From a finance perspective, there’s a lot to love about the subscription-based business model. Charging customers a small monthly or annual fee provides your company with a reliable income stream—more security and predictability during these uncertain times of ours.
But selling products as services does also throw out a new set of complications. You need to measure how customers relate to your business over the whole time they’re connected to it, using new metrics like customer lifetime value, churn, and retention rate.
Though calculating these metrics often means crunching numbers from different data sources, subscription analytics software makes the task far easier. This article will help you understand what to look for in a subscription analytics tool, and offer a comparison of two of the industry’s best—ChartMogul and Baremetrics.
What do subscription analytics platforms track?
Subscription analytics platforms measure various metrics that only subscription-based businesses have to worry about. They typically monitor things like customer acquisition costs (CAC), customer lifetime value (CLV) churn rate and conversion rate.
Do I need a subscription analytics platform?
Getting a handle on your subscription analytics is business-critical, but you may not need a dedicated platform to do this.
Some companies get their subscription analytics as a secondary feature in another product in their tech stack. For example, the subscription billing platform Chargebee offers some subscription analytics services, as does the customer relationship management tool, Hubspot. It’s worth asking around to see if your team uses a tool with similar functionality, especially if you’re looking to streamline your IT.
However, if you’d like a more robust solution—as many CFOs would— then a dedicated subscription analytics platform can help you:
- Summarize the data you need to make important decisions—perhaps the main benefit of a dedicated platform for subscription analytics is that you can quickly get an overview of your trends without needing to open three to five different tools.
- Forecast your business’ performance—when you can spot the trends in your users’ decisions to unsubscribe or change tiers, you can be more prepared for the upcoming months.
- Make smarter decisions on pricing strategy—you might notice from customer behavior that, for example, your highest tier is very popular, which may mean you can hike your prices.
- Understand whether your marketing is working—you’ll be able to connect new subscribers to your marketing campaigns, and gain a deeper sense of which tactics are bringing home the cash.
- Increase customer lifetime value—analytics can help you understand when customers are likely to churn, and even give insights as to why. Knowing this info is the first step to reversing that trend.
ChartMogul vs Baremetrics: at a glance
ChartMogul vs Baremetrics: the definitive rundown
Features
Let’s take the similarities first. Both Baremetrics and ChartMogul connect with your payment processor to create a live dashboard of your important subscription-related KPIs, such as monthly recurring revenue (MRR), churn rate and customer lifetime value (CLV). They both let you segment the data to see different customer cohorts, and allow you to set universal revenue goals.
Baremetrics and ChartMogul each offer benchmarking tools, so you can see how your business’ analytics stack up against the industry average. They also offer forecasting options, so you can see how any changes to your pricing strategy may impact your future metrics.
In terms of where these two platforms differ, Baremetrics offers revenue recovery support. That is to say, if your customers’ subscription payment doesn’t go through, they help you chase down that cash, sending out up to six automatic emails. Baremetrics also automatically sends churning customers a multiple choice survey and collates their reasons for leaving.
Whilst ChartMogul doesn’t offer this service, they do have a few standout features of their own. The biggest is that they also offer a CRM—which claims to be the only CRM specifically designed for product-first B2B SaaS companies. Whilst it might be a headache to migrate all your customer info to a new tool, this may be a really useful way to keep this crucial data in one place.
Integrations
Both Baremetrics and ChartMogul currently support Stripe, Braintree, Recurly, Apple App Store Connect, Google Play, Chargebee, Shopify Partners and custom integrations via API. They also connect to popular accounting software like Intuit Quickbooks, Xero and Paddle.
ChartMogul, meanwhile, is unique in supporting the payment processors PayPal, Chargify, GoCardless, and Zuora. ChartMogul also puts more emphasis on connecting to the rest of your tech stack, and allows you to export data to Slack, Zapier, Intercom and Google Big Query.
Pricing
Both ChartMogul and Baremetrics have relatively complicated pricing plans at the higher end of what you’d expect to pay for software as a service.
ChartMogul is free for SaaS companies of up to $120k ARR (annual recurring revenue). After this point, pricing starts at $127/month, which increases on a sliding scale based on your recurring revenue. If this sounds confusing, enter your business’ metrics on the sliding payment scale on their pricing page.
Baremetrics also operates on a sliding scale based on your monthly recurring revenue. If your annual recurring revenue is between $120 - $2M, a basic plan will cost you between $189 and $629. However, this basic plan will not include some of their most interesting features, such as cancellation insights and the ability to chase unpaid subscription fees. Again, their interactive pricing toggle is the best explanation of their payment plans.
Depending on your needs, if you’re turning over more than $40k a month, Baremetrics looks to be the cheaper option. However, securing an accurate quote from either tool will likely mean speaking to a sales rep.
Company info
ChartMogul is a remote company based in Berlin, and has been around since 2014. It raised three rounds of seed funding in its early years of operations, and has between 50 and 100 employees. It seems to be the industry leader, with 2,500+ clients.
Baremetrics is based in San Francisco, and was founded around the same time in 2013. It has raised two funding rounds and has around 10 employees. In 2020, it was acquired by the tech private equity firm Xenon Partners for a cool 4 million dollars. It has over 850 clients.
At a glance, it seems like both businesses are robust and in little danger of going under.
Support
Baremetrics offers support via chat, phone, email and a dedicated account manager, if you are on a higher tier. According to reviews, the service is great. They also have an academy for founders and CFOs who want to make the best use of their SaaS KPIs.
ChartMogul also offers support via email and a dedicated account manager, though not via live chat nor the phone. They do, however, have a comprehensive ecosystem of content around their product for those who want to make use of their subscription data—including a podcast, a SaaS newsletter, and even a community forum for founders on the road to turning over their first 50k months.
Reviews
According to reviews on G2 Baremetrics fulfills its mission really well, allowing SaaS CFOs to see all their essential KPIs with "off the shelf" reports. The biggest complaint seems to be that there’s a bit of a learning curve to understanding the platform and how it calculates metrics.
There’s also a lot of love for ChartMogul on G2, and its ability to give data insights that would otherwise get lost. Users particularly shouted out the Slack integration as a handy way to stay abreast of important subscription metrics. There wasn’t a lot of pattern to their negative reviews—complaints seemed very case-specific.
Target audience
Obviously, both ChartMogul and Baremetrics are designed for software-as-a-service companies. Judging by their case studies, Baremetrics’ average customer is a tech company on the smaller side, with 11-50 employees. However they do offer a startup program for businesses turning under 30k in MRR, a clear sign they’re targeting businesses that plan to scale.
A scroll of ChartMogul’s customer stories reveals that they’re a little harder to pigeonhole. They serve both tech behemoths, like Hotjar and Buffer, and companies with just a handful of employees like Ghost and Pitch.
ChartMogul supports 284 regions and 167 currencies—a strong offer for if your users are globally distributed. Baremetrics doesn’t offer information as to which regions it serves, but is currency agnostic. If you’re unsure as to whether they’ll be able to serve your geographies, it’s best to ask them directly.
Security
ChartMogul is compatible with SOC2, and has an uptime of 99.999%. They also encrypt all your passwords before storing them internally, and insist that accounts use 2FA.
Baremetrics restricts access to their platform to HTTPS encrypted connections. They also take special measures to encrypt any data retrieval that goes through Stripe, formatting your data as unique access tokens.
Both ChartMogul and Baremetrics are both GDPR compliant—which is great, since breaking this law can get you a fine as big as a seed round.
The final word: how to choose your subscription analytics tool
Either Baremetrics or Charmogul would, it seems, be a solid choice for helping you pop the hood and see what your subscribers are doing. That said, there’s a few key differences to take into consideration.
ChartMogul is the industry leader, with a strong selection of familiar logos on their website, and enough integrations to slot into any tech stack with ease. They also offer a CRM—a huge functionality to provide as an add-on. If you feel your current CRM isn’t suited for the needs of a B2B SaaS business, ChartMogul could be a no-brainer.
However, Baremetrics is no poor relation. It also has a very enthusiastic customer base. It’s cheaper than ChartMogul—potentially much cheaper, if you don’t need all of the functionality on offer. If you won’t make use of a CRM designed for Saas, then Baremetrics might be your winner.
Ultimately, perhaps your tie break question should be: which platform’s interface do I like the best? After all, this is going to be a tool you check every working day.
