Michelle here (OP). We consider ourselves an API company rather than an analytics portal. We sometimes describe ourselves as a "mobile analytics backend as a service", although that is kind of an awkward mouthful.
Our target customers are mobile developers who would otherwise need to roll their own analytics infrastructure for their apps. Generally people build their own analytics backends because other tools on the market don't provide an easy way to get data back out. That makes it hard to build analytics into custom interfaces or do data analysis across other areas of your business, for example. We provide full export and expose analytics via API.
We are trying to make our product extremely developer-friendly and make it as easy as possible to get data and metrics in and out of Keen IO so that people can do whatever they want with their data. For example, you could build a tab in your iPhone app that displays your custom event data metrics.
Hope that makes sense. We welcome any feedback you might have for our startup :)
Very nice. I love that you're concentrating on making a solid scalable data analytics backend instead of a flashy 'it goes ding when there's stuff' interface. I don't know how many solutions I've hand rolled where your product wouldn't fit in quite nicely. I've taken a look at your documentation and even though it's young it looks pretty good. Great work.
Thanks so much for the kind words. We love to get feedback from people like you who have some experience building their own backends. It helps drive our roadmap. If you have any feedback at all, would love to hear it: michelle@keen.io.
I didn't do a ton of comparative research, but I tried them both for about 15min each. They seemed to do about the same thing, but Ducksboard was friendlier aesthetically and everything on their site, from the UI to the docs, seemed simpler than Geckoboard. Seems like they both offer good products, though.
Oh, I also met the Ducksboard guys at Gluecon, so they got the opportunity to explain how it works to me in person. That extra exposure and personal connection probably influenced me quite a bit too.
I tried both and know your feeling. Geckoboard seems to support more services but Ducksboard has a far nicer UI. Shame we can't merge the two together.