Top 8 Free and Paid Mobile App Analytics Tools In 2023

Mobile analytics tools provide invaluable insights into how users interact with mobile apps and websites. For businesses today, understanding mobile usage and engagement is crucial. 

Mobile currently accounts for over half of all web traffic globally. Monitoring metrics like sessions, conversions, and customer behavior on mobile allows companies to optimize the mobile experience and boost growth. 

This article will guide you through the top 10 free and paid mobile analytics platforms in 2023. Whether you need basic app monitoring or an advanced enterprise-level solution, there are great options to fit your needs and budget. 

Top Mobile Analytics Tools

1. UXCAM

Trusted by some of the largest mobile brands worldwide (Rappi, Nando, Virgin mobile, etc), UXCam is installed in over 37,000 apps and is SOC 2 certified.

UXCam is a robust analytics platform designed to help you make data-driven decisions for your mobile app. The platform aims to boost user engagement, conversion rates, and retention by offering real-time insights into user behavior. 

The product is divided into 2 buckets (product analytics and experience analytics features).

Here’s a breakdown of the features in both buckets.

Product Analytics Features

• Real-Time Insights: UXCam provides real-time data on user behavior and conversion rates, helping you identify areas for improvement in your app.
• Team Dashboards: These dashboards allow for effortless tracking and analysis of KPIs. You can set up reports using a pre-built library, requiring no developer intervention.
• Funnel Analytics: This feature shows you where and why users drop out, helping you identify bottlenecks and opportunities for improvement in the customer journey.
• Screen Flows: Understand how users navigate through your app by analyzing specific user flows based on start and end screens. This feature also helps identify unusual navigation patterns.
• Event Analytics: Send custom events and properties tailored to key actions in your app. This helps you understand the impact of real user behavior on key conversion events.
• Data Segmentation: Use mega-filters and segments to slice and dice your data. You can filter by screen, user, session, and device properties, and even use auto-captured events like rage taps for behavioral segmentation.

Experience Analytics Features

• Session Replay: This feature captures video recordings of user sessions in a privacy-compliant manner, allowing you to see the reasons behind user frustrations.
• Heatmaps: Understand usage patterns through a visual overlay, helping you identify problematic screens and optimize them.
• Issue Analytics: Track technical problems in real time, such as crashes, bugs, and UI freezes. This feature also streamlines the debugging process through alerts and integrations.
• Behavioral Segmentation: Reduce the time-to-insight by segmenting sessions based on auto-captured properties such as pre-set UX events, device, screen, and custom event properties.

Additional Benefits

• Lightweight SDK: Ensures smooth app performance and uploads data when the app goes into the background.
• Privacy Compliant: UXCam’s architecture automatically blocks sensitive fields, keeping your data safe.
• Easy Integrations: Seamlessly integrate your existing analytics tools with UXCam to build the perfect analytics stack for understanding user behavior.

Pricing: there’s a free 14-day trial for all plans with no credit card required. For the growth and enterprise plan, contact sales.

Review

2. Mixpanel

Mixpanel is a robust analytics platform designed to help you make sense of the vast amount of user data your product generates.

The platform aims to make product analytics accessible to everyone, allowing you to derive actionable insights from your data. With an interactive user interface, Mixpanel enables you to ask questions and dig deeper into your data to gain clarity.

Mixpanel allows you to set up custom event tracking to observe particular user activities, like clicks or purchases, and to categorize your audience based on different parameters.

Its formidable funnel analytics facilitates the visualization and enhancement of user paths, while cohort analytics assists in discerning patterns and trends among various user segments.

Moreover, Mixpanel incorporates A/B testing features, allowing you to trial diverse alternatives and assess their influence on user engagement and conversion rates.

Highlighted Features:

• Data Visualization: Mixpanel provides data visualization tools that render data in a visually engaging way, simplifying the comprehension and interpretation of analytics insights for users.
• Campaign Management: This feature empowers users to track and evaluate the efficiency of marketing campaigns, facilitating the measurement of important metrics, the enhancement of targeting, and the making of data-informed decisions.
• Model Training: Mixpanel comes with machine learning features that permit users to build custom models using their own data, enabling sophisticated user analysis and predictive capabilities.
• Multivariate Testing: Mixpanel’s multivariate testing feature allows users to experiment with multiple variations of their mobile app, such as user interface elements or functionalities, and gauge the effect on user behavior, enabling data-informed optimizations and enhancements.

Pricing: there are 3 tiers of pricing. Free, growth and enterprise. Enterprise starts at $833/m.

Review:

3. Amplitude

Amplitude Analytics is designed to eliminate guesswork from your product development process. 

The platform unifies all your data, leveraging behavioral analytics and AI automation to provide a streamlined way to build better products. It’s trusted by over 2,000 companies and aims to deliver clear, real-time insights that are actionable. This empowers teams to make data-driven decisions with confidence.

Here are some of the key features:

• Industry-Specific Templates: Amplitude offers templates tailored to various industries, making it easier to start gathering insights.
• Automated Reports: The platform flattens the learning curve by providing automated reports that help you understand your key product metrics quickly.
• Event Recommendations: Get started swiftly with suggestions on which events to track based on your industry.

• Statistically Significant Insights: Amplitude helps you identify features and behaviors that either drive growth or lead to churn, pointing you towards insights that genuinely matter.

• User Journey Visualization: Understand where and how users convert in their journey through your product.

• Segment Analysis: Correlate behaviors with conversion and churn rates and zoom in on what’s driving behavior by segment.

• Multi-Dimensional Metrics: Analyze a mix of metrics, attributes, and cross-platform user behaviors to pinpoint your growth drivers.

• Path Analytics: Visualize who uses your product features and identify areas for optimization.

• Funnel Comparison: Compare conversion funnels to identify shared traits and remove obstacles.

Pricing: there are 3 plans here (free, plus, and growth). For growth you need to contact sales. Plus is at $49/m

Review:

4. Adobe Analytics

This robust analytics solution empowers you to understand and analyze user data across various channels and touchpoints. 

It offers several key features to derive valuable insights and drive data-informed decisions. 

With Adobe Analytics, you can track and measure customer interactions, enabling deep segmentation to uncover meaningful audience characteristics. 

Its real-time reporting capabilities provide instant visibility into a website or app performance, helping you identify trends and make timely optimizations. 

The tool also offers advanced attribution modeling, allowing you to understand different marketing channels’ impact on conversions. 

Adobe Analytics also provides powerful data visualization and reporting tools for intuitive data exploration and sharing actionable insights.

Features

• Multichannel data collection – they offer multiple ways to collect data from any source. You can capture the web and mobile app data that matters most for data-driven decision-making and that maps to your business goals.
• Advanced calculated metrics – enable you to combine metrics to create mathematical and statistical operations that are used as new metrics. These metrics can be segmented and created for any report to which you add metrics.
• Marketing attribution – Multiple rules-based and algorithmic approaches to attribution offer robust analysis of customer behavior, providing a best-fit model per channel based on your customers’ actual interaction patterns.
• Shared audiences – You can create and manage audience segments based on any behavior and share that audience segment seamlessly to the Adobe Experience Cloud for activation in other Experience Cloud products.

Pricing: Contact sales

Review:

5. Firebase

Firebase is a comprehensive app development platform backed by Google. Designed to help you build, grow, and monitor apps that users love, Firebase offers solutions for every stage of your app development journey.

Whether you’re looking to accelerate app development with a fully managed backend infrastructure, release and monitor your app with confidence, or boost user engagement through rich analytics and A/B testing, Firebase has got you covered.

Firebase offers a suite of tools to help you monitor your app’s performance and stability. Here’s a deep dive into some of the key features:

• Crashlytics: 

This real-time crash reporting tool helps you prioritize and fix the most critical app crashes. It provides detailed insights into the timeline of events leading up to a crash, enabling you to quickly identify the root cause. Crashlytics integrates seamlessly with Android, iOS, macOS, tvOS, and watchOS apps. It also works well with industry-standard tools like Jira and Slack.

• Performance Monitoring: 

This tool gives you a real-time view of your app’s performance metrics. It allows you to keep tabs on your app as you roll out new features or make configuration changes. Performance Monitoring provides a breakdown of trace and network data into dimensions like app version, country, device, and network type. It also offers automated monitoring of HTTP/S requests, helping you stay on top of network latencies and errors affecting your users.

• Automated App Testing: 

Firebase allows you to run your mobile app against suites of real, physical test devices hosted by Google. This helps you catch bugs and performance issues before distributing your app to live testers.

• Real-Time Alerts: Receive real-time alerts for new errors, regressed errors, and errors that are starting to happen at higher rates. This ensures you never miss a critical app crash.

• Customizable Dashboard: Performance Monitoring gives you control over your performance data with a customizable dashboard, making it easy to focus on your most important metrics.

Pricing: Free/paid

Review

6. ContentSquare

Trusted by brands like Zoom, Visa, ContentSquare’s mobile app analytics platform, known as CS Apps, aims to optimize the mobile app experience for users. 

The platform provides a comprehensive solution that allows teams to visualize and understand user behavior in mobile apps. With in-depth insights, teams can optimize engagement, uncover errors, and implement quick improvements to achieve a 5-star app rating.

Key Features

• User Behavior Monitoring: CS Apps offers robust monitoring of user behavior, allowing you to understand how users interact with your app. This feature is crucial for making data-driven decisions to enhance user engagement and satisfaction.
• Error & Crash Analysis: One of the standout features is the error and crash analysis. This takes the guesswork out of identifying technical issues, helping you to efficiently and effectively uncover and solve problems that cause user frustration and app malfunctions.
• Impact Quantification: This feature helps you prioritize your biggest opportunities for improvement. By quantifying the impact of various elements within your app, you can focus your efforts on areas that will maximize revenue and conversion goals.
• Compatibility: The CS Apps SDK is lightweight and easy to deploy. It’s compatible across major frameworks, including Native iOS and Android, Flutter, and React Native, making implementation a breeze no matter what framework you’re using.

Most Common Use Cases

• Fast App Improvements: With visual mobile app data, you can quickly make improvements to increase user engagement and retention. The platform allows you to optimize your content decisions and deliver an app that puts users at the forefront.
• Uncover User Journeys: CS Apps helps you understand user journeys from frustration to high-intent screens. You can reveal where users might be interacting with non-functional elements or getting stuck in illogical journey loops.
• Prevent Churn and Uninstalls: By identifying the steps leading to bugs, errors, and crashes, you can prevent users from abandoning your app. This feature allows you to understand the paths that might be causing users to lose patience and uninstall the app.

Pricing: Contact sales

Review:

7. GlassBox

Glassbox aims to provide in-depth mobile app analytics that empowers businesses to deliver experiences that customers not only love but keep coming back to. The platform automatically captures every user interaction and technical event within your native mobile app. This gives you a comprehensive data set to analyze the in-app experience. Glassbox’s lightweight SDK has been deployed in many of the world’s most downloaded apps for years, ensuring reliability and no impact on performance.

A Unified Analytics Platform

Glassbox offers a unified platform for both mobile and web analytics. It combines crash analytics, product analytics, and customer experience (CX) analytics into a single platform. This allows you to see not just how users behave but also understand why they behave in a certain way, thanks to features like session replay.

Core Features

More Data, Less Effort:

Glassbox allows you to capture all the data you need for analysis without the need for tags. It offers real-time conversion funnels and performance monitoring.

Instant Session Replays:

The platform provides video-like session replays that show you what customers experience and why. This enables you to identify and resolve issues more quickly.

CX and Technical Insights:

Glassbox gives you insights into how crashes, errors, and latency affect user behavior. It helps you find, prioritize, and fix technical issues that could negatively impact the customer experience.

Interaction Maps:

Understand how customers interact with each screen and element within your app.

Funnel Analysis:

Create ad-hoc funnels to discover why drop-offs and deviations occur within the user journey.

Journey Analysis:

Visualize app journeys on an interactive map, enhanced with AI insights.

Crash Analytics:

The platform allows you to replicate crashes and understand what caused them, aiding in quicker resolution.

Performance Analytics:

Understand how software, network, OS, and device factors impact the user experience.

Version Insights:

Keep track of version adoption trends, response times, and errors.

High Compatibility:

Glassbox operates seamlessly with Android, iOS, React Native, Flutter, Xamarin, and more.

Ecosystem Integration:

The platform can be integrated with web analytics, APM, VOC, and A/B testing tools.

Pricing: Request pricing

Review:

8. Flurry

Used by 250k plus businesses, 1 million+ apps built and activated across 2 billion+ devices, Flurry has powered the app economy since 2008.

Flurry Analytics is not just a free tool; it’s a professional-grade analytics platform that has been serving app developers since 2008. The platform offers a range of functionalities, from basic metrics to advanced features like on-demand complex queries, funnel analysis, and custom segmentation.

Audience Insights

Flurry automatically breaks down your audience by age, gender, location, and interest category. This helps you refine your product roadmap, determine monetization strategies, and optimize acquisition and retention efforts. You can also segment your audience based on custom events, such as making a purchase or viewing an ad.

Event Tracking

Flurry provides in-app event tracking that’s easy to set up. You can track up to 500 custom events like in-app purchases, completed levels, articles read, and more. The platform even allows you to add parameters to these custom events for deeper insights. For instance, for a purchase event, you can add details like price point, item purchased, and sessions before the first purchase.

Funnel Analysis

Flurry’s funnel analysis helps you monitor key drop-off points within your app. It allows you to understand how users progress through each step of a conversion funnel, such as making in-app purchases or completing tutorials. You can identify points of friction that need improvement and even measure the impact of recent changes on key user segments.

User Segmentation

Flurry lets you group audiences based on demographics or behaviors. This enables you to analyze each segment’s unique engagement patterns. For example, you can segment your audience by paying vs. non-paying customers or create time-based cohorts for more granular analysis.

Data Ownership

One of the best things about Flurry is that your data always belongs to you. The platform offers various ways to access your data, including an analytics console, exportable reports, and APIs for custom integrations.

Pricing: Free

Review:

Why Mobile App Analytics Matters

1. User Behavior Insights:

Mobile analytics provides unparalleled visibility into how real users interact with your app in the wild. By tracking key events and user flows, you gain invaluable insights around engagement, usage, demographics, and more. 

Analytics empowers you to move beyond assumptions or guesses to data-driven decisions about your users. 

You can identify your most engaged users, understand how far users get in critical workflows, see which features are most popular, uncover usage patterns across devices and geographies, and much more. 

With rich behavioral data, you can truly understand your users and tailor the app experience accordingly.

2. Optimization and Improvement:

Mobile analytics enables you to continuously optimize and elevate the app experience by identifying pain points and bottlenecks in the user journey. 

For example, you may find a high drop-off rate during sign-ups and realize the process has too much friction. Or you may see low conversion on calls-to-action and iterate on placement and messaging to improve. 

Analytics provides the continuous feedback you need to refine and perfect the experience over time. 

You can A/B test variations, fix UX issues, improve core workflows, optimize in-app messaging, and more. Analytics gives you the data to build an app that smoothly guides users to desired outcomes.

3. Customer Retention:

Understanding the complete customer lifecycle is crucial for long-term customer retention and loyalty. Analytics provides visibility into onboarding, engagement trends over time, factors that indicate churn risk, and more. 

With these insights, you can develop targeted campaigns to re-engage lapsed users. You can also build user segments to proactively notify if engagement declines. 

By continually monitoring customer health, you can address issues before it’s too late. Analytics helps you reduce churn, increase retention, build habit-forming experiences, and cultivate satisfaction through meeting user needs.

4. Targeted Marketing:

Analytics allows you to build detailed user profiles and segment your audience based on behavior, demographics, device usage, and other attributes. 

You can then craft targeted marketing campaigns, messaging, and promotions that closely align with the needs of each segment. 

For example, you may promote new features to engaged power users first, then later target lapsed users with win-back offers. Or A/B test messaging to see which resonates most with various groups. 

Analytics lets you deliver the right content to the right users at the right time for greater relevance, engagement, and ROI.

5. Future-proofing:

Mobile analytics is not just about understanding the current state of your app and users. By identifying emerging trends and evolving user needs, analytics also equips you to make smart investments into future capabilities aligned with market demands. 

You can catch rising requirements early and build what users want next, staying agile and ahead of the curve. 

Analytics helps you focus development efforts on the functionality and innovations that will drive the most value in the months and years ahead.

6. Cost Efficiency:

With mobile analytics, you can optimize spend on marketing, development, and other resources by focusing time and money on the priorities that actually deliver results and move the needle for your business. By relying on data instead of hunches, you ensure greater efficiency and return on investment. If the data shows a feature is scarcely used, you can remove it rather than wasting time improving it. By tying spend to analytics-driven insights, you drive growth in a lean and cost-effective manner.

Criteria for Selecting a Mobile App Analytics Testing Tool 

1. Ease of Use

Having an intuitive user interface is absolutely critical for quick onboarding and ongoing use of any mobile analytics platform. 

A steep learning curve with complex menus and dashboards can severely limit adoption, especially for smaller teams without dedicated data analysts. 

Prioritize tools that offer clean, understandable, and visually appealing dashboards that make surfacing key insights fast and straightforward for any team member. 

Avoid platforms that bury users in overly technical complexity. Look for thoughtful UX design that anticipates user needs and enables both high-level overview and granular analysis as required.

2. Feature Set

A robust and comprehensive feature set allows you to track a wide range of events, analyze conversions, build engagement funnels, segment users, and derive many other types of mobile insights. 

Having these expansive analytics capabilities can be a game-changer versus taking a limited or piecemeal approach to mobile data. 

Ensure the tool provides the full breadth and depth of reporting, segmentation, attribution, and other analytics functionality you need to drive decisions across marketing, product, engineering and beyond. 

Seek breadth and flexibility vs. fixed or canned reports.

3. Data Accuracy

Without highly accurate underlying data, any insights gleaned from a mobile analytics platform are essentially meaningless or even misleading. 

You absolutely need to be able to trust the validity of the data in order to confidently inform major business decisions and strategies. Therefore, only tools that collect analytics data in a completely reliable way should be trusted and considered. 

Beware of potential bugs, flawed implementation/configuration, outdated methodologies, sampling errors, or other systemic problems that can badly distort the mobile analytics picture. 

Take time to rigorously validate data accuracy upfront rather than making flawed assumptions.

4. Scalability

As your organization’s mobile initiatives and user base grow rapidly over time, your mobile analytics needs will inevitably scale up as well. 

The analytics solution you select today must be able to easily handle increments in events tracked, users analyzed, and overall data volume without costly platform migration. 

Switching analytics providers down the road due to limited scalability leads to much greater costs, implementation headaches, and loss of historical data. 

Take a long-term view and pick a flexible solution that can smoothly expand as your organization’s mobile analytics needs grow over the next several years.

5. Real-Time Reporting

Having access to analytics data in real-time enables making quicker, more informed decisions vs. waiting on batch updates or daily/weekly reporting. 

When you are in the midst of time-sensitive activities like running mobile marketing campaigns, monitoring performance issues, or dealing with other urgent scenarios, real-time mobile analytics visibility is crucial. 

Ensure any tool you select provides near-instant access to data vs. just once-a-day or once-a-week data updates. However, don’t over-prioritize real-time metrics at the expense of accuracy – strike the right balance for your needs.

6. Integration Capabilities

Easy integration with your company’s existing software stack is vital for connecting disparate data sources into a unified, holistic analytics view. 

Lack of turnkey integrations with your other tools or platforms leads to highly fragmented data, manual workarounds, and ultimately minimal visibility. 

Look for analytics solutions that offer pre-built connectors, APIs, or other seamless integration mechanisms that allow the tool to plug right into other systems you rely on like Amplitude, mParticle, Adobe Analytics etc.

7. Customer Support

For organizations and teams that are relatively newer to leveraging mobile analytics, having responsive, experienced customer support can be hugely beneficial when getting started. 

Inadequate troubleshooting, guidance, and training from a vendor can completely stall adoption and utilization. 

Lean heavily on the vendor’s expertise to overcome initial hurdles in appropriately understanding and leveraging the tool to extract maximum value. 

Look for personal assistance when needed as you navigate the learning curve and establish optimal processes.

8. Pricing

Mobile analytics pricing varies extremely widely – from completely free or freemium options to expensive enterprise-level solutions costing well into six figures annually. 

Understand the trade-offs between these pricing models in terms of features, support levels, data volumes, and more. 

Rest assured that the cheapest tool is not necessarily the best long-term fit for your needs. 

Take a strategic view on value versus cost and pick the pricing level aligned to your organization’s needs, maturity, and budget.

9. Security and Compliance

Any mobile analytics tool that is processing user data needs to meet the most stringent security standards and comply fully with regulations like GDPR. 

Using a platform with lax security or compliance opens the door to sensitive customer data being compromised or misused. 

Make absolutely sure to prioritize solutions that guarantee complete data protection, encryption, access controls, and transparency around their security and compliance measures. 

Don’t leave this to chance – validate it thoroughly.

Frequently Asked Questions About Mobile Analytics Tools

1. Question: What is a mobile app analytics tool?

Answer: A mobile app analytics tool is software that helps you understand user behavior and engagement in your mobile app. It provides metrics on actions like installs, sessions, screen views, clicks, conversions, demographics, churn, and more. This data enables you to optimize the app experience and inform strategic decisions.

2. Question: How do I choose the right mobile analytics tool?

Answer: Key criteria to evaluate are ease of implementation, depth of analytics features, data accuracy, scalability, real-time capabilities, integrations, customer support, security, and pricing model. Prioritize must-have capabilities for your needs and resources. Try out free trials to get hands-on. Choose a long-term partner that will grow with your app.

3. Question: How much do mobile analytics tools cost?

Answer: Pricing varies widely. Free or low-cost entry-level options have limited features. Full-featured platforms often charge by volume metrics like monthly active users or events. Some specialize in app analytics while others cover web and app. Cost can range from $50/month into the thousands for enterprise-level tools.

4. Question: What are some key mobile analytics metrics I should track?

Answer: Some of the most important metrics to track are:

• Daily/monthly active users
• User retention rates
• Session length/time in app
• Screens or features used
• Funnel conversion rates
• Revenue and conversions
• Demographics and segmentation

Focusing on actionable metrics that align to your goals provides the insights you need to improve your app.

5. Question: How reliable are mobile analytics tools? Can I trust the data?

Answer: The top analytics platforms have reliable data collection and methodologies to provide accurate insights. However, issues can arise from poor implementation, tagging errors, outdated SDKs, and limitations around tracking users across devices. Validating data by testing tracking, comparing sources, and sniffing traffic can improve reliability.

6. Question: What mobile analytics features are “must-haves” vs. “nice-to-haves”?

Answer: Must-have features include event tracking, user segmentation, funnels and retention analysis, source/campaign attribution and platforms’ core strengths. Nice-to-have features are bells and whistles like predictive modeling, push notification analytics or advanced integrations. Prioritize must-haves for your core needs.

7. Question: Can I integrate mobile analytics with my CRM, marketing, and other tools?

Answer: The top platforms offer APIs, pre-built integrations, and connectors to unify data across your martech stack. Look for analytics, attribution, and customer data platform (CDP) integrations. This provides a more complete view of the customer journey.

8. Question: What should I look for in analytics vendor support?

Answer: Seeking providers with robust implementation help, training resources, technical support and proactive account management ensures you can fully leverage the platform long-term. Prioritize responsive, consultative customer support.