The main alternative to Keen IO is to build your own backend. Some developers will always prefer that, but many folks don't have the time & resources to devote to constructing & maintaining an analytics backend. Here are some things that people appreciate about Keen IO:
- The ability to start collecting & querying their event data immediately & easily
- Keen's uptime and reliability (transferring backend ops from their pager to ours).
- Not having to worry about scalability. For customers who are collecting billions of events per month and planning to double in less than a year, data challenges are less trivial.
- A point and click query interface that can be used by some non-devs to run analysis, create graphs, extract data, etc
- Query & visualization libraries that allow you to create reporting interfaces (websites/dashboards/customer-facing-analytics) much more quickly
- A growing inventory of features & open source tools that build on the API (scoped keys, caching, notifications, dashboard templates, etc)