This document highlights and explains how some of the features of Countly differ from similarly named ones in other analytics solutions, as well as talks about whether certain features are currently available or planned for in Countly. This document is regularly updated.
How Countly differs from other analytics tools, like Google Analytics
We believe that analytics software should be simple, incomplex and should just show the necessary information, with a superior user experience. Moreover, some companies may want to own their data, requiring to have analytics servers in their own premises. Since Countly is open source, you can install Countly service on your server farm.
Unlike other services, Countly is an all-in-one platform, including analytics for mobile, desktop and web pages, sending messages via push notifications, user profiles and crash reporting. This eliminates the need to use more than one service (which is good, since you do not have to maintain or pay for them), or more than one SDK (which is good, since you don't want to make your app fatter).
Countly's roadmap is public, so you can know what we are working on right now. Also, you can see a list of issues on Github that we are working on.
Moreover, Countly has mobile applications for Android, and iOS devices, including iPad and iPhone, so you do not have to use a browser to check latest status of your app.
Why Countly does not offer the use of Google Tag Manager
Google Tag Manager allows the tracking of new events without code intervention and app release. It is effective on websites to a certain degree since it enables adding events based on scenarios such as a “click” or “page view”, but on mobile, it doesn’t work the same way. As you can see in this article apart from not being intuitive for a non-technical person to use this functionality, it’s also rather limited since on mobile you don’t get to trigger events based on various actions/transactions taking place inside the app but you just have the ability to alter default events logged by Firebase.
Our stance on codeless analytics has been clear: at Countly, we think the valuable information you’ll be getting out of your analytics efforts rests within the application/business logic rather than the UI. User interface based events and other data is only useful if it is coupled and enriched with business logic layer information such as transactions taking place, the properties of a particular user or session, and the complex relationship of user UI actions to the experience and journey within the app. For this reason, we aren’t currently planning to implement a tag manager or similar codeless analytics functionality, since it would severely impact the value businesses get out of Countly.