If you’re on a B2B product team and sifting through analytics tools, you know the pain: every vendor promises the world, but you just want answers—what’s actually useful, and what’s just marketing? Whether you’re sizing up PostHog or its competitors, this guide will help you cut through vendor claims and focus on what actually matters for B2B teams.
Step 1: Get Real About Your B2B Analytics Needs
Before you even look at features, get specific about what you care about. B2B products have different needs than B2C. Here’s what usually matters most:
- Account-based analytics: You don’t care about “users” as much as you care about companies.
- Complex user journeys: Your customers might have long sales cycles, multiple touchpoints, and more than one stakeholder per account.
- Data privacy and compliance: B2B buyers ask tough questions about where data lives, who can access it, and how it’s secured.
- Integration with other tools: Think CRMs (like Salesforce or HubSpot), support tools, and internal data warehouses.
Write down your top three needs. Seriously—if you don’t, you’ll get distracted by shiny features that don’t move the needle.
Step 2: Know the Main Players (and What’s Hype)
Let’s be real: most “product analytics” tools promise they do everything. Here’s a quick, no-nonsense breakdown of the main B2B contenders:
- PostHog: Open-source, can be self-hosted, developer-friendly. Good if you want control and flexibility. Not as polished out-of-the-box as some.
- Mixpanel: Polished, fast to set up, widely used. Better for event-based analytics than for account-level reporting.
- Amplitude: Similar to Mixpanel, with more enterprise features and a focus on cohort analysis. Gets expensive fast.
- Heap: “Auto-captures” everything. Sounds great, but can be noisy and overwhelming for complex B2B products.
- Pendo, Gainsight PX: Focused more on product adoption and in-app guidance for SaaS. Analytics is just one part.
- Google Analytics, Adobe Analytics: Not really built for product teams, more for marketing traffic. Not ideal for B2B product analytics.
Ignore claims about “AI insights” or “magic dashboards.” What matters is whether the tool helps your team answer real questions, not whether it has a flashy homepage.
Step 3: Compare Features That Actually Matter for B2B
Here’s where the rubber meets the road. Don’t get lost in feature matrices—zero in on the stuff B2B teams need.
1. Account-Based Reporting
- Can you see product usage by company, not just by user?
- PostHog: Possible, but you need to set it up—track company as a property on events, or use “groups.”
- Mixpanel/Amplitude: Decent, but often requires custom workarounds or paid add-ons.
- Pendo/Gainsight: Built-in, since they target B2B SaaS.
Pro tip: If you have a lot of “invited users,” make sure your analytics tool can group them by company automatically. Otherwise, you’ll spend hours in spreadsheets.
2. Custom Events and Data Flexibility
- How easy is it to track the things you care about?
- PostHog: Total flexibility, especially if you’re technical. Anything you can send, you can track. But the learning curve is there.
- Mixpanel/Amplitude: Easy for basic events, but custom event properties can get tricky. Some limits on data volume in cheaper plans.
- Heap: Captures everything, but cleaning up that data is a chore. You’ll need to invest time to make it actionable.
3. Integration With Other B2B Tools
- Does it play nice with your CRM, support tools, or BI stack?
- PostHog: Has APIs and plugins, but you may need engineering support.
- Mixpanel/Amplitude: Good out-of-the-box integrations with common SaaS.
- Pendo/Gainsight: Deep integrations with Salesforce, Zendesk, etc.
- Heap: Decent, but “set it and forget it” is a myth—expect to tinker.
Watch out: “Integrates with Salesforce” sometimes just means “exports a CSV you have to upload manually.” Ask for specifics.
4. Self-Hosting and Data Ownership
- Can you control where your data lives?
- PostHog: Yes, this is a major selling point. You can self-host on your own cloud or even on-premises.
- Mixpanel/Amplitude/Heap: Cloud-only. Your data lives on their servers.
- Pendo/Gainsight: Cloud-only, with some compliance certifications.
If you’re in a regulated industry or care about privacy, this matters. Don’t just take their word for it—ask about SOC2, GDPR, and data residency.
5. Pricing and Scaling
- How does the pricing model fit your growth?
- PostHog: Open-source version is free, but you’ll pay in engineering time. Cloud plans scale with usage.
- Mixpanel/Amplitude: “Free” plans cap out fast; real usage gets expensive, especially as data volume grows.
- Pendo/Gainsight: Enterprise pricing, not transparent. Expect a sales call.
- Heap: Also gets pricey at scale.
No tool is truly “free.” You’ll either pay with money, time, or both.
6. Reporting and Usability for Non-Technical Teams
- Can your sales, customer success, or product managers actually use it?
- PostHog: Powerful, but takes some setup. Not as slick for non-engineers out of the box.
- Mixpanel/Amplitude: More polished dashboards, easier for business users.
- Pendo/Gainsight: Built with customer-facing teams in mind.
Bottom line: If your team doesn’t have a technical background, factor in the learning curve.
Step 4: Put Tools to the Test—With Your Real Data
Demos and sales decks are nice, but you won’t know what works until you try it with your own messy data.
- Set up a proof of concept with two or three tools.
- Track the same events and try to answer questions your team actually cares about (“Which accounts haven’t used Feature X this month?”).
- Get feedback from multiple roles—not just engineers, but also product managers, customer success, and sales.
- Time how long it takes to get to a usable dashboard. If it’s weeks, that’s a red flag.
Pro tip: Don’t be afraid to ask vendors blunt questions like “Can you show me how to do account-based reporting, step by step?” If they hand-wave or stall, that’s your answer.
Step 5: Ignore the Noise—Focus on Outcomes
You’re not buying analytics for the sake of it. You want answers to real business questions:
- Who are our power users (by company, not just individual)?
- Which features drive retention for our best customers?
- Where do accounts get stuck in onboarding?
- How is product usage tied to expansion or churn?
Pick the tool that helps your team answer these questions with as little fuss as possible. Ignore the rest.
A Few Honest Takes
- PostHog is a great fit if you want control, can handle some setup, and care about data ownership. Not ideal if your team hates technical tinkering.
- Mixpanel/Amplitude are safer bets if you want polish and fast time-to-value, but watch your bill as usage grows.
- Heap is great for “set and forget” tracking, but can get overwhelming unless someone curates the data.
- Pendo/Gainsight shine for product adoption and customer success use cases, but you might overpay if you just want analytics.
No tool is perfect. They all have trade-offs. Don’t fall for “one platform to rule them all”—focus on fit for your use case and team.
Keep It Simple—And Iterate
Don’t let the hunt for the “perfect” analytics tool stall your team. Start with your top needs, run a real-world test, and pick the tool that gets the job done with the least pain. You can always adjust later—what you need today might change as your product grows.
Stay skeptical, keep it simple, and remember: analytics should help your team make better decisions, not just generate prettier charts.