Keen IO builds your custom analytics infrastructure so you don’t have to

Wow, thanks for the kind words! I'm blushing over here. I wrote a big portion of our docs and would love to know which parts could be fleshed out more (I can think of a few areas but I'm curious what you think).

I didn't notice the scoped keys before, but this would definitely be useful to us. Thanks for pointing it out.

We use it quite extensively and it's been great. The API is really well designed and hasn't limited us at all. Being able to send arbitrary event schemas is nice too. We were able to re-use an existing JSON document format with only minor changes which means we don't have to do a lot of mapping back and forth. I highly recommend them.

(Disclosure: we partner with Keen IO on some product stuff, but we pay for our account for the analytics stuff just like anyone else.)

I use them for a side project (access logs and stats on an API I built) and they are great. Easy to set up, new features coming out every once in a while (some of them community-build hacks) and the one time they had an outage a while back they had a ridiculously detailed post-mortem.

Also, I'm on the free plan, so really, can't beat that. :-)

On some level Mixpanel is a competitor. You can send it events and query/extract them later. Mixpanel is geared towards app/web analytics and marketing-type purposes. Mixpanel gives you some tools for building queries and reports and lets you export to Excel. Keen is geared towards developers. You can build charts that you can embed in other webpages (which is very cool) but building the queries kinda needs API access.

If you're creating a custom analytics tool that integrates tightly with your system, Keen might be a better choice. Especially if you're going to e.g. let your customers view and analyze their own data (but not see anyone else's), Keen is a no brainer. It's got a better API and much better API security model.

If you're looking for something more akin to a Google Analytics replacement but event-based instead of pageview-based, Mixpanel or similar might be better.

Keen and Mixpanel both had great support, by the way. I'd encourage you to reach out to one or both if you're curious about how to integrate with it.

We use Keen a lot on our engineering team. In our case we send them a lot of a events, but only query a few dozen times a month. However those queries are done in times when we need to quickly query data. Saved our ass a few times since started using it. They have libs on all of the languages we use. There is no excuse for a frontend dev or backend dev on any team to just log as much data as they can. That's the key...the barrier is low enough where there really is no excuse AND you don't have dev ops screaming at you sending too much data.

Most of our non technical people can't use the dashboard (I think this is from lack of effort rather than something wrong on Keen's side), but it is powerful and easy to use. Someone doesn't have to know SQL or Hadoop to get what they want.

Anyways YMMV but we have really liked using it.

EDIT: like others have posted want to also say that they have great customer service. Have had no issues but feel like they have made sure I could get in touch if I needed to

I like Heap's (https://heapanalytics.com) approach - capture everything, query later. Depending on your needs (Heap is front-end UI oriented), might not be the right fit.

Nothing but great things to say about Keen.

I first found them when testing services via Segment.io and after spending a morning digesting the docs I realized it's what I needed for my company (at the time) to build a simple and scalable tracking/reporting API with. They reached out shortly after, and discussed my needs, offered help modeling the data layer with us and worked out an enterprise deal, the legal, etc. I realized early on they like working the hard challenges and helping us was fun for them.

For side projects as well as my current venture, I use them for tracking near everything, and the simple charting right in their interface makes it pretty easy to make quick decisions and break down the data.

I collect about 4mm events a month these days for my most successful project, and their APIs are still super fast and require zero up-keep from my end.

Congrats to Ryan & Nick over there for the success!

(Disclaimer: founder of Keen IO here.)

That's a bit misleading, I think. The full paragraph:

You are solely responsible for any content and other material that you submit, publish, transmit, or display on, through, or with our Services (“Content”). You grant us a non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free and fully paid license to use the Content, as necessary, for purposes of providing the Services to you and other users of the Services. All rights in and to the Content not expressly granted to us in this Agreement are reserved by you.

Anyways, legal mumbo jumbo aside (we obviously could make this clearer), we absolutely don't sell or give your data to anybody but you. That's one of the major differences between us and some other analytics companies. Your data is yours and we won't monetize it.