Heap Reviews & Product Details

We trialled a number of tools trying to find something that would be able to be used without needing our Head of Insights to generate reports.

Heap was the easiest tool out there, we were able to onboard each team (product, marketing etc) and help them become self-sufficient for reporting.

Also we didn't have to keep asking devs to add tags! Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Heap is getting better at this but helping highlight patterns across different reports and events.

This isn't unique to Heap, but sometimes for a non-data pro, it can be hard to understand if you are tracking across the right events.

Hopefully AI can just work backwards from goal and work everything out :) Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

I love how easy it is to create a dashboard that's accessible for my entire team to review results of certain tools/products. Additionally, Heap makes it easy to surface quick data points as well as more in-depth analysis. It's great I can add quick descriptions so other folx can easily understand what they're looking at and the biggest takeaways. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

I dislike that Heap caches so much – sometimes the tool can get really slow due to this. Also, I wish I could see event data for specific events while building out dashboards. I usually need to have two tabs open -- one where I'm searching the entire repository of events, and another where I'm building my current chart. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

This product is best in class in combining auto-captured events + custom API events. If I need more client-side events, the visual labeling tool is convenient. I don't need to bother a developer to defined these events for me. I can't imagine life without it. Additionally, building reports is so easy and intuitive. I can build reports in less than a minute if I know where to look.

Heap has built a library of integrations that make it a breeze to accomplish any product task. For example, we're segmenting users based on action and then sending it to Iterable which then sends out a campaign for these users. Heap can also integrate with your AB testing tools which helps you further analyze your customer's behaviors. Powerful stuff. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

If you don't structure your custom API events, then Heap won't read it correctly. You need all your event properties at a top level structure, it hates nested json objects. In addition to custom API events, Heap Events has a confusing structure. There's properties only available at an Heap event level versus a user level versus a property level. This makes it hard to find the properties you need when building reports. Unless you know what you're looking for, it's a pain to create reports without this knowledge.

Categorization is also confusing with Heap. You have different category rules based on charts, events, segments and dashboards. I can't add Paths to dashboards, which is a missed opportunity.

Lastly, and this is not Heap's fault, but if you're a company instrumenting Heap into your products, you need to do a lot more work in instrumenting Heap and your events correctly. If you don't have a good analytics plan or structure in place, you will struggle with using Heap. Heap is only as good as the data you input into it. This is something we are working with as well. Heap has done a good job with helping us with the instrumentation, but it felt very surface-level. We learned a lot along the way that we wish we had known in the beginning.

When we started evaluating it, it was cheaper than the other comparable tools available in the market. But it's getting just as expensive as the industry leaders out there like Amplitude. If you're a startup, it's going to be a bit out of reach. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Pros:

- Analysis types are purpose-built for product analytics (vs general data display), so it's normally twice as easy using Heap to get the right display or analysis type (eg conversion funnel, user journey) versus using another all-purpose analytics tool

- Self-serve component is very handy, and saves tons of development time/cost

- Customer support is fantastic Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

- Some aspects of self-serve can be buggy, but it's not often I run into this

- Running large queries, especially exporting data for further anlaysis/customization can be very slow, even not load at times

- Some of the presets of display are not highly configurable (eg if you wanted to compare a more nuanced data point, like the ratio of one thing, to the ratio of another, it's not possible in a single step) Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Heap has a very extensive and robust UI that enables you to dive deep into the data about how your users use your applications. The heat map and user journey features will allow you to see insights that are very hard to capture and visualize compared to other data anlytics and visualization software. Heap takes much of the hard work required to centralize and visualize the data and provides critical insights into what product decisions you should make for your upcoming sprints. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

The biggest downside to Heap is its steep learning curve. Enabling users to access such powerful features requires extensive education on utilizing Heap's features. I would prefer if Heap was more user-friendly from the getgo but the company has designed a whole website portal called "Heap University" that tries its best to offset these issues and provide extensive educational resources to its users. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Team is always available to help. It's the best platform for marketeers as you can retrospectively apply events and tracking and it will have all past data versus GA where tracking only begins after implementing a change Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

It's expensive and quite unflexible for us as a seasonal businesses. As we get larger i think this becomes less of an issue Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Very extensive and helpful insights that brings business value to our product development decisions. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Steep learning curve to use effectively. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

That its relatively easy to setup event definitions through the Visualizer.

Has a good user experience. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Not intuitive enough for deep analysis of funnels and journeys. It's difficult for me to understand what's happening between two points in a flow and to determine what the cause for drop-off rates may be. I would like to see the percentage of usage for each field in a form. Important metrics are success rate, engagement time, and drop-off rate.

Another issue is not having surveys and feedback widgets on the platform. So I have to rely on other tools to provide that functionality. It would be good to have it in one place so I can link it to the same user database.

Would be great to have user onboarding flows too and links to knowledge bases. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

As a product owner, I've always believed in the "if you build it, you should measure it" approach. We've tried many analytics platforms, but having all your data in one place and giving product managers the tools to create dashboards, funnels, and views of their data is very important. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Understanding how to link Heap to other incumbent analytics platforms. As we transition all of our analytics to Heap, we still need to be able to access data in our current platform and need to connect. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Auto capture and snapshotting are very cool in theory, but they don't work all the time. The implementation was not done perfectly in onboarding, so tagging roadblocks and limitations constantly come up. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Extremely challenging to natively tag a complex site with microsites, clients, etc. involved in the product funnel. iOS and Android app tagging are not straightforward, and most end users of Heap can't figure out how to do it, even with documentation and video instruction. Segment integration doesn't work seamlessly. The lack of support from Heap reps (specifically in the form of workshops, examples using our data, walk-throughs, q&a has been pretty terrible. We had one session right when onboarding to walk us through the tool, but nothing since. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.