ProfitWell vs. Baremetrics

For a SaaS business to survive, it needs to track its business data. For a SaaS business to thrive, it needs to deeply understand what the business metrics mean for the state of the business.

It is no wonder that so many companies choose to use a business metrics dashboard to help with data visualization and making insights. The skills to manipulate data are lacking at many companies and too expensive to acquire. That leaves you with one question: Can I get a product to do this business metrics analysis for me?

We’ve dissected the Baremetrics vs. Stripe debate, as well as Stripe vs. Braintree, Chargebee, Chargify, Gumroad, PayPal, Recurly,  Shopify, Zuora, and ProfitWell. We’ve compared Chargebee to Recurly and Zuora. We’ve even compared Recurly to Chargify and Zuora.

Now, in this ongoing series of comparisons, we discuss two of the best subscription analytics dashboards for SaaS: Baremetrics vs. ProfitWell.

Baremetrics provides an easy-to-read dashboard that gives you all the key metrics for your business, including MRR, ARR, LTV, total customers, and more, directly in your Baremetrics dashboard. Just check out this demo account here.

Connect Baremetrics to your revenue sources and start seeing all of your revenue on a crystal-clear dashboard. You can even see your customer segmentation, deeper insights about who your customers are, forecast into the future, and use automated tools to recover failed payments.

Sign up for the Baremetrics free trial and start seeing more into your subscription revenues now.

What is ProfitWell?

ProfitWell is a SaaS enterprise focused on the B2C and B2B markets. It is actually an expansion of the original company, Price Intelligently. With a focus on helping other SaaS companies, ProfitWell offers three products:

• ProfitWell’s Metrics: This is a revenue metrics tracking product.

• Proftwell’s Retain: This is designed to reduce involuntary churn due to credit card failures.

• ProfitWell’s Recognized: This helps you to know when you can recognize your revenue.

Baremetrics vs. ProfitWell: what are the differences?

Baremetrics and ProfitWell have similar goals: they both aim to help SaaS companies, new and established, maximize their revenue stream. 

However, there are some key differences, from how they integrate with payment processing companies to how they present your data.

Although by no means exhaustive, let’s look at some of the ways Baremetrics and ProfitWell differ:

1. Pricing

The basic ProfitWell product is free, and then ProfitWell charges for the use of the expansion products. Baremetrics charges only one fee for everything, where the fee is on a sliding scale depending on your MRR.  

If you are using ProfitWell, and you want to start using the churn prevention and revenue recognition products, you might need to start paying a lot of money to get access to them. With Baremetrics, you already have access to the churn prevention, cancellation insights, customer insights, and forecasting tools all within your all-in-one low fee. 

2. Integrations

ProfitWell has integrations with Zuora, Chargebee, and PayPal, while Baremetrics integrates with Chargify and Stripe. While Baremetrics does not officially integrate with PayPal, many Baremetrics users still import and analyze PayPal and Chargebee data via the Baremetrics API. 

3. User Interface

The ProfitWell UI and design is rather bland and unintuitive. 

Contrary to this, Baremetrics has a lively and intricate UI and design that makes it easy to spot needed information and understand what the data is showing—even for novice data scientists. Go ahead and play with the Baremetrics Demo account! 

ProfitWell vs. Baremetrics: The clear, modern, easy-to-read Baremetrics interface above vs. the cluttered and dated interface of ProfitWell below. On the Baremetrics dashboard, the information you need jumps out at you.

4. Dunning tools

Both ProfitWell and Baremetrics have dunning tools, but ProfitWell Retain’s dunning emails are not customizable, whereas Baremetrics Recover’s dunning emails are fully customizable. With Baremetrics you can add your own branding, sentences, voice, buttons, and more to your dunning emails. 

Dunning emails are an effective method for recovering failed payments. However, with Recover you can go further by including in-app reminders for customers to update their billing information. 

In Recover, you can make it so that, when customers log in to your software, they’ll see a pop-up asking them to update their billing information.

With Recover, you can take one more step by using the in-app callout message:

To do so, copy and paste our JavaScript code snippet and choose how many days you want users to have access before enabling the paywall to force a payment method update.

The settings are found using the steps: Recover → Settings → Credit Card form → callout.

5. Additional features

Baremetrics has many features that you cannot find on ProfitWell. This includes: 

• Cancellation Insights

• Segmentation

• Benchmarks

• Annotations

• Trend Lines

• Customer Profile Augmentation

Figure 2. With Baremetrics’ forecasting feature, you can easily project your future MRR and cash flows to lean into what is working and stave off further issues from what isn’t.

Where Baremetrics wins

Baremetrics has some clear advantages. Let’s take a look at a few of them now.

• You are probably looking for more features that help you act on your data and analytics. With intuitive features that help you understand the data, such as Annotations and Trend Lines, Baremetrics doesn’t just visualize your data, but also gives you the insights needed to forecast the future.

• Baremetrics wins the beauty contest, and ultimately that helps keep you focused. Important information immediately pops out on the Baremetrics dashboard. This is one of the most common positive feedbacks we get from customers—the look and feel keeps them using the service, which means they get more out of the features.

• You want features that help you strategize. With Cancellation Insights, Forecasting, Benchmarks, Annotations, and Trend Lines, Baremetrics offers all the tools needed to plan, act, and assess.

• You want to customize your dunning emails. Dunning emails are always a drag, and customized emails are needed to minimize your dunning—a feature offered by Baremetrics.

• You’re not happy with Retain’s performance or Retain’s pricing structure. With Recover, Baremetrics gives you more for less.

• Setting up a Baremetrics account is simple.

• Baremetrics offers 26 metrics that are accurate and easy to access.

Where the ProfitWell vs. Baremetrics debate is still ongoing

Although Baremetrics is a robust platform with many strengths over ProfitWell, there are some situations where Baremetrics isn’t the right choice. While Baremetrics management and development staff are always listening to users and working diligently to provide high value-add features and remove pain points, the following are a couple concerns we’ve heard.

• SaaS companies are very price-sensitive, especially when trying to bootstrap their business, and would prefer not to pay for metrics at all. 

When considering price, most Baremetrics customers tend to pay substantially less at Baremetrics than they would be paying if they were using the same features at ProfitWell. When it comes to getting the most for your bootstrapped business, definitely use Baremetrics. But if you’re looking to get minimal tracking for free, use ProfitWell.

• The customer wants to integrate with payment providers like Zuora and PayPal.

ProfitWell wins over Baremetrics for Zuora, but the debate is still ongoing for PayPal. Baremetrics had a leading PayPal integration for a long time prior to the Shopify Partners API going live. At the moment, the Baremetrics team is building out a new Shopify Integration that will give ProfitWell a run for their money.

FAQ

“Why would I choose ProfitWell vs. Baremetrics?” 

Most customers choose Baremetrics over ProfitWell for the same few reasons. 

Baremetrics allows you to go much more in-depth with your metrics and analytics, comparing plans, segments, cohorts, benchmarks, and getting detailed breakdowns of what’s happening each day. 

Baremetrics customers also like the design and UI much better, which makes sense since you use the tool every day. Baremetrics also offers some more features that allow you to act on your data, like Cancellation Insights for reducing churn and reactivating customers and Recover with customizable email and in-app dunning. 

We’re constantly building new features and improvements, and we think you’ll find we’re always making the tools better for you.

“Does Baremetrics have a lot of outages and downtime? I hear that ProfitWell is more reliable.” 

No, thanks to our fantastic engineering team, Baremetrics doesn’t experience any frequent or major outages. Our uptime is superb now, and we have a well-equipped team to handle any and all issues. Baremetrics is just as reliable as, if not more reliable than, any other analytics product out there.

“Is ProfitWell more accurate than Baremetrics?” 

While ProfitWell says that they’re more accurate, the reality is that we’re all using the same logic and calculations, so there’s no way that they could be more accurate than Baremetrics. 

There are some discrepancies in methodologies for calculating certain metrics, but we’re both accurate solutions.

“ProfitWell only makes me pay for Retain when they’ve beaten my current recovery rate, so why would I choose Recover?” 

Something to be aware of is that your system may not be fully set up or optimized. Before declaring a clear winner, give an honest look at your original set up and see if there are low-hanging fruit that ProfitWell is capitalizing on. 

There’s really no magic or secret-sauce to recovery. Baremetrics’ Recover product has all the same features and amenities, with even more customization. Work with us on your account and we’d be happy to help you improve your recovery rate.

“Are there any interesting features in Baremetrics that I am missing?” 

Yes, loads of them! One of the lesser-known features of the dashboard is Annotations. 

Annotations allow you to add little notes to all your charts so that you can quickly see how trends change from various specific points in time. 

Annotations can be anything relevant to your business. Here are some examples: 

• You’ve changed prices

• Started a new marketing campaign

• A new competitor entered the market

• You’ve added a new pricing tier, 

• Any other relevant moment in time 

Seeing whether these moments represent change points can drastically improve your trend analysis. If they help, you will know when it’s time to double down. If they don’t, you can easily see that you need to try something different. 

To use Annotation, simply click on the point in time where something has happened (top left), add in an evocative comment (top right), and then later on you can easily reference trend changes from that point in time (bottom). 

Conclusion

Baremetrics makes it easy to collect and visualize all of your sales data so that you always know how much cash you have on hand, which clients have paid, and who you still owe services to. 

When you have many clients, it can be difficult to calculate your MRR (Monthly Recurring Revenue), ARR (Annual Recurring Revenue), LTV (Customer Lifetime Value), and so much more. Thankfully, there is Baremetrics to do all of this for you. 

Baremetrics can even monitor your SaaS quick ratio so you know immediately if your accounts receivables are getting out of control. It can even help make sure you collect on delinquent accounts. Integrating this innovative tool can make financial analysis seamless for your SaaS company, and you can start a free trial today.

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