SaaS Analytics & Dashboards

Mixpanel excels at funnel analysis, cohort retention and user-level event exploration — great for B2C products with large user volumes. Amplitude has stronger behavioural analytics and enterprise governance features — preferred by B2B teams doing deep analysis. PostHog is open-source, self-hostable, and includes feature flags, session recording and A/B testing in one product — excellent for privacy-conscious teams and startups wanting to avoid per-event pricing. We work with all three and help you choose based on your data volume, budget and analytics maturity.

Start with a North Star metric — the single number that best captures the value your product delivers (e.g., "weekly active teams" for a collaboration tool). Then define 3-5 leading indicators that drive it (activation rate, feature adoption, engagement frequency). Avoid vanity metrics like total signups. Every event you track should connect back to understanding or improving one of these metrics.

For product analytics (understanding how users interact with your product), always use a dedicated tool — Mixpanel, Amplitude or PostHog. Building this from scratch is a significant ongoing engineering investment that never pays off. For in-app analytics visible to your customers (showing them their own data), you typically need to build — though tools like Embeddable or Cumul.io can reduce the work significantly.

The typical approach is to store customer-specific usage data in your application database, aggregate it with pre-computed materialized views or a time-series database, and render charts using a library like Recharts, Chart.js or Tremor. For more complex requirements, embedding a BI tool (Metabase, Superset) or using a purpose-built embedded analytics vendor (Cumul.io, Embeddable) is faster and more maintainable.

Identify the product behaviours correlated with retention vs churn in your historical data — this is your engagement model. Build automated health scores based on these signals, updated daily. Surface at-risk accounts to your CS team with specific reasons ("not used Feature X in 14 days") so outreach is targeted. Trigger in-app prompts and emails when engagement drops below thresholds. Measure the impact of each intervention on 30-day retention to iterate your playbook.