On Wednesday, February 21st, we hosted a live event on Discord, highlighting Countly's significant developments from 2023 to this day. Led by Onur, our CEO, the session offered an insider look at Countly's journey and unveiled our newest offering: Countly Flex.
The webinar was about 36 minutes long. You can watch the recording here, but if you’re in a rush, here is all you need to know:
In 2023, we made significant strides in enhancing and expanding Countly’s analytics capabilities. The introduction of Countly Flex marked a pivotal shift for us in the small and mid-size business market, offering a customizable SaaS solution that caters to the diverse needs of businesses. This new edition allows users to create their own County servers in desired regions (15 regions), with a pricing model that scales with user growth.
In fact, Flex is precisely as the name suggests, it’s flexible. We have tried to compile everything we have learned for the past 10 years from Countly Lite and Countly Enterprise and make it… more flexible.
For those keen on exploring the behind the scenes of creating Flex and adding to our product offering, check out this article from our Product Led Story series.
In 2023, we at Countly dedicated ourselves to enhancing our SDKs, ensuring seamless integration and optimal performance across various platforms.
Our commitment to developer support manifested through the introduction of the Google Tag Manager SDK, along with significant improvements across all SDKs. These enhancements not only facilitate a more robust data collection and analytics experience but also underscore our profound dedication to empowering developers with efficient, powerful tools for leveraging the full potential of Countly's analytics.
In 2023, we also introduced Countly Guides, a feature that offers users direct access to relevant information and step-by-step walkthroughs for various Countly functionalities. This initiative is part of our ongoing effort to enhance UX, ensuring that everyone, from individual developers to large enterprises, can easily navigate and maximize the extensive capabilities of Countly. Through interactive guides (interactive walkthroughs) and comprehensive documentation available right within the dashboard, we aim to simplify the learning curve of all our users.
Something we’re excited about is the introduction of a more powerful Notes Widget in Countly, which was designed to enhance collaborative analytics work. This upgrade enables teams to annotate dashboards with richer, more detailed notes, fostering better communication and understanding of data insights within larger teams.
The SDK Manager, also part of the major release, streamlines the integration and management of Countly's SDKs. It offers an overview of SDKs and SDK versions your data originates from, and types of data coming into your server. Furthermore, it helps you monitor the status and health of your integration. An experimental part of the SDK Manager is the ability to configure the SDKs remotely. Just like how we empower your apps to be remotely changed via the Remote Config functionality, via the SDK Manager, we are letting you remotely configure your SDK behavior.
More details on the SDK Manager here.
Another update mentioned by our CEO during the webinar is the App Version Reporting feature, which aims to provide more precise insights into user adoption rates of new app versions. This adjustment allows our users to visualize the adoption of app versions through both percentage (%) and absolute values, making it easier to understand and react to user behavior trends over time.
In 2023, we also introduced an enhancement to our push notification capabilities with the addition of recurring push notifications. This new feature allows for the scheduling of push notifications on a recurring basis—daily, weekly, or monthly—enabling more consistent engagement with app users.
More details here.
For better user feedback gathering, we added a third visibility option, "always" to our surveys and Net Promoter Score (NPS) widgets. This update allows for continuous engagement, enabling users to submit feedback multiple times, ensuring valuable insights are not missed. Additionally, we introduced a no-logo option for a cleaner, more brand-aligned presentation.
More details here.
More details about these changes here.
This question stood out as an important, although overlooked, topic. But as Onur framed it:
Our platform's configurability is highlighted by its extensive settings, allowing every aspect of Countly to be tailored to your needs.
This includes detailed adjustments like dropdown item limits in Drill, ensuring that even seemingly minor preferences can be customized. We've made discovering these options easier with a search functionality within settings, streamlining the process of fine-tuning your Countly experience to match your specific requirements.
Looking ahead, we plan to introduce 2 major updates in the coming months.
March 2024: The County 24.03 release is planned to include reworked Alerts with more trigger options, responsive feedback widgets for better user engagement, the introduction of Profile Groups for targeted analytics, and enhancing your data strategy with Data Populator.
August 2024: The Countly 24.08 release is planned to include enhancements in data strategy planning and the addition of Journey Builder, In-App Notifications, and ML/AI capabilities, which are set to elevate the platform's offering, making Countly an even more powerful tool in the product analytics space.
So yes, that’s a wrap! If you want to watch the full webinar recording, please visit our YouTube Channel and let us know if you have any questions related to the updates mentioned above.
Make sure you join our Discord community to not miss events like this one!