Adobe Analytics vs. Smartlook

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
Adobe Analytics
Score 8.2 out of 10
N/A
Adobe acquired Omniture in 2009 and re-branded the platform as SiteCatalyst. It is now part of Adobe Marketing Cloud along with other products such as social marketing, test and targeting, and tag management. SiteCatalyst is one of the leading vendors in the web analytics category and is particularly strong in combining web analytics with other digital marketing capabilities like audience management and data management. Adobe Analytics also includes predictive marketing capabilities that help…N/A
Smartlook
Score 8.5 out of 10
Small Businesses (1-50 employees)
Smartlook is an analytics solution tool for websites, iOS/Android apps, and various app frameworks, that answers the "whys" behind users' actions. It helps users understand precisely how customers interact with website and app — watch recordings, create heatmaps, use automatic tracked events, and build conversion funnels. Data is seen on one central dashboard, which enables sharing and collaborating with colleagues. This is to support clear, data-driven decision-making for product managers,…
$55
per month 5000 sessions
Pricing
Adobe AnalyticsSmartlook
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
Pro
$55
per month 5000 sessions
Free
Free forever
per month 3000 sessions
Enterprise
Custom pricing
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Adobe AnalyticsSmartlook
Free Trial
NoYes
Free/Freemium Version
NoYes
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoYes
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeOptional
Additional DetailsAll Smartlook packages support both web and mobile app platforms.
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
Adobe AnalyticsSmartlook
Considered Both Products
Adobe Analytics
Chose Adobe Analytics
Adobe Analytics has a more modern and friendlier user interface and it's easier to use for me. Google analytics has better compatibility with other Google products
Smartlook

No answer on this topic

Top Pros
Top Cons
Features
Adobe AnalyticsSmartlook
Web Analytics
Comparison of Web Analytics features of Product A and Product B
Adobe Analytics
9.0
4 Ratings
15% above category average
Smartlook
-
Ratings
Lead Conversion Tracking9.24 Ratings00 Ratings
Bounce Rate Measurement9.14 Ratings00 Ratings
Device and Browser Reporting9.34 Ratings00 Ratings
Pageview Tracking8.84 Ratings00 Ratings
Event Tracking9.24 Ratings00 Ratings
Reporting in real-time8.44 Ratings00 Ratings
Referral Source Tracking9.14 Ratings00 Ratings
Customizable Dashboards8.84 Ratings00 Ratings
Best Alternatives
Adobe AnalyticsSmartlook
Small Businesses
StatCounter
StatCounter
Score 9.0 out of 10
Lucky Orange
Lucky Orange
Score 7.5 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
Siteimprove
Siteimprove
Score 8.7 out of 10
Siteimprove
Siteimprove
Score 8.7 out of 10
Enterprises
Contentsquare
Contentsquare
Score 8.6 out of 10
Contentsquare
Contentsquare
Score 8.6 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
Adobe AnalyticsSmartlook
Likelihood to Recommend
8.3
(178 ratings)
9.0
(141 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
10.0
(42 ratings)
8.9
(4 ratings)
Usability
6.7
(33 ratings)
9.2
(75 ratings)
Availability
8.3
(12 ratings)
9.1
(1 ratings)
Performance
7.9
(11 ratings)
8.2
(1 ratings)
Support Rating
3.9
(41 ratings)
9.1
(107 ratings)
In-Person Training
1.4
(5 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Online Training
7.0
(5 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Implementation Rating
8.0
(10 ratings)
7.3
(1 ratings)
Configurability
-
(0 ratings)
8.2
(2 ratings)
Contract Terms and Pricing Model
7.3
(6 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Ease of integration
-
(0 ratings)
9.1
(1 ratings)
Product Scalability
9.9
(2 ratings)
8.2
(1 ratings)
Professional Services
7.7
(5 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Vendor post-sale
-
(0 ratings)
9.1
(1 ratings)
Vendor pre-sale
-
(0 ratings)
9.1
(1 ratings)
User Testimonials
Adobe AnalyticsSmartlook
Likelihood to Recommend
Adobe
Adobe Analytics is better than some other tools as it feels better set up for actual "analysis", rather than simply "reporting". The power of Workspace allows you to drag 'n' drop at ease which makes you are far more in control of your own analysis/discovery/exploration. However, regards the final reports and dashboards' look 'n' feel the Workspace PDF output is lacking visually compared to other products like Google's Looker. To engage with less technical end users sometimes Looker feels the better, more polished option.
Read full review
Smartlook
Smartlook is best for screen recordings. Especially when you are running MVPs. However, its pricing is very high. If your daily visitors are too much then either you will have to lose many of your recordings or you will have to pay too much money.
Read full review
Pros
Adobe
  • They've been really an industry standard tool in analytics for a long, long time. They've got the trusted brand and the reputation, a wonderful community behind it. It is always nice, having that level of support where you can meet other practitioners. It's a great benefit because I can meet other people who have already pushed the tool a lot farther than I have. And it's a great place to get ideas in that way. We came from a world where we were running on a homegrown system that we'd use to do click tracking. You get some advantages on that of the customization, but losing out on community of support was one of the big reasons why we decided to move beyond that and implement Adobe Analytics instead.
Read full review
Smartlook
  • Funnels are both easy to configure yet comprehensive enough to detect complicated customer journeys.
  • Real-time recording provides exceptional insights to our design & engineering teams.
  • Session recording is surprisingly lightweight and seems to cause no substantial performance degradation for our customers.
Read full review
Cons
Adobe
  • Most of the problems that Adobe Analytics as of now is having, it is getting addressed in a newer tool called Web Desk DK from implementation. They are already addressing that issue with the new tool and also the time data with the customer general analytics. So there is something not in workspace analysis and this is what they're addressing in customer general analytics. Which is good.
Read full review
Smartlook
  • I feel nickel and dimed with the events and funnels.
  • We came from sessions being 30 mins of inactivity and now it's 5-10 mins. Session count has gone up significantly which we weren't prepared for.
  • Recording playback isn't as clean and maneuverable like FullStory.
Read full review
Likelihood to Renew
Adobe
We've found multiple uses for Adobe Analytics in our organization. Each department analyzes the data they need and creates actionables based off of that data. For E-Commerce, we're constantly using data to analyze user engagement, website performance and evaluate ROI.
Read full review
Smartlook
As my ratings show, I have been absolutely delighted with Smartlook in terms of usability, cost, support, and its benefit to our organization. I have given it such high ratings because I think it has really benefitted our organization and I think it could do the same for other companies too.
Read full review
Usability
Adobe
Sometimes the processing times are very long. I have had reports or dashboards time out multiple times during presentations. It could be improved. It is understandable since there is a huge data set that the tool is processing before showing anything, however for a company that large they should invest in optimizing processing times.
Read full review
Smartlook
Every page, the tool setup pages and dashboards are built very well, the site structure is perfectly designed and intuitive to use. All functions are well documented and the help sections are really everywhere, you don't have to search for answers, as they are just popped up or max. a click away for your service.
Read full review
Reliability and Availability
Adobe
I do not ever recall a time when Adobe Analytics was unavailable to me to use in the 8 or so years I have been an end user of the product. My most-used day-to-day analytics tool Parse.ly however, generally has a multiple hours planned offline maintenance every two to four weeks, and sometimes has issues collecting realtime analytics that last anywhere between 15 minutes to an hour, and happen anywhere between 1 to 5 times a month.
Read full review
Smartlook
No answers on this topic
Performance
Adobe
Again, no issues here. Performance within the day updates hourly. other reports are updated overnight and available to access by the next morning. Pages load quickly, the site navigates easily and the UX is quite straightforward to get command over. On this front, I give Adobe kudos for building a great experience to work within
Read full review
Smartlook
No answers on this topic
Support Rating
Adobe
I barely see any communication from Adobe Analytics. The content on the web is also not that great or easy to read. I would recommend a better communication about the product and the new addons information to come to its user by a better mean.
Read full review
Smartlook
Sofia P. is being our point of contact with the issues we faced. I was unsure about how to explain to her what was going on with the recording numbers (the recording has stopped before we were expecting to), but she readily understood and came with a solution for us in the same day. The problem was blocking our developer to test the integration, so it was great to have support so fast that he could continue his work.
Read full review
In-Person Training
Adobe
It was a one-day training several years ago that cost the organization several thousand dollars. There were only about 10 people in the training class. Adobe tried to cram so much information into that one-day class that none of our users felt like they really learned anything helpful from the experience. Follow-up training is too expensive
Read full review
Smartlook
No answers on this topic
Online Training
Adobe
The online training for Adobe SiteCatalyst consists of short product videos. These are ok, but only go so far. For a while Adobe charged a fee for this, but recently made these available for free. There are many great blog posts that help users learn how to apply the product as well.
Read full review
Smartlook
No answers on this topic
Implementation Rating
Adobe
One of the benefits and obstacles to successfully using Adobe Analytics is a great / more accurate implementation, make sure your analytics group is intimate with the details of the implementation and that the requirements are driven by the business.
Read full review
Smartlook
No answers on this topic
Alternatives Considered
Adobe
I think Adobe's been around longer as a product but Tealium, from when I did research, it has auto-tagging. So one of my biggest pet peeves is when I'm rolling out new features, and whether it's an app or a website, is that I have to go speak with our metrics team or tagging team and we have to come up with these different strategies. Okay, how are we gonna tag it? What are we going to name it? It just seems like a lot of wasted time in my opinion. I want to track everything. I want to know every single thing these people are doing. We shouldn't have to have this conversation if we tag this, you might not have time to tag this right away for MVP. It's like that to me right now. That shouldn't even be a conversation. I should be able to release a feature, I should be able to just automatically go pull reports on that. And just figure out exactly what they were doing.
Read full review
Smartlook
It has been a year between the time when I last used Hotjar and first started using Smartlook. I would say both tools are more or less equal when it comes to features, the only 2 differences I can think of are - price and customer support. Smartlook is cheaper and has superior customer services. You have the feeling when interacting with them that they genuinely care.
Read full review
Contract Terms and Pricing Model
Adobe
Adobe Analytics is relatively affordable compared to other tools, given it provides a range of flexible variables to use that I have not found in any other tools so far. It is worth investing in if your company is medium or large-sized and brings a steady flow of revenue. For small companies, it can be overpriced.
Read full review
Smartlook
No answers on this topic
Scalability
Adobe
My organization uses Adobe Analytics across a multitude of brand portfolios. Each brand has multiple websites, mobile apps and some even have connected TV apps/channels on Roku and similar devices. Adobe can handle the multitude of properties that have simple, small(ish) websites and the larger brand properties that include web, mobile and connected TVs/OTT devices.
Each of those larger brands has multiple categories and channels to keep track of. We can see the data by channel/device or aggregate all the data together. This gives our executive teams the full picture and the departmental teams the view they need to see their own performance.
Read full review
Smartlook
No answers on this topic
Professional Services
Adobe
The professional services team is one of the best teams for complex adobe analytics implementations, especially for clients having multiple website and mobile applications. However, the cost of professional services is a bit high which makes few clients opt out of it, but for large scale implementations they are very helpful
Read full review
Smartlook
No answers on this topic
Return on Investment
Adobe
  • I like to think it's positive. It's a very steep learning curve, so we do face a lot of challenges with adoption inside of the companies. My team and I evangelize this and also who's in charge of data and advanced analytics, but it's very hard to leverage that with typical business analysis people. These are people who live their life in Excel and SQL and Power BI. They just use this very occasionally and by only looking at that sort of aggregate data, they miss out on behavior and what actually happens in execution. And because it's such a steep learning curve, we do have a challenge pushing it in there.
Read full review
Smartlook
  • Smartlook is used by different individuals from different organizations to have insights into different parts of products. It is used as the sole developer of our website as well as marketing campaigns.
  • Smartlook has an amazing feature which is tracking the activities of return users.
  • It gives reliable and efficient services.
Read full review
ScreenShots

Smartlook Screenshots

Screenshot of HeatmapsScreenshot of RecordingsScreenshot of DashboardsScreenshot of EventsScreenshot of FunnelsScreenshot of Analytics for websites & mobile apps