How analytics ratings differ above and below 500 employees
SMB here means a company with fewer than 500 employees — the cut these figures are scoped to. Each tool is shown twice, once from buyers under that line and once from buyers at or above it; neither is the figure published elsewhere on this channel, which lives on the analytics pages. Figures blend duplicate product records where a tool appears under more than one name.
| Tool | Under 500 | 500 and above |
|---|---|---|
| 7.9 | 7.5 | |
| Ecommerce attribution and reporting built for DTC brands. The highest figure here, and well sampled with this group. | ||
| 7.7 | not rated | |
| Paid-media attribution for ecommerce. Almost every rating it has comes from companies under 500; too few buyers at companies of 500 and above rate it for a scoped average to be reported. | ||
| 7.5 | 7.5 | |
| Product analytics. One of the few tools here that reads the same on both sides of the line. | ||
| 7.5 | 8 | |
| Product analytics with automatic event capture. Rated by few enough buyers in each group to carry no decimal. | ||
| 7.5 | 7.5 | |
| Product analytics. Rated by few enough buyers in each group to carry no decimal. | ||
| 7.2 | 7.3 | |
| A BI layer over a warehouse rather than a tag-based analytics tool. Well sampled on both sides. | ||
| 7 | 7.5 | |
| BI and visualisation. Half a point lower with this group than with larger companies. | ||
| 7 | 7.2 | |
| Enterprise web analytics. Its under-500 figure rests on the fewest ratings any tool here can be reported on. | ||
| 6.0 | 6.8 | |
| The default web analytics tool, and the most-rated product in the corpus. Last of the ten with this group, on much the largest sample of it. | ||
| 7.5 | not rated | |
| Open-source product analytics. Rated by the fewest buyers here that can be reported at all, and barely rated above the line. | ||
Two things about that table are worth stating plainly. Google Analytics 4 sits nearly two points below the highest observed average among companies under 500, on much the largest sample in the group, and it remains lowest at a tighter cutoff — about the same figure among companies under 200 employees. The tools at the top also differ sharply from the broader corpus in who rates them: Northbeam and Triple Whale draw nearly all or most of their ratings from companies under 500, which is the subject of the next section.
How much of a published rating is buyers your size
Every tool above also carries a figure across all interviews. This is what sits behind those figures — the share of each tool's ratings that comes from companies under 500 employees.
Share of each tool's buyer ratings that comes from companies under 500 employees. The bars run 0 to 100% and are not on the rating scale used in the table above.
The company-size mix varies sharply by tool: from 96% of ratings coming from companies under 500 at one end to 3% at the other. Neither figure is wrong; they reflect very different company-size mixes. Northbeam's published figure is substantially more weighted toward companies under 500 than Adobe Analytics's.
The counter-current: the top of this table is not the top of the category
Three cautions come with these figures. The two tools at the top draw most of their ratings from companies under 500 — 96% for Northbeam and 86% for Triple Whale — so their scoped and overall figures are based largely on the same buyers — that is a fact about who rates them, not evidence that they would hold up elsewhere, and the corpus cannot say how they would read at larger scale. The samples are also very unequal: one tool carries several hundred ratings from this group and two carry the bare minimum, so the figures rest on very different amounts of evidence. And a satisfaction average is not a fit assessment — none of these figures tells you which channels a tool can attribute, what it costs at your traffic, or how much instrumentation it needs before it reports anything useful.
What this means if you are an SMB
A rating scoped to companies your size is closer to a peer benchmark than a corpus average, and it is still an average. Our read, not a practice buyers describe, is that the share behind a figure matters alongside the figure: a tool whose published rating draws mostly from larger companies gives an SMB a less size-matched benchmark. On this page that share runs from 96% down to about a thirtieth.
Want this read against your own stack?
Get my read →The narrow version is that the under-500 column gives an SMB a more size-matched benchmark than the blended figure. What is worth taking away is how differently the published figures are composed: 96% of Northbeam's ratings and 86% of Triple Whale's come from companies under 500, against 12% for Tableau and 3% for Adobe Analytics. The questions that actually separate two finalists are the ordinary ones a rating cannot answer: which channels you need attributed, who maintains the tracking when it breaks, and how much of the setup lands on a team that also has other work.
For where buyers go when they leave the default, see GA4 alternatives buyers actually switch to. The same split across other categories is in does company size change how buyers rate software, and the rest of this series in which ecommerce platform SMBs rate highest.
Common questions
What is the best analytics tool for a small business?
Among the tools rated by buyers at companies under 500 employees, Triple Whale carries the highest observed average at 7.9 and Northbeam is next at 7.7. Their overall ratings are also heavily weighted toward companies under 500: 86% of Triple Whale's ratings and 96% of Northbeam's come from that group. None of this establishes a best fit for any particular company: these scores measure buyer satisfaction rather than fit, and they say nothing about which channels a tool can actually attribute or what it costs at your traffic.
Why do SMBs rate Google Analytics 4 so low?
The interviews do not settle why. What the figures show is that Google Analytics 4 reads 6.0 among companies under 500 employees, last of the ten tools here and on the largest sample of that group in the set, against 6.8 from companies of 500 and above. It stays last at a tighter cut, reading about the same among companies under 200 employees.
Why does the same analytics tool get a different rating from small and large companies?
The interviews do not settle why the ratings differ. One possible contributor is that the same product name can cover different plan tiers, implementations and levels of instrumentation at different company sizes, which this analysis does not separate. Separately, the company-size mix behind each tool's published overall rating varies substantially: 96% of Northbeam's ratings come from companies under 500, against 3% for Adobe Analytics.
Should an SMB trust a published software rating?
It is a starting point rather than a peer benchmark, and the company-size mix behind it is useful context for interpreting the figure. On this page one tool's rating among companies under 500 employees sits more than half a point away from its broader figure, and for another only about a thirtieth of the ratings behind that figure come from companies under 500 at all. Our read, not a practice buyers describe, is that a scoped figure is closer to a company-size-matched benchmark than a corpus average, though it remains an average and the number of ratings behind it still matters.
Get this research made for your stack
These figures are the rating among companies under 500 employees, which is closer to a peer benchmark than a corpus average — but it is still an average. Do a 15-minute interview and get the read for your own traffic, channels and stack.
Get my personalized read — 15-min interviewNo password · your interview is anonymized before it ever informs a page like this one.