App Annie or Apptopia? 3 factors you need to consider

Mobile is the Mortal Kombat of digital marketing. He who controls the precious real estate of the mobile home screen controls the app universe. Apptopia and App Annie were created to help companies duke it out in this arena, providing invaluable stats mobile marketers need to monetize their apps and get them closer to that all-important spot beneath the user’s thumb.

App Annie and Apptopia appear quite similar at first glance. In a Quora post in 2015, Apptopia founder Jonathan Kay went through a list of similarities, concluding that the main difference between the two is price. In other words, the two products are virtually identical. But Apptopia is less expensive, so you should choose Apptopia, especially if you are an SMB.[1] Is this right?

1. Pricing

Not exactly. Kay makes the point that App Annie is a product built for enterprise clients, with 375 clients paying them an average of $80K per year in 2015. Of course, as Kay acknowledges, this tells you nothing about the median cost of an App Annie contract. In order to find out what you would pay to use App Annie, you’d need to contact them.

As Kay points out, Apptopia’s prices are listed on their website.[2] But this doesn’t include their Enterprise tier—for that you have to talk to an Apptopia sales rep.

With the tiers listed on Apptopia’s site, you can pay as little as $600/year if you only have a few apps and don’t require more than 6 months of historical data. Their middle tier, the so-called ‘Burst’ tier, is $10,800 per year. With that you get unlimited apps and 12 months of historical data. But you don’t get API access or data-in to your systems—for that you need the Enterprise tier.

So maybe Apptopia wins on price… it depends. But there’s an additional complication: What do you want to use the product for?

2. Usage

So far we’ve been comparing apples to apples, because we are talking about the pricing for market data. But what about usage data? What if you have an app you’re selling on both Android and iOS and you want one dashboard to look at your key metrics like downloads and revenue? What if you want to be able, at a glance, to see advertising analytics like ad spend, ad revenue, CPI, eCPM and fill rate on your site?

The price for these features in Apptopia? It’s a trick question. Apptopia doesn’t have them. App Annie has them for the grand price of free.

This seems a good place to put in a recommendation: If you are a company with an app and you need a simple SDK that gives you usage, purchase, and advertising data for it, App Annie is a good choice. You can step up from there to get a whole package that includes market comparison data, but be prepared for a little sticker shock.

If, on the other hand, you are an app publisher or maker of App SDKs and you need in-depth market intelligence, you may want to consider what Apptopia has to offer. You may be impressed by the breadth of intelligence they bring. And especially if you can get by with their Flex or Burst pricing plans, it won’t break the bank.

3. Or… try both

One thing seems certain: Both App Annie and Apptopia have interesting offerings and different takes on a complicated and rapidly changing market space.

Whichever one you choose, if you have Treasure Data Customer Data Platform, you’re in luck. That’s because you’ll have integrations for both platforms that put the data you ingest at your fingertips along with all of the rest of your first-party data. In fact, you can try both platforms and compare the data right in Treasure Data to see which platform actually provides the best bang for your buck.

If you don’t have Treasure Data yet, drop us a line today. We’d love to show you exactly how having all your data in one place can multiply the ROI of your entire marketing stack.