How to choose a mobile app analytics tool

"Mobile app analytics" is a wider label than it sounds. It covers tools that help a listing get found in the app store, tools that catch a crash before a one-star review does, tools that manage and measure in-app subscription revenue, and free event tracking built into Google's own app platform — four jobs that rarely live in one product. Picking a tool means first picking which of these you're solving for, because comparing an ASO platform to a crash-reporting tool on "features" doesn't get you anywhere.

Store visibility: getting found and ranked

App Store Optimization is its own discipline: keyword research, ranking tracking, listing conversion, and watching what competitors do. Appfigures and AppTweak both live here, tracking keyword rankings and benchmarking listing performance across app stores. Sensor Tower does the same job but from further out — after acquiring its largest rival, data.ai, in 2024, it now leads on market-intelligence estimates (downloads, revenue, ad spend) for apps you don't own telemetry for, useful for competitive research beyond your own portfolio. If your question is "how do we rank for these keywords," Appfigures or AppTweak; if it's "how big is this competitor's app, really," Sensor Tower.

Technical observability: crashes, performance, bugs

A second, unrelated job is knowing when the app breaks. Embrace and Luciq (the 2025 rebrand of Instabug) both cover crash reporting, performance monitoring and session-level diagnostics for native iOS and Android apps, reconstructing the technical timeline — network calls, view transitions, device state — leading up to a failure. This is engineering tooling, not marketing analytics, and it's priced and bought by a different team than ASO or attribution tools. Neither replaces Firebase Analytics or an attribution partner; they answer "why did it crash," not "who installed it" or "what did they do after."

Subscription revenue: infrastructure that produces analytics as a byproduct

A third job is specific to apps that sell subscriptions: RevenueCat and Adapty are subscription infrastructure first — they handle in-app purchase validation and cross-platform entitlement management so engineering doesn't build App Store and Play Billing integration from scratch — and produce churn, trial-conversion, and revenue-cohort analytics as a byproduct of sitting in that purchase path. Both have added no-code paywall builders with A/B testing on top. If your app doesn't sell subscriptions, neither tool is relevant regardless of how good their analytics look in a demo.

Free, built-in event analytics

Google Analytics for Firebase is a different case entirely: free, unlimited event tracking built into Firebase, automatically capturing first-opens, in-app purchases and screen views, with custom events on top and a direct feed into GA4 and Google Ads audiences. It's the default choice for any team already on Firebase, and there's rarely a reason to pay for a competing basic event tracker if you are. It is not an ASO tool, not a crash reporter, and not a subscription-revenue tool — it only does one of the four jobs in this category, well, for free.

What each job actually costs

Pricing models differ as much as the jobs do:

• ASO tools price by tracked keywords and competitors — Appfigures scales from roughly $8 to $1,400/month across tiers; AppTweak publishes tiers up to $549/month with Enterprise custom-quoted; Sensor Tower is quote-only across the board.
• Observability tools price by session or usage volume — Embrace meters per 1,000 sessions above a free tier; Luciq prices by daily active users and seats with no public list.
• Subscription infrastructure prices as a percentage of the revenue it processes — both RevenueCat and Adapty are free below a monthly revenue threshold, then take roughly 1% of tracked revenue, which means the tool gets more expensive exactly as your subscription business succeeds.
• Firebase Analytics is free at any volume, full stop.

A shortlist by situation

• If you're launching an app and need to be found, start with Appfigures for affordable keyword tracking, and add AppTweak or Sensor Tower once competitor benchmarking matters.
• If you're an engineering team chasing crashes and slow screens, compare Embrace and Luciq directly — see Embrace vs Instabug.
• If you sell in-app subscriptions, RevenueCat or Adapty should already be in your stack for the billing infrastructure alone; the analytics come with it.
• If you're already on Firebase and just need event tracking and funnels, Firebase Analytics costs nothing and there's little reason to look elsewhere first.
• If you need competitive intelligence on apps you don't own, Sensor Tower is the only tool in this category built for that specifically.

Questions to ask a vendor or in a trial

1. Which of the four jobs above does this tool actually do — and which does it not do?
2. For ASO tools: how many keywords and competitors does our real portfolio need tracked, not the demo's three examples?
3. For observability tools: what's the session or DAU volume at our current scale, projected forward a year, against the pricing model?
4. For subscription tools: does the percentage-of-revenue fee apply to gross or net revenue, and does it change as we scale?
5. Does this tool replace something we already have for free (Firebase), or genuinely add a capability we're missing?

Common mistakes

Buying an ASO platform expecting it to explain a crash spike, or a crash tool expecting it to explain a ranking drop — these are different products solving different problems. Paying for basic event analytics that Firebase Analytics already provides for free. Not checking whether a subscription-analytics tool's revenue-share fee was modeled against your growth projections, not just today's numbers.

See Appfigures vs Sensor Tower and Embrace vs Instabug for two of the sharper decisions in this category, and browse every tool in this category for the full list. For measuring which channel actually drove an install, see choosing a mobile attribution partner.