Product analytics solution: Buy vs. Build
- Last Updated : February 5, 2025
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- 4 Min Read
Searching through a sea of solutions for your ideal product analytics solution can be a hassle. You have to surf dozens of websites and research extensively to find a feasible solution that suits your needs.
After all this research, you might be wondering whether you should buy an existing solution or build one from scratch (a.k.a., the build vs buy dilemma). With so many resources leading you in so many different ways, it can be hard to decide. That's why we've compiled a quick guide to help you decide whether to buy or build an analytics solution.
Key questions to consider
Before we get started, it's important to ask yourself a few questions:
- Why do you need an analytics tool?
- Are you already using any existing analytics tools or are you new to them entirely?
- Is your business facing problems that can't be resolved with existing tools?
- How much time, resources, and money can you dedicate to the analytical needs of your business?
- What is the future roadmap for your business?
Once you've given thought to these questions, you'll understand what exactly your business needs. Let's weigh the options available and choose the right fit for your business.
Build vs. buy: Weighing the pros and cons
Buy an existing solution: Pros
- Saves time and helps you focus more on core competencies.
- Reduces costs and increases the efficiency of support activities.
- Comes as a package that includes support, assistance, updates, and maintenance.
- Includes its own data handling practices, data safety frameworks, and privacy compliance policies.
Buy an existing solution: Cons
- Existing solutions may not cater to all of your specific needs and lack the flexibility to customize them according to your needs.
- Involves a high risk of vendor lock-in, which means the costs to migrate and transfer data to other solution providers might also become high.
Build a new solution: Pros
- Results in a custom fit that will meet all your needs.
- Gives you complete ownership of your solution.
- If requirements change, you can alter your solution accordingly if you have enough resources.
Build a new solution: Cons
- Requires a substantial amount of time, effort, money, and resources.
- If the solution doesn't suit the product line, it distracts your business from its objectives and goals.
- Generally harder to scale and upgrade when your requirements increase or change.
- Requires you to build safety frameworks and draw regulations on your own. As a solution provider, you are solely responsible for data safety and privacy compliance.
Additional features to look for in analytics solutions
Functionality
Product analytics solutions have been available for years. Most existing solutions today focus on aspects such as user adoption, usage, engagement, issue tracking, retention, growth, and performance. A few offer industry-specific adaptations based on usability and purpose, while others tackle particular challenges and cater to niche use cases.
Convenience
You can try the best-of-breed approach by combining various tools to address your analytical needs. However, integrating multiple services and gathering all your data in a single place is tedious and cumbersome.
To break data silos and prevent them from affecting your business decisions, you need a unified system that brings all your app data into a single place without disturbing your existing tech stack.
Scalability
Scalability is another essential factor to consider; building and maintaining a scalable solution can be challenging as demand increases. Prebuilt solution providers have a significant edge here since they regularly upgrade and fine-tune their products to meet market expectations.
Compliance
Since analytics solutions involve data and users, there's usually a strong emphasis on data security and privacy. As a business, it's necessary to ensure effective data handling practices, protection of user privacy, and compliance with global data protection laws and regulations.
Zoho Apptics: A comprehensive product analytics solution for all your apps
Your analytics solution, whether built or bought, needs to balance functionality, convenience, scalability, and compliance. Zoho Apptics does it all, providing valuable app-driven insights while protecting user privacy.
Zoho Apptics saves you the hassle of managing multiple subscriptions, complex setups, and fragmented insights for your business. This solution serves as a single source of information for everyone involved in the app development process and post-development activities.
For developers, Apptics monitors app health with real-time crash reporting and issue analytics, optimizes app performance, and customizes your app's behavior from within the console.
For marketers, it gives early insights into user engagement, app stickiness, and drop-off rates with retention analysis. Flows and funnels help you understand user navigation and analyze how users interact with your app.
For managers, it provides a bird's eye view of all app aspects to help make data-driven decisions and develop a strategic app roadmap.
Zoho Apptics is built on privacy-by-design principles, incorporating compliance with various data privacy and security laws at every step. This ensures a safe and privacy-friendly development environment for your applications.
It comes with prebuilt functionalities and seamless integrations that help you adopt a more proactive approach toward product development. Easily optimize your app's user experience using features like in-app feedback, store reviews, ratings, updates, remote configuration, and push notifications.
Zoho Apptics is a comprehensive solution that encompasses everything your app needs. Explore Zoho Apptics for free and schedule a one-on-one session with our experts to learn more about how Zoho Apptics can cater to your needs and help you achieve your goals.