Item: Countly
Rating: 8
Author: Fedor Paretsky

Overall Satisfaction with Countly

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Countly was used previously at our company to track conversion rates, click-rates, and simple user-event tracking. We later switched to Mixpanel and Segment for these services but chose Countly as our tracking service at the beginning because it was open-source and was possible to self-host. We used some of the mobile SDKs to also track how our end-users were using our mobile applications.

Pros and Cons

Pros

Open-source and Self-hosted - Countly can be completely self-hosted, which makes it really easy to offset costs of a competing service like Segment or Mixpanel for early-stage companies.
A large number of SDKs and platform support - Countly provides fairly comprehensive support for mobile applications and general tracking. As a result, it's pretty easy to create comprehensive tracking of events for any company.
Custom queries, access to data - You have instant access to data and extensive customizability which makes this platform fairly easy to use for any purpose of user and market tracking.

Cons

Bad UI - The UI is quite outdated and poorly designed, which was one of the principal reasons for us moving away from Countly.
Some poor documentation - 3rd-party documentation and tutorials for some of their mobile SDKs are better than Countly's own documentation.
Server requirements can be a bit high - For startups with trial credits on cloud computing services, this may not be a problem. Otherwise, Countly can get as expensive as hosted services like Segment and Mixpanel.

Return on Investment

Positive - Completely free to self-host. This may be a much better option than purchasing expensive enterprise-pricing plans for competitors.
Positive - Comprehensive SDKs and support. It's easy to integrate most mobile applications and interfaces into the analytics platform once you understand the documentation.
Negative - Poor documentation. As mentioned previously, the documentation could use a lot of improvement, and significantly slowed us down from integrating these SDKs on our front-ends.
Negative - poor UI. It could use a lot of improvement and is a good reason to switch to other services.

Alternatives Considered

Matomo (formerly Piwik)

Matomo has poor integrations and SDK support compared to Countly. It is also significantly harder to set up compared to Countly. There have also been complaints about Matomo having security flaws. Additionally, Matomo seemed to lack common analytics platform features, like segmentation, and tracking/downloading raw data. These features are very easy to use in Countly and are usually a necessity for most companies.

Other Software Used

Google Charts, Microsoft 365 Business, Ghost, LastPass, Auth0, Authy, Yubico, Skype, Slack, MEGA, Loom, Sketch, Docker, IntelliJ IDEA, PyCharm, IntelliJ WebStorm, Microsoft Visual Studio Code

Likelihood to Recommend

Countly is wonderful. It mhas affordable options for startups that are experimenting with event and market-tracking services that can't afford more expensive services but do have the cloud credits to operate Countly. For later-stage companies that have the money, but not the time to set up a service like this, a service like Amplitude, Segment, or Mixpanel may be a better alternative.

Comments

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Affordable, open-source, and a good on-premise option.