Heap is a web analytics platform captures every user interaction on web iOS with no extra code. The tool allows you to track events and set up funnels to understand user flow and dropoff. It also provides visualization tools to track trends over time.
$0
Up to 10k sessions/month
Kissmetrics
Score 9.6 out of 10
Mid-Size Companies (51-1,000 employees)
Kissmetrics is a customer engagement automation platform. This solution includes behavioral analytics, segmentation, and email campaign automation.
$500
Monthly Tracked People
Pricing
Heap
Kissmetrics
Editions & Modules
Free
$0
Up to 10k sessions/month
Growth
Starting at $3,600 annually
Up to 300k sessions/year
Pro
Contact Heap Sales
Custom sessions per month and unlimited projects
Premier
Contact Heap Sales
Custom sessions per month
Growth
$500
Monthly Tracked People
Power
$850
Monthly Tracked People
Enterprise
Custom
Monthly Tracked People
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Heap
Kissmetrics
Free Trial
Yes
Yes
Free/Freemium Version
Yes
No
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
No
No
Entry-level Setup Fee
Optional
$1,500 per installation
Additional Details
Heap pricing is based on session volume. A session is a period of activity from a single user on your app or website. It can include many pageviews or events.
What are Monthly Tracked People?
Monthly Tracked People are unique visitors that engage in an Event on your website or with your product, that gets tracked by you in Kissmetrics.
Monthly Tracked People can be anonymous or identified.
Heap is well suited for 1. Capture customer journey with session replay 2. Identify customer behaviour and improve overall customer experience 3. Frequent and quick implementations and modifications 4. Comparative analysis for historical marketing insights Heap is not so well suited, if the aim is to capture only analytics data without any goals to improve upon customer experience / targeting appropriate users based on data tracking.
[Kissmetrics is well suited for the] abandon cart scenario to re-engage users on the purchase journey. Engaging users to personalized content using the visit metrics derived from the data captured at each digital touch points. [Implementing] website campaign and journey orchestration is easy. You get visitor profile to segment upon using different visit metrics and action.
The Auto Capture function does indeed save quite a bit of time, and being able to build new reports off historical data is really valuable.
Interface is really intuitive and user-friendly. Much easier to pick up and use than GA.
Building reports out on the fly is really quick and easy, allowing you to give right into all kinds of analyses.
The Event Definition screen is really useful, giving a quick glance at the most used events, which you then decide to turn into conversions or goals if you want.
Kissmetrics has a fantastic dashboard where you can see all relevant metrics immediately after login.
Kissmetrics was extremely easy to implement in our site and it works across different platforms.
After the initial setup, managing and creating new events to track is super simple.
You can monitor live usage. This feature allows you to monitor user interactions as they are happening and as events you are tracking are triggered. You can see exactly what users are doing real time, which is really a very cool feature. At the time, this kind of realtime monitoring was not possible with Google Analytics.
The biggest issue, is that I have lost faith in the accuracy of the data.
There have been a few examples of the system producing what looks like spurious data. I triangulate the data using Google Analytics, and on a few occasions, there have been very wide discrepancies that indicate a potentially serious problem. For example, Google might indicate 1,000 page views, while KISSmetrics indicates 5,000.. This is not a constant problem, but it has happened enough where my faith in the data is shaken.
It really doesn't matter how good the front-end functionality is if my faith in data accuracy is not 100%.
A/B testing is much more difficult than it needs to be. It is possible to structure the product to enable A/B testing, but this involves reading a bunch of help files and writing some code. I would have expected this to work out-of-the-box. In Google Analytics, for example.you only have to enter two URLs and then it works. This was a surprise.
Heap helps me understand key data points without fussing with the formatting of a dashboard. It gives me the benefit of data analyzation without the fuss of the formatting - as well as the ease of sharing data collected with my colleagues
I used KISSmetrics on a daily basis whilst a summer analyst at a language-learning software startup company called Voxy. To my knowledge, the company continued to use KISSmetrics. I am no longer at Voxy but we were pleased with KISSmetrics.
Sometimes, Heap has issues reconciling similar selectors, and I have not found the manual tagging system to be the most intuitive, especially when best practices are not used when designing the front-end infrastructure. Even so, it helps that the data is unmodified, and all analytics are done through an interfaced layer, so damage and confusion [are] not permanent.
For basic operations, the product is relatively user-friendly, considering how complicated a topic data and analytics can be. The engineering integration work is very straightforward, and building standard report types is pretty easy. However, there were a few rough spots. Event mapping and some of the deeper account settings are not well explained. And the Power Reports functionality is just utterly, impossibly confusing
I've never run into any issues with Heap's availability, Heap is always there when I need it. I haven't run into any issues like application errors or unplanned outages during my 2+ years of using Heap. Each and every time I log in to Heap I have a completely functional experience
In a year, we had trouble logging-in just once. But even then all tracking data was later available once the site came back up. also, the system down notices were very informative - they explained the reason for the downtime and were constantly updated with progress in getting the problem resolved.
On a scale from 1-10, Heap loads pages fairly quickly. The only time I experience delays is when I am loading a graph with perhaps too many events or filters on the page. But in terms of creating or searching for events or viewing reports, I don't ever experience a lag.
Speed improved dramatically as the service matured. Early iterations of the publicly-released application would occasionally provide slow processing of results, but those delays became much rarer occurrences during the last year that we used KISSmetrics. One of the more impressive views (which started out feeling more like a toy) is the live view of visits. Knowing that you could see, in real time, what events a user triggered, was gratifying and instructive.
Heap support has allowed us to troubleshoot and test a lot of different items. Their support team is always helpful and friendly, even when we come to them with the most complicated questions. I think this greatly improves the value proposition of the product because their support team is knowledgable and friendly.
Everytime that I've needed or contacted support, I've received a quick response and timely help! There was even a major issue we had with connecting Unbounce into Kissmetrics. They brought in multiple people and worked with us for hours to make sure we could figure out the issue and get everything running! I have no complaints about the support team!
Again, we were fortunate to work with KISSmetrics as they built their application, but Hiten, their CEO and founder, was incredibly helpful to me personally, and to our metrics-driven business as a whole, as we adopted their tool.
I loved this aspect of the product. It wasn't just that the documentation and online tutorials are great - which they are - the on-boarding process though was really stellar. Once you have set everything up, you get a welcome message followed by a step-by-step guide to get you started that is built right into the product interface. For example, the UI asks you to first do X, and then copy this code snippet and send it to your developer who will know what to do with it. When you come back after the first interaction with the product, it continues the process by explaining right in the UI how to track events etc. This kind of step-by-step approach is incredibly efficient. Although there are various forms of supporting documentation (PDFs videos etc) to support every step, you don't really need them. This approach means that you are up and running very quickly with virtually no training time or documentation consultation. Highly efficient process.
The implementation was smooth and easy. The Heap team helped us with implementation and it went great! Within a few weeks, we were fully up and running and utilizing the platform to its full capability. This is an additional thing that has made this platform so great and we couldn't recommend it enough.
In order to build trackability down to revenue, there was quite a lot of work to integrate Kissmetrics with our software and internal process. We had to build the hooks so that Kissmetrics could call back into our software and billing system, etc.. However, we didn't need additional expertise to do this. Once you understand the API, and you own systems, making it work is not too difficult. We did not require an outside consultant or anything like that
Heap is better because its easy to use, easy to install. With Heap you just add a snippet of tracking code to your header, instead of having to instrument each event like you do with other tools.
It has been a while since I demoed Heap and Optimizely but the main points that stick out in my head are that Kissmetrics had more transparent and cheaper pricing. Kissmetrics offered all the same functionality, and at least from my personal experience, the staff at Kissmetrics was easier to work with and nicer to interact with.
The most challenging part of using Heap in a growing organization is the naming and structure in which reports and dashboards are organized. I work within the marketing department and our Heap leader internally works within the IT/Product department, which makes it challenging because we often don't speak the same language, so the learning curve has been steep without any specific use-case examples to leverage online.
