Top 5 NinjaCat Alternatives: Best Solution for Marketing Reporting

Marketing reporting is complicated as it is, and not knowing which tool to use makes things even more challenging. NinjaCat is a popular data management and reporting solution, with speed and scalability fuelling its success. However, if you're looking for more advanced features and capabilities to manipulate data with zero coding, it might be better to consider some alternatives.

This article outlines the top five NinjaCat alternatives that will help you create a single source of truth for your marketing data, automate reporting, and make informed decisions when launching new campaigns.

• Improvado: A no-code marketing analytics platform that automates full-cycle analytics and reporting processes. Start improving your analytics today with full-fledged support from an Improvado expert.
• TapClicks: A marketing analytics platform for marketing data management and reporting.
• Looker Studio: A business intelligence platform that helps analysts in data discovery, exploration, and visualization activities.
• AgencyAnalytics: A white-label marketing reporting solution for digital agencies and freelancers.
• Klipfolio: A cloud-based dashboarding tool for small and medium businesses. 

NinjaCat Overview

NinjaCat is an all-in-one tool for marketing analytics, automated reporting, and call tracking that pulls data from 150+ data sources into one place. It is built mainly for digital agencies and media companies to generate reports across multiple ad accounts, visualize data in dashboards, and monitor ad spend. 

The core NinjaCat feature is a data management pipeline. The tool pools data from 150+ marketing data sources, including platforms like Google Ads, Facebook Ads, LinkedIn Ads, and more. To aggregate data from platforms not listed on the website, teams can use the NinjaCat Inbound API that works through the Zapier integration or the NinjaCat Outbound API. Additionally, NinjaCat supports the following data extraction options: email, URL parsing, custom SQL or FTP server, and spreadsheet data ingestion. However, the NinjaCat website doesn't specify if users can request a custom connector. 

Once the data is aggregated, users can blend it, cleanse, enrich it with additional data, apply custom calculations, or create custom metrics. Then, you can visualize the data using various options and generate a report or a dashboard by selecting the appropriate widgets and customizing branding and design. 

NinjaCat features and capabilities also include:

• Call tracking: NinjaCat integrates with call analytics and tracing solutions to support spam control, call recordings, custom notifications, and more.
• Budget management: NinjaCat provides a budgeting dashboard powered by an algorithm to automatically adjust daily budgets, provide budget recommendations, and more.
• Security: The platform doesn't host or run its own routers, DNS servers, or physical servers, as the service is built on Amazon Web Services. NinjaCat also claims their backups are encrypted with the industry standard AES-256 encryption algorithm.

NinjaCat Use Cases

According to G2 reviews, NinjaCat is more suited (57%) for small businesses with up to 50 employees, whereas companies with over 50 employees come second (43%). Such distribution of clients can be explained by the low number of data source connectors, absence of professional services and enterprise SLAs, and lack of advanced data transformations and customization options.

To benefit from NinjaCat, the team must undergo a lengthy onboarding process and have in-house technical expertise since the tool has a steep learning curve and takes a lot of back-end work to function properly. 

NinjaCat Pricing

NinjaCat doesn't have specific pricing plans or even a pricing page on its website. However, some of NinjaCat's clients, including an enterprise-level company, claim they're paying $60,000 annually. The pricing varies by the number of connectors and the complexity of your current marketing data stack. 

NinjaCat Integrations

NinjaCat has out-of-the-box integrations with about 150 paid search, CRM, social media, PPC, SEO, and call-tracking tools. It also gives users the flexibility to pull data into the platform from providers with which NinjaCat doesn’t have direct connections.

For example, you’re an eCommerce business using WooCommerce to run your online store, and you need to connect with NinjaCat to calculate your total spend across all of your campaigns. Since NinjaCat doesn’t have a connector for WooCommerce, you can use one of the available custom data source options. NinjaCat supports custom SQL and FTP servers, provided URLs from a data source, email parsing, and spreadsheet file as a data source. 

Why Look for a NinjaCat Alternative?

As much as NinjaCat helps businesses and agencies aggregate their data across multiple accounts, it has its fair share of drawbacks. Here are five reasons why you may think about switching to another solution: 

• NinjaCat integrates with essential advertising platforms, missing out on crucial marketing channels such as TikTok Ads, Google Campaign Manager 360, Quora Ads, and many more.
• Compared to other alternatives, NinjaCat comes with a slightly complicated setup process. Some reviews on G2 claim it took 250 hours of the client team’s time to set up the platform.
• NinjaCat has a steep learning curve, and to get the tool to perform correctly, a user has to do some back-end work. Therefore, it isn’t a strong alternative for teams without engineering experience and resources.
• Even though NinjaCat claims to deliver real-time insights, this is not always the case. As with many marketing analytics platforms, NinjaCat doesn’t extract all metrics from each supported API. So, if you need to go beyond basic analytics, you’ll have to schedule daily emails that deliver custom data, which will be updated only by the end of the day.
• Some customers mention that NinjaCat offers limited data transformation capabilities. In other words, it might be a good tool for agencies to draw up 101 marketing reports across numerous accounts. But you’ll need to spend 80-100 hours per week normalizing and organizing that data. 

With the above limitations and drawbacks in mind, here’re the top alternatives to NinjaCat that might suit your use case: Improvado, TapClicks, Looker, Agency Analytics, and Klipfolio.

Improvado: For Enterprise and Mid-Market Companies

Improvado is a no-code advanced marketing analytics solution powered by enterprise-level features, multiple customization options, and a Professional Services team on board to go from vendor to analytics partner. 

The core of Improvado is an Extract, Transform, Load (ETL) solution. The platform pulls data from 500+ data sources, including paid ads, social media platforms, CRMs, email marketing tools, and much more. With the help of pre-built extraction templates and a bulk edit feature, you can connect any of your marketing platforms in just a few clicks and eliminate routine configurations and adjustments.

Similar to NinjaCat, Improvado supports other data extraction options: flat-data ingestion, raw data extraction through email, spreadsheet, Amazon S3, and FTP/SFTP. Additionally, users can request a custom connector through Data Extraction Customization Services (DECS), which will be delivered in six weeks at the most. 

Then, you can apply ready-made transformation scenarios to the extracted data to convert it from raw numbers to business-ready data. By normalizing disparate naming conventions and aligning disparate data formats, Improvado provides data breakdowns into different dimensions (campaigns, ad sets, ad groups, and creative levels). 

Improvado offers two data transformation options for a company to make a decision based on their needs and technical experience:

• Marketing Common Data Model (MCDM), an out-of-the-box solution that applies transformations automatically and comes with a pre-built cross-channel Data Studio dashboard. Using one of the dashboard templates, users can get a quick glance at their data. 
• DataPrep is an enterprise-grade self-service transformation solution that comes with over 300 features and functionalities to facilitate data discovery. The DataPrep learning curve is around two months, but data transformation doesn't require SQL knowledge or technical expertise.

Improvado then pushes analysis-ready data to a destination of your choice: a BI or data visualization tool, data warehouse, or analytics platform. 

Improvado features and capabilities also include:

• Marketing attribution modeling: Improvado works with first-party cookies and in a cookieless environment, and it comes with single-touch and multi-touch models that can be customized to meet the unique needs of your company. 
• Professional Services: The team of marketing experts and data analysts can customize your dashboard, connect custom data sources or enable flat-file feed, and design custom data transformations.  
• Data warehouses with deployment and maintenance services: The Improvado team sets up and configures the data warehouse instance of your choice and then manages it on your end. Thus, you get all the benefits of a marketing data warehouse hassle-free.

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Improvado Use Cases

Improvado caters to marketing, sales, and revenue teams in agencies, mid-market brands, and enterprises, offering advanced capabilities that serve these units' needs, connecting with all necessary apps and services, and requiring zero technical expertise or SQL knowledge. 

Designed for users with zero technical expertise, Improvado streamlines analytics and reporting processes by offering data transformation recipes and visualization templates. If, at some point, a client does run into a technical issue or needs help with customizing a dashboard, the Improvado Professional Service team is ready to step in. 

The platform has users in privacy-sensitive industries like health, finance, and insurance, thanks to its compliance with regulations like HIPAA, SOC-2, and enterprise SLA.

Improvado Pricing

Improvado offers a customized pricing plan for its customers and doesn’t tie them to a one-size-fits-all package.

You only get a quote after talking to the company representative about your business objectives, data and reporting needs on a 30-minute call. That way, you pay for the features you truly need and use.

Improvado Integrations

Improvado offers native integrations to over 500+ data sources, including platforms like Google Campaign Manager, LinkedIn Ads, HubSpot, Shopify, Marketo, and much more. No SQL queries or manual operations are required. This saves your team hours of manual API requests and management and gives access to analysis-ready data in near-real time. If clients have unique needs, they can request a custom connector that will be delivered to them in six weeks at the most. 

Additionally, Improvado extracts highly granular data, meaning it can pull over 33,000 metrics and dimensions from the data sources. This provides companies with enough data to dive deep into the performance of a particular audience, cohort, or creative and make solid business decisions based on their findings. 

For example, Improvado supports 79 Google Ads report types, including Campaign Lifetime Reach, Final URL Conversion, and many more. Improvado can pull up about 1,800 Google Ads metrics, field names, and dimensions. All these reports give the marketing leadership team a complete view of the budget and channel allocation. 

TapClicks: For Small and Medium-Sized Businesses

TapClicks is a reporting tool and a marketing operations platform that handles the entire marketing data management lifecycle. The platform offers a suite of tools for analytics, report generation, process automation, and more.

The TapClicks main product, TapAnalytics, consolidates marketing and performance data into a single dashboard—fitted with automated reports and analytics. Users can run calculations, create custom fields, perform data mapping, and prepare data for visualization.

TapReports is a reporting studio with dashboard templates, multiple widgets, and design and layout customization options. Users can brand their dashboards and users and schedule their sending to clients or stakeholders. 

TapClicks features and capabilities also include:

• TapOrders: This tool integrates with CRMs and other data sources to track orders, clients, and tasks. Users can add orders, manage inventory calendars, update item descriptions, etc.
• TapWorkflow: It's a task and workflow management tool that helps keep track of tasks, share instructions, and automate some marketing campaign approval tasks. 
• Raven: It's an SEO tool that performs site audits, rank tracking, link-building, and keyword research.

The current TapClicks customers note the steep learning curve and slow response of the support team, which makes mastering the tool even harder.

TapClicks Use Cases

TapClicks is a marketing-specific platform that helps analyze trends and identify opportunities, create automated and customizable reports, automate order and fulfillment processes, and conduct competitor analysis. 

TapClicks is also HIPAA-compliant, meaning brands working in healthcare and wellness industries in the U.S. can benefit from the tool without breaching security compliance.

Note: TapClicks may not be ideal for enterprise brands. The platform provides a low number of dashboard customization capabilities which can limit your reporting options. Additionally, customers mention that data is only updated once per day. If you need near-real-time insights, you'll have to refresh data manually, which causes temporary issues in the platform operations.

TapClicks Pricing

Similar to NinjaCat, TapClicks doesn't provide any information about its pricing plans on the website. However, it offers a 14-day free trial. 

TapClicks Integrations

TapClicks has native integrations with about 220 data sources. If you don't see the integration you need, its Smart Connector lets you extract data from almost any source and push it to your account.

Once you configure the Smart Connector, it’ll automatically pull new data on a daily basis. Its manual file upload functionality, on the other hand, lets you upload the following file formats: .csv, .tsv, .xlsx, and .ods. Keep in mind that the upper file size limit is 10 MB, and you can’t upload Excel files with formulas and files that contain images.

However, building this Smart Connector will require technical expertise. Also, once created, a Smart Connector cannot be deleted.

TapClicks pulls a relatively low number of metrics and dimensions. Customers complain that some secondary conversion data from Google Ads isn't extracted by the platform. This might lead to false conclusions and inaccurate reports, ultimately affecting your performance marketing decisions and results.  

Looker Studio (Google Data Studio): For Experienced Data Analysts and Engineers

Looker Studio, formerly known as Google Data Studio, is a cloud-based business intelligence and analytics solution. Looker's main strength derives from its unique modeling language, LookML.

Compared to other NinjaCat alternatives, Looker has a distinctive approach to data modeling. Looker works best for companies with experienced data analysts and engineers who can slice and dice data on their own. Looker has a steep learning curve, requiring users to learn LookML and have some statistical knowledge.

Given its features and sophistication, you may find that Looker performs more slowly than other alternatives, like Improvado, particularly while working with massive data volumes.

Looker Studio is free to use. However, Google offers Looker Studio Pro with added functionalities like asset management for enterprises, collaboration tools, and technical support.

Looker Use Cases

Looker Studio isn't a marketing-specific solution but it has a library of integrations to marketing platforms and a catalog of dashboards, which make it suitable for marketing professionals. 

As mentioned earlier, the platform isn't beginner-friendly and requires technical experience to make the most out of it. 

Looker Pricing

Looker Studio is available for free. But to access advanced features and technical support and expanded administrative features, users need to upgrade to the Pro version. 

The cost of the solution is based on the volume of data usage and backend queries. According to customer reviews, the Pro version is extremely pricey, even for enterprise-level companies, which can stand in the way of scaling operations. 

Looker Integrations

Looker Studio comes with 800 native data source connectors, including popular marketing tools, DSPs, call trackers, project management platforms, data warehouses, and more. Customers can't request a custom data connector but can push needed data via Google Sheets and CSV file integrations.

AgencyAnalytics: For Small-Scale Marketing Agencies

AgencyAnalytics is a white-label marketing reporting solution for digital agencies and freelancers. The tool helps automate reporting and customize dashboards to show your clients the effect of your marketing efforts. 

AgencyAnalytics comes with 70+ data source connectors to one of the most popular marketing platforms. The team doesn't build custom connectors. Alternatively, users can upload CSV or Excel files directly into their account or use FTP and SFTP data ingestion options.

AgencyAnalytics provides multiple dashboard templates, prebuilt reports and a drag-and-drop report builder. Users can customize dashboard design and automate the frequency and time reports are sent to the clients.

You can also embed any online content—social media posts, Google docs, Looker Studio reports, and YouTube videos—with widgets, adding content in an iFrame.

AgencyAnalytics Use Cases

As per G2 reviews, AgencyAnalytics is mainly used by small businesses (90%). The platform provides limited customization capabilities that don't match the needs of enterprise companies or international agencies. It also lacks in-depth and advanced marketing analytics features, except for the custom metrics feature. Additionally, the tool neither supports integrations with other analytics, visualization, or BI platforms like PowerBI, Tableau, or Snowflake nor provides the opportunity to manipulate raw data.

AgencyAnalytics Pricing

AgencyAnalytics has three flexible pricing plans (on an annual basis):

• Freelancer, starting at $12/month for five users;
• Agency, starting at $18/month for unlimited users;
• Enterprise with custom pricing.

For each pricing plan, there is a 14-day free trial available. 

AgencyAnalytics Integrations

AgencyAnalytics offers native integrations to 70+ marketing platforms, including PPC, SEO, social media, mail tracking, call tracking, and eCommerce. It's a relatively small number of integrations compared to other alternatives on the list. Additionally, there is no framework to request a custom connector to a data source not mentioned on the website.

AgencyAnalytics provides other data extraction options, like a REST API that lets developers extract data from custom sources. The API is available to Enterprise users only.

Related: 7 Must-Have Marketing Agency Software Tools to Maximize Efficiency

Klipfolio: For Getting Started with Marketing Reporting

Klipfolio is a low-code business intelligence (BI) and reporting tool for custom dashboard development and data management. 

Klipfolio offers 60 dashboard templates and over 200 prebuilt visualizations. The dashboards are fully customizable, and you can adjust display properties in the editor or create unique visualizations using HTML, JavaScript, and CSS. The downside is that it requires extensive knowledge of coding. The Klipfolio provides professional services but doesn't specify whether it includes dashboard customizations or anything else specific. 

Users also have complained that the software runs slow when executing complex actions or working with dashboards with custom filters, which can affect reporting time. 

Klipfolio Use Cases

Klipfolio solutions are catered to analytics, sales, customer support, operations, and marketing teams. 

As discussed earlier, dashboard customization and other features beyond standard offerings require technical expertise. Thus, data filtering requires performing JSON manipulation.

Additionally, Klipfolio provides lower data granularity than some alternatives mentioned in the list. The low number of pulled metrics and dimensions limits marketers in their ability to dive deep into all kinds of marketing-related metrics.

Klipfolio Pricing

Klipfolio has different pricing options: for Business and for Enterprise. 

For Businesses, there are three plans: Grow, Team, and Team+, running at $99, $199, and $399 per month, respectively.

The Enterprise plan offers customized pricing depending on your specific needs, starting at $499 per month.

Klipfolio Integrations

Klipfolio has over 100 pre-built connections to popular marketing platforms like Google Ads, Google Analytics, LinkedIn Ads, Mailchimp, Moz, and more. If you don't find the integration you need, you can push data to your account through Klipfolio's REST/URL connector.

Additionally, Klipfolio allows users to bring data from cloud file-sharing services like Dropbox, Google Drive, and Microsoft OneDrive. It also supports SQL databases (PostgreSQL, MySQL, and Firebird) and different data types (CSV, Excel, Google Sheets, JSON, and XML).

Final thoughts

All of the above NinjaCat alternatives have their own strengths and weaknesses. While some solutions focus more on ease of use and user-friendly interface, some provide advanced features and customization capabilities. 

Make your decision based on your company size and needs, what data sources are non-negotiable for your team, and what level of customization you require. 

Improvado is the best fit for enterprise and mid-market brands. It is an automated marketing analytics solution powered by an advanced data transformation engine, multiple customization options, and a team with extensive experience in the marketing field.