Being straight with you
Most analytics pages only tell you what a tool is good at. Here is the other list: the things Ripples deliberately doesn't do, and what we would actually recommend instead. If one of these is what you need, we would rather you found out now than after installing.
We don't record what people do on your screen, and we're not planning to. It's a genuinely useful thing, just not what we're building.
Instead Use PostHog, or Microsoft Clarity, which is free.
Heatmaps tell you where people clicked. Ripples is built to tell you which channels bring customers who pay and then stay. Different question.
Instead Use Microsoft Clarity or Hotjar.
Experimentation is its own product with its own hard problems, and doing it badly is worse than not doing it.
Instead Use PostHog, Statsig or GrowthBook.
Ripples is hosted only. If owning the data on your own box is a hard requirement, that is a good requirement to have.
Instead Use Umami, Plausible, Matomo, Rybbit or OpenPanel.
Ripples decides which questions it answers. That is the trade: you get answers on the day you install it instead of a query surface you have to learn. If you want to ask arbitrary questions of your own event data, you want a warehouse.
Instead Use PostHog, or GA4 with its free BigQuery export.
Google Ads spend comes in automatically. Meta, TikTok, LinkedIn and the rest do not, and pretending a manual CSV is an integration would be silly. You can still import spend by hand for any channel.
Instead For Meta specifically, DataFast integrates it.
Ripples is built around a subscription: a signup, then payments arriving over months, then retention. A shop where the purchase is the whole relationship gets very little from that model, and there is no Shopify app.
Instead Use Google Analytics, Matomo or a Shopify-native tool.
We are built for one person, or a handful. There is no SAML, no SCIM, no SOC 2 report and no procurement process to run, because nobody we are built for has ever asked for one.
Instead Use Amplitude, Mixpanel or PostHog.
This one matters. Ripples exists to connect marketing spend to revenue and retention. If nothing is being paid for yet, you are getting a traffic dashboard, and there are excellent free ones. Come back when someone pays you. That is when we get interesting.
Once you have someone whose actual job is data, you will want more depth than we give you. We will help you migrate when you get there. Outgrowing Ripples is a feature, not a bug.
Instead Use PostHog, Amplitude or Mixpanel.
What we do do: connect your traffic, signups, revenue and Google Ads spend so you can see which channels bring customers who stay, and when your spend pays back.
See how that worksIf you are weighing us against something specific, the comparison pages go through the same concessions tool by tool, with prices.
Free until $1K MRR. No credit card.