your website. And the majority of analytics professionals we polled for our survey agreed—Google Analytics and equivalent tools don’t help them understand why customers do what they do.
Which brings us to our next point…
What traditional web analytics data won’t tell you
Web analytics tools—like the ones we mentioned above—give you a useful and comprehensive log of what happens on your website, but there are some questions they cannot answer on their own, like:
What your visitors were looking for when they landed on your site
What they think and experience as they browse through its pages
What information is missing
Whether visitors left happy after finding what they needed—or frustrated after getting stuck somewhere
which is where complementary behavior analytics software can help you paint a clearer picture and understand how visitors experience your site.
With tools like heatmaps and session recordings (more on this later), behavior analytics tools add a qualitative dimension to the information you collect from tools like GA, so you can get answers to those magic wand questions that web analytics alone can’t answer.
How to combine qualitative and quantitative analytics data
Instead of seeing traditional analytics and behavior analytics as giving you two distinct datasets (quantitative traffic data and qualitative UX data), you’ll get a lot more out of both if you learn how to combine them for greater effect. For example:
First, use quantitative data—like pageviews, bounce rate, or session duration—to identify problem pages and find your best-converting content
Then, add a behaviour analytics tool to collect qualitative information, and to understand the user behavior behind the big numbers
Using both quantitative and qualitative data, you’ll know more about why users leave without converting and will be able to identify which changes and improvements to make to your site.
👉 Get started: find a page with a high exit rate in Google Analytics, place a Hotjar heatmap on it, and start reviewing what’s being clicked on or ignored, and see how far visitors are scrolling.
For additional context, watch session recordings of people exiting the page, and observe their behavior: what do they do before they leave? Are they leaving in frustration (tip: look for rage clicks), or did they simply get what they needed?
Top 8 behavior analytics tools used by experts in 2020 (and beyond)
Behavior analytics tools help you collect and analyze user behavior on your website by giving you visual cues about visitor clicks and browsing activity, and by allowing you to get direct feedback on the user experience (UX).
Here’s a list of the top 8 behavior analytics tools that came up in our web analytics survey, in order of popularity:
1. Hotjar
What it is: product experience insights software
What it’s used for: heatmap analysis, and collecting and analyzing session recordings and user feedback to improve UX
Price: from free for 35 sessions/day.
Hotjar (hi there! 👋) is product experience insights software that helps you:
Understand why your users take certain actions on your site (or why they don’t), and get voice of the customer (VoC) feedback from real users through tools like heatmaps, session recordings, and surveys so you can build products that delight your customers.
We’re proud to be the most popular behavior analytics tool on the market, used on over 900k websites in 180+ countries.
🤓 Learn more: Hotjar is built to add depth to the insights you get from traditional analytics tools like Google Analytics.
When you use Hotjar and GA together, you can answer questions about the behavior and needs of your users—questions you can’t answer by using GA alone. Here’s a quick write-up from our team about why and how we think you should use Hotjar and Google Analytics together.
2. Crazy Egg
What it is: website optimization tool
What it’s used for: heatmaps, recordings, and A/B testing
Price: from $24/month (annual billing required)
Crazy Egg started off as a design agency and then relaunched as a website optimization tool, with the goal of helping businesses track, evaluate, and improve their conversion rates.
3. VWO
What it is: A/B testing tool
What it’s used for: split testing, and funnel and form conversion analytics
Price: from $99/month
VWO is a popular A/B testing tool that makes it onto our behavior analytics list due to VWO Insights, their visitor behavior analytics toolset.
4. FullStory
What it is: digital experience analytics tool
What it’s used for: conversion analysis, funnel visualizations, and page speed metrics
Price: from free for 1,000 sessions/month
FullStory describes their software as an easy-to-use digital intelligence platform that helps companies solve problems, find answers, and fine-tune their customer experience.
5. Lucky Orange
What it is: traffic and user behavior analytics
What it’s used for: viewing traffic data, conversion funnels, and visitor replays
Price: from $10/month.
Lucky Orange is a real-time analytics tool that helps online businesses identify issues and give usability support directly to individual users.
6. Smartlook
What it is: user recording and heatmap analytics
What it’s used for: visitor journey tracking, and event and funnel reporting for websites and mobile apps
Price: from free for 1,500 sessions/month
Smartlook is a behavior analytics tool that records user behavior on websites and mobile apps.
7. Clicktale
What it is: customer behavior analytics tool
What it’s used for: analyzing user behavior patterns on web and mobile apps with heatmaps and session replays
Price: on request
Clicktale describes their software as digital experience analytics and customer behavior analysis, with the goal of transforming digital interactions into insights and visualizations.
8. Mouseflow
What it is: behavior analytics tool
What it’s used for: tracking user behavior with heatmaps, session replays, funnels, and forms
Price: from free for 500 recordings/month
Mouseflow is a behavior analytics tool that allows users to replay the full visitor experience and identify pain points, boost conversions, and optimize websites.
BONUS: 3 new(ish) cookieless analytics tools to try
Privacy-focused analytics is a relatively new category that addresses two customer concerns that came up during our survey: privacy, and feature bloat.
When we asked 2000+ experts about their biggest challenges with traditional website analytics, their second most common issue was that the volume of data and options were overwhelming. Privacy concerns also popped in the ‘other (please specify)’ field, so we think both are worth addressing here.
Here are three simple, cookieless, and privacy-focused analytics tools to try:
1. Plausible
What it is: Plausible is a lightweight, open-source, cookieless website analytics tool
What it’s used for: collecting simple website traffic data like pageviews, bounce rate, and visit duration
Price: from $6/month for 10,000 pageviews
2. Fathom
What it is: Fathom is a simple, light-weight, privacy-focused analytics tool
What it’s used for: tracking basic website analytics data like unique visitors, bounce rate, and goal completions
Price: from $14/month for 100,000 pageviews
3. Simple Analytics
What it is: Simple Analytics is a basic, cookieless analytics tool
What it’s used for: tracking top-level traffic metrics like referral source, top pages, and visitor country
Price: from $19/month for 100,000 views.
