Top 12+ web analytics tools to improve your site and grow your business

With the number of web analytics tools out there, it’s easy to get lost and not know where to start. 

But don’t worry—we’re here to help. We’ve crafted a list of the top web analytics software, tools, and platforms out there for you to choose from, so you can start growing your business with data-backed decisions.

What are web analytics tools?

Web analytics tools are made up of software that’s designed to track, measure, and report on website activity, such as site traffic, visitor source, and user clicks.

Using web analytics tools helps you understand what’s happening on your website and gain insights on what’s working (and what’s not). In turn, you can use these insights to optimize the user experience (UX) and drive more engagement and conversions.

What are the different types of web analytics tools?

There are 2 main types of web analytics, depending on how data is collected:

• On-site/hosted: a piece of code installed on your site will generate analytics unique to you

• Third-party/off-site: insights collected from third-party sources (like search engines and toolbars) that generate analytics data about multiple websites. This type is ideal for competitive analysis.

Within these 2 groups, web analytics software falls into 5 categories:

• Traditional analytics: quantitative website traffic data, like bounce rate and pageviews

• Behavior analytics: individual or aggregate qualitative user website behavior data 

• Customer journey analytics: customer touchpoint data, across multiple channels

• Content analytics: editorial analytics to measure website content performance

• SEO analytics: data on keyword performance, backlinks, search traffic, and competitors

Some tools overlap across several categories (like Contentsquare—that’s us! 👋). Below, we’ve listed some of the top tools across each category, as well as their closest alternatives.

Top 12 web analytics tools used by professionals (and their best alternatives)

Here are the top 12 web analytics tools used by professionals (we’ve also included their most similar alternatives).

1. Contentsquare

2. Google Analytics

3. Mixpanel

4. Kissmetrics

5. Adobe Analytics

6. Matomo (formerly Piwik)

7. Open Web Analytics

8. Woopra

9. HubSpot

10. Chartbeat

11. SimilarWeb

12. Ahrefs

1. Contentsquare

What is it? Contentsquare is an all-in-one Experience Intelligence platform that combines traditional web analytics with behavior analytics, experience analytics, experience monitoring, product analytics, and voice of customer to give you a comprehensive understanding of what’s happening on your website—and why. It combines qualitative and quantitative data to give you deeper insights into your users’ experiences, helping you identify and prioritize improvement opportunities that’ll drive customer happiness and business growth.

Key features:

• Get holistic, actionable insights about what your users do and why by enriching key web analytics data with heatmaps, journey analysis, surveys, funnels, session replays, user interviews, user tests, and more

• Capture 100% of engagement data automatically without the need for a tagging plan with SmartCapture (even on SwiftUI for mobile)—simplifying your setup and empowering retroactive analysis based on emerging trends and business needs

• Zoom in on the exact data you need with powerful user segmentation

• Streamline your workflow with AI capabilities that quickly surface need-to-know insights for better, faster decision-making

• Focus on growth with an industry-leading platform that’s built with privacy in mind (GDPR, CCPA, APPI compliant, and more)

• Save time and money with all the insights you need in one easy-to-use central platform

2. Google Analytics

What is it? Google Analytics is a traditional web analytics tool providing quantitative user data across devices and platforms. 

Key features: 

• Track quantitative data, like sessions or bounce rate—organized in dedicated reports—to learn what's happening on your site

• Collect event-based data from websites and apps with GA4

• Integrate with the rest of the Google Marketing Platform tools, like Adwords or the Search Console, to help combine all your data in one place

Most similar alternatives:

• Contentsquare

• Yandex Metrica: web analytics tool from Russian search engine Yandex

• Baidu Analytics (or Baidu Tongji): web analytics tool from Chinese search engine Baidu

3. Mixpanel

What is it? Mixpanel is a self-serve product analytics platform that helps you convert, engage, and retain more users. 

Key features: 

• Get insights on how your product is being used and what your most popular features are

• Visualize where your users drop off by building retroactive funnels and measuring conversion rates between each step

• Analyze which users stick around and improve customer retention

Most similar alternatives:

• Contentsquare

• Google Analytics

• Kissmetrics (see below)

💡 Pro tip: did you know that you can perform funnel analysis in Contentsquare? Funnels lets you spot where users drop off so you can improve your most important flows. Better yet: you can watch session replays of users who didn‘t convert to understand exactly why they didn’t make it to the next step, so you can improve your site’s UX.

4. Kissmetrics

What is it? Kissmetrics is a product and marketing analytics software that helps scaling SaaS and ecommerce businesses accelerate their growth with quantitative data. 

Key features: 

• See key metrics at a glance in your customizable dashboard

• Track power users with segmentation and cohort analysis to understand how they behave on your site

• Measure key revenue metrics like customer lifetime value and churn rate

Most similar alternatives: 

• Contentsquare

• Google Analytics

• Mixpanel

5. Adobe Analytics

What is it? Adobe Analytics is a traditional web and marketing analytics tool, which is part of the Adobe Experience Platform, designed to provide actionable insights. Consider it an enterprise alternative to Google Analytics.

Key features: 

• Collect and measure data from multiple channels to get a complete picture of your customers and business

• Segment your customers to understand why they behave the way they do and how they differ from one another

• Leverage AI, machine learning, and automation to predict and modelize customer behavior

Most similar alternatives: 

• Google Analytics

• Contentsquare

6. Matomo (formerly Piwik)

What it is: Matomo is an open-source web analytics tool that emphasizes the protection of your data and your customers’ privacy. 

Key features: 

• With 100% data ownership, users can safely use analytics without worrying about data being used for marketing or any other purposes

• Protect your and your users’ privacy with a tool compliant with the strictest of privacy laws, including GDPR, HIPAA, CCPA, LGPD, and PECR

• Get comprehensive web analytics data, from behavioral data to SEO and paid ad performance

Most similar alternatives: 

• Clicky: privacy-friendly, GDPR-compliant website analytics tool

• Plausible: privacy-friendly, no cookies, GDPR, CCPA, and PECR compliant Google Analytics alternative, made and hosted in the EU 

• Fathom: easy-to-use, privacy-friendly, GDPR-compliant Google Analytics alternative with a stylish user interface (UI)

• Simple Analytics: privacy-first, EU-based & hosted, no cookies Google Analytics alternative, also with a sleek UI

7. Open Web Analytics

What is it? Open Web Analytics is a free and open source web analytics framework that lets you stay in control of how you instrument and analyze the use of your websites and web applications.

Key features: 

• Open source framework customizable to your needs with built-in, first-party control

• Integration with raw data sources available via an extensive data access API

• Combination of standard web analytics metrics, dimensions, and reports with qualitative data from click maps

Most similar alternatives:

• Google Analytics

• Contentsquare

• Matomo

💡 Pro tip: click maps are only one type of heatmap. Learn exactly how much of your page is actually seen by users before they leave with scroll maps, how they move on the page with move maps, and how different elements of your page contribute to your goals with zoning.

Learn how to improve your site’s UX with Heatmaps in Contentsquare.

8. Woopra

What is it? Woopra is an end-to-end customer journey analytics tool that tracks what users do on your site, helping you acquire and retain more customers. 

Key features: 

• Get a holistic understanding of every action your users take from their first touchpoint

• Track, analyze, and optimize every touchpoint that affects the customer experience 

• Automate workflows with built-in triggers and integrations with other popular web analytics tools 

Most similar alternatives: 

• Contentsquare

• Totango: composable customer success platform and customer journey builder

9. HubSpot

What is it? HubSpot’s Marketing Hub is a marketing analytics platform that gathers all your marketing tools and data in one place. 

Key features: 

• Measure traffic, manage leads, and improve your conversion rate

• An integrated multimedia content management platform for you to create and distribute content

• Lead generation and nurturing features, including form and landing page builders and email marketing automation

• Built-in marketing analytics to turn quantitative data from SEO, social media, and lifecycle campaigns into insights-driven actions

Most similar alternatives:

• Adobe Marketing Cloud: end-to-end digital marketing platform

• Salesforce Marketing Cloud: comprehensive digital marketing solution

10. Chartbeat

What is it? Chartbeat is a content analytics software designed to help you grow your audience by delivering insights to improve your content.

Key features:

• Understand how your audience is connecting with your content (including videos) in the moment across platforms, channels, and devices

• Pull app traffic into a real-time dashboard to learn what’s resonating with your most loyal audience on a second-by-second basis, which sections they’re engaging with, how push alerts are drawing their interest, and more

• Intuitively assess content performance, KPIs, and valuable trends over the long term with an historical dashboard

Most similar alternative: 

• Parse.ly, a content analytics platform

💡 Pro tip: place a content feedback survey (or a feedback widget) on your site to get user insights so you can make customer-driven decisions to improve your content.

11. SimilarWeb

What is it? SimilarWeb is a competition and market analysis platform that tracks online traffic data to help you measure how you perform compared to your direct competitors—and the rest of the market.

Key features: 

• Get an exclusive view into any website’s performance via the free browser extension and track how competitor traffic trends over time

• See how sites rank globally and across every industry, and analyze their traffic and engagement over time

• Find and connect with more qualified leads and turn them into customers with key insights and data on their business

Most similar alternatives:

• SpyFu: comprehensive competitor analysis solution

• Ahrefs and SEMRush (more info below)

12. Ahrefs

What is it? Ahrefs offers a comprehensive suite of SEO tools to help you rank higher in search engine results pages and get more traffic.

Key features: 

• Find keywords your customers are searching for and track how your rankings progress

• Analyze where your competitors stand, from their backlink profile to their ranking keywords, and discover which of their content pieces performs best

• Audit your own website and identify both technical SEO and content optimization opportunities

Most similar alternatives:

• SEMRush: comprehensive SEO, content marketing, competitor research, PPC, and social media marketing platform

• Moz: all-in-one SEO software

Why traditional web analytics tools are useful… but not enough

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're coming from, and whether they're new or returning visitors

• 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

But there’s a caveat: traditional web analytics data isn’t enough for you to really understand how visitors are experiencing your website and why they behave the way they do. 

There are some questions web analytics tools alone can't answer, like

• What your visitors were looking for when they landed on your site?

• What do they think and experience as they browse through its pages?

• What information is missing?

• Do visitors leave happy after finding what they needed—or frustrated after getting stuck somewhere?

This is where an all-in-one Experience Intelligence platform like Contentsquare shines. By joining the dots between traditional web analytics and behavior analytics, you can paint a clearer picture of your users and therefore better understand how they experience your site.

How to enrich traditional web analytics with experience insights

Say you identify a page with a high exit rate. You suspect something is going wrong—but the numbers alone don’t tell you what is happening.

With Contentsquare, you can examine a heatmap for that page to see what’s being clicked on or ignored and see how far visitors are scrolling.

Then, for additional context, watch session replays 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?

Session replays are also useful when paired with traditional A/B testing tools: they let you see how users behave on each variant of your page so you can confirm your hypotheses and improve conversion rates.

Go beyond traditional analytics

Web analytics is more than simply quantitative data. To improve your site and ultimately grow your business, you need to understand user behavior, not just know what people do on your site.

Use an all-in-one platform like Contentsquare to get the complete picture—and start making data-driven, user-centric improvements.

FAQs about web analytics tools