GSD
10 of the Best Web Analytics Tools for React Websites
Posted by Zain Sajjad on February 26, 2021
Almost all of these web analytics tools have a significant free tier so you can test any of them with your React websites. We will analyze the tools on some common attributes that will give you a good summary of the features each of them has.
Software development is not just about delivering features every day; it’s about keeping up with quality standards and understanding the needs and pains of end-users. Every scalable product requires an in-depth understanding of how users are moving across screens and what actions they are performing, as well as an analysis of what’s causing drop-offs and ways to get back to those users and try to engage with them in the best possible ways.
A number of tools are available today to give you the best look at your product’s performance and your users’ behaviors. We have compiled a list of the top tools available that are compatible with your React websites and popular React CMS tools like ButterCMS.
Table of contents
Google Analytics + Firebase
Pricing: Free for life
Google Analytics is without a doubt the most widely adopted web analytics tool. It has a wide range of features that help you track and re-target your users easily. Being powered by Google, it has top-notch demographics and user interest insight. It also offers tightly coupled integration with Google Ads to help you correlate your sources of revenue and traffic. The recent adoption of Firebase with Google Analytics means you can leverage your custom audiences to target messages, promotions, or new app features using other Firebase features, such as FCM and Remote Config.
Best For: GA is one of the most comprehensive web analytics tools. It’s good for apps of any scale, including bloggers, e-commerce sites, SMEs, and enterprises.
Pro Tip: Google Analytics along with Firebase allows you to integrate your React website and mobile app together so you can track your product’s performance across different platforms from one single dashboard.
Heat Maps | Real-Time Analytics | Conversion Tracking |
Facebook Pixel
Pricing: Free for life
Facebook Pixel helps businesses build better audiences for their ads on Facebook’s platforms (Facebook, Instagram, and Messenger). It allows businesses to re-target their site’s visitors via cross-platform apps. It helps you automatically show website visitors the products that they've viewed on your React website or on other related sites. That results in more conversions with less spending. Pixel also helps businesses target an audience that is similar to the site’s visitors.
Best For: E-commerce businesses using Facebook Ads for marketing.
Pro Tip: Pixel’s tightly coupled integration with Facebook ads and other utilities makes it one great gem for e-commerce businesses.
General Analytics | Re-Targeting | Conversion Tracking |
Microsoft Clarity
Pricing: Free Service
Delivering the best user experience requires in-depth analysis of what works best for real users. Clarity allows you to replay user sessions and explore heat maps of your website’s usage. It tells you how deep your users are scrolling, where they are clicking more, and what’s confusing your users. Also, you can analyze what’s causing abandoned carts and drop-offs. Clarity also shares the JS errors occurring on your React website.
Best For: Any business seeking web analytics tools to understand user journeys on their platform.
Pro Tip: Integrating Clarity with Google Analytics means you will start seeing a link to session playbacks within your Google Analytics dashboard.
Real-Time Analytics | Heat Maps | Session Playbacks |
Matomo (formerly Piwik)
Pricing: Open Source 100% free for self-hosting | Cloud starts from 29 EUR
It would require a separate post to describe all the features that Matomo is offering. Matomo is, in my opinion, the best web analytics tool available today. It’s not just about user behavior, heat maps, or session recordings: Matomo also offers detailed performance metrics for each page view. Matomo’s media analytics allows you to know how your videos are being watched and what impact they have on conversions. Advanced e-commerce analytics helps you optimize your sales performance and, combined with ad conversion tracking, it’s a gem for boosting business on your React website.
Best For: Businesses with multi-platform presences (Mobile app & web).
Pro Tip: No need to sacrifice your historical Google Analytics data as you can import your GA data directly into Matomo.
Facebook Ads Tracking | Data Export and APIs | App Analytics |
66Analytics
Pricing: Starting from $79
All-in-one web analytics tool - Real-time analytics, conversion tracking, heat maps, session recordings, and data ownership. 66Analytics gives you a complete picture of your product—everything that is asked by marketing, UX, or product management teams. Also, you can check how many users are online, which devices are the most popular, and which pages are most accessed.
Best For: Any business looking for one complete solution that focuses on privacy, too.
Pro Tip: It doesn’t require any deployments and you still own your data which you can completely wipe out when you want.
Lifetime Data Retention | Heat Map & Sessions | Real-Time Analytics |
Hotjar
Pricing: Free Basic Plan, Personal Plan for $39, and Business Plan starting from $99
Hotjar provides downloadable heat maps for user clicks, cursor movements, and scrolling. This helps marketers, UX designers, and product managers understand their visitors’ motivations and desires.
Hotjar is not just about heat maps and session recordings, it also enables you to ask for instant visual feedback on your React website or app. You don’t have to just create surveys on your platform; they can be triggered on custom events or you can invite users to complete them via email.
Best For: UX-focused businesses trying to understand user behaviors in-depth.
Pro Tip: Once purchased you can invite unlimited users to your project. That’s super helpful for sharing analytics across multiple teams.
Real-Time Analytics | Heat Map & Sessions | Surveys & Feedback |
Kissmetrics
Pricing: Starting from $299
Kissmetrics’ deep integration with your users’ information helps you understand user behavior well. It helps you understand populations and cohorts, see your user acquisitions, and learn what features your power users are using the most. It also helps you review signups and purchases drilled down by plan, device, campaign, and more.
Best For: SaaS and E-commerce businesses trying to dive deep into user behaviors.
Pro Tip: Advanced BI Reporting allows you to dig deep inside your data. Also, behavioral analytics helps you to customize your website and content as per user’s profiles.
Real-Time Analytics | Cross-Device Aggregation | Live Support |
Cube.js
Pricing: Free & Open Source | Infrastructure cost for deployment
Cube.js is an Open-source analytical API platform. Cube.js analytical API server offers outstanding performance with query orchestration and multi-level caching. It also has built-in support for multitenancy and row-level security. It has a client-side data fetching library that integrates well with all major charting libraries for visualization. On the data sources side, it supports all modern data stores including serverless query engines. In a nutshell, Cube.js is a complete analytical API platform to build your next fully customizable analytics app.
Unlike hosted solutions, Cube.js allows you to own your data saving you from being vendor-locked.
Best For: Enterprises looking for customizable and scalable web analytics tools.
Pro Tip: The flexibility of Cube.js allows you to implement analytics your way no matter for what industry you’re working in; It can produce great results.
Quick Implementation | Open Source | Fully Customizable |
Fathom
Pricing: Starting from $14/month
Fathom is a simple, light-weight, privacy-first alternative to Google Analytics. Unlike big tech giants providing web analytics tools free of cost, Fathom charges a minimal amount for its analytics platform as they claim, “We charge a small and fair fee for Fathom, because our business model is selling software, not data.” Fathom only tracks the information required for the growth of your product rather than collecting tons of unnecessary information about your users.
Best For: Small- and medium-scale businesses looking for a privacy-focused analytics solution.
Pro Tip: Fathom keeps your React website cookie-free, which means you don’t have to worry much about privacy compliance in different regions.
Real-Time Analytics | Privacy-Focused | Full Data Export |
Plausible
Pricing: Starting from $6/month
Plausible is a lightweight and open-source website analytics tool. It doesn’t use cookies and is fully compliant with GDPR, CCPA, and PECR. Plausible is built with simplicity and ease-of-use in mind. It gives you full ownership of your data. Plausible Analytics is a lightweight web analytics tool that is built with speed and performance in mind. Plausible scripts weigh under 1 KB. You can also share your stats privately by generating a secure link.
Heat Map & Sessions | Lightweight Library | Real-Time Analytics |
Conclusion
Today, monitoring your React website is not too hard, but selecting the right tool is critical. Some React CMS tools make the job even easier by including out-of-the-box integration with Google Analytics and other popular analytics tools.
Depending upon your use case and bandwidth, many of these tools can help you get a good picture of user behavior. What is your experience with any of these tools? Please share with us in the comments below.
ButterCMS is the #1 rated Headless CMS
Related articles
Don’t miss a single post
Get our latest articles, stay updated!
Zain is a Senior Frontend Engineer at Peekaboo Guru. He is passionate about anything and everything React, React Native, JavaScript & Mobile Machine Learning.