Most analytics setups fail the same way: a founder installs a tool, wires up a pageview event, and never looks at it again because it answers questions nobody was asking. The fix isn't a better tool — it's picking the right kind of tool for the question you actually have, then adding a second one only when a real question shows up that the first can't answer.
Here's how the major web and mobile analytics tools split by the job they're actually good at.
What you're really deciding between
Analytics tools split into two categories that get conflated constantly:
- Traffic analytics — where visitors come from, what pages they land on, how many convert. This is marketing and SEO territory: sessions, referrers, campaigns, search queries.
- Product analytics — what logged-in users actually do inside your app: which features get used, where they drop off, what a retained user's path looks like versus a churned one's.
Most founders need both eventually. Almost nobody needs both on day one.
Traffic analytics
Google Analytics 4
Free, deeply integrated with Google Search Console and Google Ads, and still the default because of that integration more than because of its interface — GA4's event model is more capable than its predecessor but noticeably harder to learn. Worth having installed for the Search Console pairing alone, even if you rarely open the dashboard directly.
Plausible / Fathom
Privacy-first, cookieless alternatives that trade GA4's depth for a dashboard you can actually read in thirty seconds: top pages, top referrers, conversion goals, no consent banner required in most jurisdictions since there's no personal data collected. The right choice when "how much traffic, from where" is the whole question.
Product analytics: web and mobile behavior
PostHog
An open-source product analytics suite that bundles event tracking, session replay, feature flags, and A/B testing into one tool with a generous free tier — the closest thing to a one-stop shop for a team that doesn't want four separate vendors for four related jobs. Strong choice when you want product analytics and feature flags from the same place.
Mixpanel
Purpose-built for funnel and retention analysis — cohort breakdowns, retention curves, and event-property segmentation are where it's genuinely best-in-class. The tool to reach for when the question is specifically "why do users drop off between step 2 and step 3," on web or mobile.
Amplitude
Similar territory to Mixpanel with a stronger enterprise pedigree and deeper behavioral cohorting — usually the pick once a team has a dedicated growth or data function asking more sophisticated questions than a solo founder typically needs answered on day one.
Mobile-specific signal
Web analytics tools mostly work for mobile web, but native iOS and Android apps need their own signal: App Store Connect and Google Play Console give you install, uninstall, rating, and review data that no third-party tool replicates, because it comes directly from the platform. PostHog, Mixpanel, and Amplitude all ship mobile SDKs for in-app event tracking alongside that store-level data.
Side-by-side
| Tool | Category | Best for | Free tier |
|---|---|---|---|
| Google Analytics 4 | Traffic | SEO and campaign attribution | Yes, generous |
| Plausible / Fathom | Traffic | Simple, privacy-first traffic view | Limited trial only |
| PostHog | Product (web + mobile) | All-in-one: events, replay, flags | Yes, generous |
| Mixpanel | Product (web + mobile) | Funnels and retention analysis | Yes, capped by events |
| Amplitude | Product (web + mobile) | Advanced behavioral cohorting | Yes, capped by events |
| App Store Connect / Google Play | Store-level (mobile only) | Installs, ratings, reviews | Included with developer account |
How to pick without overthinking it
Start with one traffic tool and one product tool, maximum. Google Analytics plus PostHog covers the vast majority of what a solo founder needs in the first year — acquisition on one side, in-product behavior on the other — and both have free tiers that don't force an upgrade decision before you have the users to justify it. Add Mixpanel or Amplitude later, specifically, when a retention question comes up that PostHog's dashboards genuinely can't answer.
Analytics tells you what users do. It won't tell you if something's on fire.
Traffic and product analytics answer "what happened over time." They're not built to tell you, right now, that a deploy fifteen minutes ago broke checkout. That's a different job — the one FounderOS's ranked incident inbox exists to do, alongside the Google Analytics and Search Console widgets already sitting on your Today page.