How to choose analytics for a SaaS startup

A SaaS startup usually has three different questions:

1. Marketing — which page or channel brought the visit?
2. Product — did the new account do the thing that predicts they stay?
3. Revenue — which channel produced paid customers?

One tool can cover more than one question. Most early teams still overload a single install and then trust none of the charts.

If the site is a homepage, docs, and a signup page, a pageview tool is enough. Plausible or Fathom answer referrers, campaigns, and a signup goal without a heavy script.

Add GA4 only if Google Ads or Search attribution is a weekly decision. Read PostHog vs Plausible before you put a product SDK on the marketing homepage — our recorded PostHog script is in a much heavier band than Plausible.

Once people sign in, you need a few named events: signup completed, project created, invite sent, upgrade clicked. PostHog is built for that, including funnels and flags. GA4 can do events too, with more reporting overhead.

Keep the event list under ten until a chart changes a decision. The vocabulary is in What are analytics events? and Pageviews vs events.

If the question is "which blog post or ad led to a paid customer," look at DataFast's payment attribution or a deliberate ecommerce setup in GA4. DataFast is not a replacement for in-app funnels. Compare Plausible vs DataFast and DataFast vs PostHog.

Price the shortlist at your traffic in the pricing calculator before you add a second subscription.

Marketing site: Plausible or Fathom. Product app: PostHog, once you have logged-in users. Revenue: DataFast or GA4 ecommerce, when payments are the metric that matters.

Skip the third tool until the first two leave a question you cannot answer. Heatmaps and recordings (Hotjar, or PostHog replay) come after a specific page is failing, not on day one.