Product Analytics Should Live Inside Your Stack, Not Outside. Countly Fixes It

Most analytics tools weren’t designed to be part of your product but to monitor it from the outside. 

But in a world where AI, personalization, and automation depend on real-time product-level data, that’s no longer good enough. 

In this exclusive interview with Website Planet, Onur Alp Soner, CEO of Countly, explains how disconnected analytics is holding teams back, and why owning your stack is the key to fixing it. 

He shares how data teams should move from vendor lock-in to full control, and why modular, private product intelligence is the right way to do it.

In 2-3 sentences, why does your company exist? What’s the fundamental pain point or flaw in your industry it was designed to solve?

Analytics was never supposed to be a third-party dashboard.

It should be part of your product, part of how you think, part of how you move.

We give teams the tools to build with data, not just observe it, in a way entirely theirs, whether they’re a startup or a Fortune 100.

Why is this issue especially relevant today? Can you share any recent statistics, research, or examples that prove its urgency?

We’re entering an era where personalization, automation, and even AI all depend on fast, integrated, product-level data.

However, most analytics tools still treat data as a job of reporting. They batch, isolate, host, and sell it back to you in limited slices, which is a reason why most enterprise companies (about 70%) use four or more different tools to monitor their systems and apps.

Too many tools and too much complexity make teams waste time jumping between them. As a result, only 1 in 10 companies actually has a clear, complete view of how everything is working (called “full stack observability”), according to recent surveys.

Especially in the last months, teams across industries, from SaaS to healthcare to defense, have run into the same ceiling: they couldn’t track backend logic, couldn’t enrich with internal data, and couldn’t operate under the data policies they needed.

You can see that this is not a niche problem anymore. It’s structural and it impacts a business bottom line. Just to give an example, recent studies show that the cost of poor data strategies reached over £1.3 trillion globally in construction alone.

But the consequences don’t stop there:

• Stakeholders may avoid using data-driven insights, reverting to manual, intuition-based practices when data reliability is in doubt.
• Employees report increased stress and turnover due to chronic data firefighting and tool complexity.
• Teams spend significant time and resources patching broken data pipelines and rectifying issues instead of innovating or strategizing

Last but not least, the growing talent gap in data analysis also doesn’t help: finding qualified professionals who can effectively enrich data is proving challenging, with 63% of companies facing difficulties in their recruitment efforts, according to research from Codio.

What kind of people or organizations are most affected by this issue, and why are they still stuck with it? What’s wrong in how they are trying to solve it?

Anyone serious about building a responsive, secure product will eventually feel it. Regulated industries, like banks, telcos, and the public sector, notice it sooner, but we’ve seen early-stage SaaS teams run into it, too.

Most try to fix it by stitching together tools, building workarounds, or trusting a vendor roadmap. But the issue isn’t a lack of effort.

Most analytics products were never designed to be part of your stack. They were intended to be someone else’s.

What should they do instead, and how do you help with that?

Treat analytics like infrastructure. It needs to be composable, integrated, and something you actually own.

Countly supports that at every level:

• Start with Countly Lite if you want full access to the open-source core.
• Use Flex for private hosting with zero infrastructure hassle.
• Go Enterprise for full control, self-hosted or private cloud, with advanced features and support.

No matter where you start, the model stays the same: your data, your environment, your logic. That’s the real shift.

What are the things you do that competitors CAN’T or WON’T do? What makes them game changers?

We don’t force you into our cloud or our structure. You choose how you run Countly, locally, privately, or hosted by us, and you always have full transparency and ownership.

The platform itself is modular. You can build on it, remove what you don’t need, and integrate with systems most vendors won’t touch. Even our SDKs are flexible. Want to track internal users? Backend events? Offline flows? No problem.

Other vendors sell analytics as a service. We treat it as part of your architecture.

Can you share a milestone or testimonials that show your solution works? Great if you can show what metrics you move and by how much.

One large enterprise in the banking sector replaced three disconnected analytics and engagement tools with Countly Enterprise, reducing their time to insight from several hours to real time. They now track internal systems, app usage, and backend processes, all in one place, fully self-hosted.

A Flex customer told us, “This is the first cloud analytics setup that actually feels like ours.” And every month, we see new products launch with Countly Lite, because sometimes open source is the clearest path to control.

What’s the BIG vision for the future of your company? What’s in your roadmap, and how will these updates improve your clients’ lives?

We’re building Countly into a full experience layer, not just to measure user behavior, but to respond to it. That includes deeper real-time journeys, powerful remote config, smarter targeting, and automation that adapts to product state.

Everything will stay modular, private, and composable. Whether you run Countly from your own servers, from ours, or from GitHub, we want it to be the most flexible and complete way to power product intelligence on your terms.

To wrap up, if there was one key takeaway you wish people could bring home from this interview, what would it be?

Analytics should be something you own, not something you rent. Countly gives you that ownership, whether you start open source, run private cloud, or scale in your own infrastructure.

Sources:
https://www.codio.com/blog/2025-industry-survey-data-skills-gap
https://www.datamation.com/big-data/state-of-observability-review-2024/
https://logz.io/observability-pulse-2024/\https://mixpanel.com/blog/the-business-impacts-of-data-quality-issues/