Startup Data Analytics & Metric Tools

If you feel like you’re making decisions without knowing the full picture then join the club.. Today I’ve been looking at getting some better analytics from inside our database.

To date this has been done in Excel. Now we’re hitting decent user sign up rates, tracking and reporting everything is beginning to take up too much time.

Why should you care?
You might know how many people are signing up to your app/site/blog but without analytics you don’t know what usage looks like.

But I’ve got Google Analytics!?
That’s great but your app/sites’ database is a treasure chest of data just waiting to be cracked open. Business intelligence is big business in the corporate world because it means you can make informed decisions. You do like making informed decisions right?

The options
So after a little bit of searching these appear to be the main options. Let me know if I’ve missed any out.

Chart.io
Cost: 30-Day free trials, Plans start at $85/m
Connects to: Databases & Google Analytics

Metricly
Cost: Free for Basic, $49 for Premium, $99 for Enterprise
Connects to: Databases and anything else you can imagine

RJMetrics
Cost: 30-Day free trials, Plans start at $500/m
Connects to: Databases & Google Analytics

Mixpanel
Cost: Free for 25k data points, get 175k data points by adding their link, pay for more
Connects to: Nothing, you add code to register data points

GoodData
Cost: Not shown on their site, you have to call..
Connects to: Everything except your DB: List here

Which one is for me?
So how do you choose? The same as with everything else. You choose the one which you can afford and does the job. I’m testing Metricly at the moment as it appears to be comprehensive.

My backup option is Chart.io which although it has less connectors looks like it’ll do the job of cracking open the data in our MySQL database..