12 Best PLG Tools for Product-Led Growth in 2025

Having fully bootstrapped our SaaS startup Featurebase to over half a million in recurring revenue, we thought we'd list some of the best product-led growth tools we've used to get here.

These tools have helped us turn our product into its own best salesperson, proving that you don’t always need a massive sales team to grow (we're still a team of 3).

While some products, like soda or mattresses, seem to sell themselves, it's a different story for complex software with nuanced user journeys. That's where PLG shines—letting your product do the heavy lifting so sales and marketing can take a backseat. Here are the tools that made it happen for us. 👇

In short—The best PLG tools for 2025:

1. ✨ Featurebase - Collect user feedback, announce product updates, and build a Help Center—all in one tool
2. Mixpanel - Product analytics platform to understand user behavior and track product adoption
3. Posthog - Open-source tool for event tracking, session replays, surveys, and heatmaps
4. Hotjar - Another option for heatmaps, session recordings
5. Linear - Modern issue-tracking tool and a Jira killer
6. Churnkey - Automates payment recovery and retention for SaaS
7. Baremetrics - Subscription analytics made simple for SaaS
8. Chartmogul - A bit more advanced subscription analytics for SaaS
9. Plausible - Lightweight, privacy-focused alternative to Google Analytics
10. Intercom - Live chat, email, and product tour platform—gets expensive after the 1y startup discount
11. Zendesk - Another live chat and ticketing tool
12. Segment - A customer data platform to centralize and sync user data across tools

What is product-led growth?

Product-led growth (PLG) was coined in 2016 by Blake Bartlett, a partner at OpenView. Product-led growth means that the product is the one selling and driving customer acquisition. Instead of openly pitching the product to potential customers, businesses make the product free and let the users explore the key features independently.

Users create their customer journey themselves by discovering the value in the free versions of web and mobile apps.

The main principles of a product-led growth strategy include:

• Self-service experience: users sign up, get onboarded, explore, and use the product on their own.
• Value before purchase: provide free trials, freemium plans, or limited versions of the full product to drive increased user adoption later on.
• Virality: in some tools, users need to invite others for the tool to work (e.g., Zoom), driving further business growth and essentially forcing the user to purchase.
• Product as the salesperson: a seamless customer experience, effortless user onboarding, and great features naturally steer the potential customer towards the purchase without teams such as customer success getting involved.

Why is product-led growth the hot new thing?

Product-led growth has become wildly popular in recent years for a good reason. If you're skeptical about trying out a product-led strategy, here's what you should know before starting.

1. The customer acquisition costs are lower
   With product-led growth, customers adopt the product, go through user onboarding, and discover all the features. Businesses don't have to rely on expensive sales software or processes.
2. The time to value is faster
   With product-led growth software, users can experience value immediately. Free trials, freemium models, or product demos let users see what the product is about without spending money.
3. You can grow your product at a scalable rate
   Users are discovering the product, which allows you to acquire 100 customers in a day just as easily as 10, facilitating easier business growth.
4. User retention is higher
   When users receive value immediately through key features, they are likelier to continue using your product.
5. You can exploit virality and network effects
   You can grow your product organically by asking users to add their team to explore the product fully. For example, communication apps like Slack require adding team members to use all the features.
6. You achieve better product-market fit
   Product-led growth prioritizes user feedback and behavior. With insight into user analytics, you can build products that meet customers' needs.
7. There is increased expansion revenue.
   When customer satisfaction and user engagement are high, people are more likely to purchase add-ons and upgrade to higher plans.
8. The customer experience is generally better.
   A product-led strategy forces you to focus on increased user satisfaction through better onboarding, which results in improved user experience.

Best product-led growth tools to try in 2025

Creating product-led growth on your own can be challenging with aspects such as tracking user behavior, collecting user feedback, doing customer relationship management, and more. This is why there are numerous product-led growth tools to help you build a better product that sells itself. 👇

1. Featurebase

Featurebase (👋 that's us) is a modern product management tool that helps SaaS companies collect user feedback, reduce support loads, and announce product changes. It’s loved by thousands of product, marketing, and support teams from companies like Nature.com, User.com, and Screenstudio.

Instead of having 4+ different tools, Featurebase offers everything in one place to help you build products your users love:

• Feedback collection & voting: Centralize feedback with embeddable widgets, integrations, and a public feedback forum. Let users vote on each other's ideas, see their total revenue, and focus on the most impactful features. All upvoters will automatically be notified when you ship their request.
• Changelogs: Announce product updates and increase feature adoption with neat in-app popups, notification emails, and a dedicated updates page.
• Help Center: Provide self-serve support with a beautiful knowledge base & bring help articles inside your product with a lightweight widget.
• Surveys (NPS, CSAT, etc.): Create targeted in-app surveys to ask users anything and measure customer satisfaction.

Plus, it integrates with many popular PLG tools in this list that you likely already use, such as Linear, Slack, Intercom, Zendesk, and many more.

We use Featurebase ourselves to build Featurebase, and while we're biased, it's one of the most irreplaceable tools in our toolset. But don't take our word for it—see what thousands of our customers are saying.

✨ Start building products users love with Featurebase for free →

2. Mixpanel

Mixpanel is an advanced product analytics platform designed to help teams track user behavior and improve product experiences. It’s ideal for product managers and data analysts. We use it daily to stay in touch with our product usage data.

Key features:

• Event tracking: Tracks specific user actions in real-time, such as clicks or sign-ups, providing insights into how users interact with your product.
• Cohort analysis: Groups users based on shared behaviors or attributes, enabling targeted engagement.
• Funnels: Measures conversion rates across steps in a user journey to identify drop-off points.
• Retention reports: Tracks how often users return to your product after their initial interaction.

Mixpanel has a free plan for up to one million monthly events. Paid plans start at $24 per month for 10,000 events.

3. Posthog

PostHog is an open-source analytics tool focused on event tracking, suitable for developers and data-driven teams. It's our go-to tool for session recordings and heat maps.

Key features:

• Feature flags: Tests and rolls out new features to specific user groups
• Session recording: Tracks user sessions for a detailed view of behavior
• Self-hosting: Offers the option to host data on your own infrastructure for privacy and control
• In-app surveys: Run embedded surveys to measure NPS, CES, or anything else
• API integrations: Easily integrates with other tools and platforms

Posthog has a free plan that lets you retain data for up to a year and add unlimited team members. Pricing for paid plans depends on your usage, and you'll have to fumble around on their website a bit to find out how much you'll pay.

As a side note, they also have a very good handbook on how they built PostHog, run their company, and more.

4. Hotjar

Hotjar is a customer experience platform that helps teams understand how users interact with their products. It's a nice option, but we ended up going with Posthog for session recordings and heatmaps.

Key features:

• Heatmaps: Visualizes where users click, scroll, or hover.
• Session recordings: Captures user sessions for detailed analysis, helping you collect qualitative and quantitative data.
• Surveys: Collects product data and user feedback directly.
• Conversion funnels: Identifies where users drop off in key flows.

You can use Hotjar for free to track up to 35 sessions per month. Paid plans start at $32 per month.

5. Linear

Linear is a project management tool designed for fast-moving product teams to track issues, plan roadmaps, and manage sprints. They pretty much position themselves as the modern Jira.

Key features:

• Issue tracking: Manage bugs and feature ideas
• Roadmaps: Visualizes product timelines and goals
• Team collaboration: Assigns tasks and communicates within the platform
• Integrations: Syncs with tools like Featurebase, GitHub and Slack

Linear offers a completely free plan for two teams with unlimited members. Paid plans start $8 per user per month.

P.S. You can use the native Featurebase integration to collect feedback with Featurebase and automatically sync the ideas with your development backlog in Linear.

6. Churnkey

Churnkey helps SaaS companies reduce churn by optimizing the cancellation process and offering retention strategies. At the time of writing this, it has saved us a total of $8k of revenue and 46 customers in the 2 years of running our startup!

Key features:

• Dynamic cancellation flows: Offers incentives like discounts or pauses to prevent cancellations
• Exit surveys: Gather feedback from users who cancel on autopilot
• A/B testing: Tests retention strategies to see what works best for your business strategy
• Dashboard analytics: Provides churn and retention data in a user-friendly interface

Churnkey has a free 14-day trial period. After that's done, you'll pay based on your churn volume. If you have up to $5,000 of monthly churn, you'll pay $250 monthly for Churnkey.

7. Baremetrics

Baremetrics provides subscription analytics for SaaS companies, offering visibility into revenue metrics.

Key Features:

• MRR and ARR tracking: Tracks monthly and annual recurring revenue, which are key metrics for SaaS teams
• Customer Segmentation: Groups customers by behavior or subscription plans
• Churn insights: Monitors subscription cancellations and downgrades to help you curb your customer acquisition cost
• Forecasting: Predicts future revenue trends based on historical data

Baremetrics pricing depends on your company's monthly recurring revenue (MRR). The cheapest you can get is $108 per month.

8. ChartMogul

ChartMogul provides subscription analytics and revenue reporting for SaaS businesses. We love it most for its simplicity—nobody likes getting lost in numbers. 😅

Key features:

• Revenue metrics: Tracks MRR, ARR, and LTV.
• Churn analysis: Breaks down churn by cohort or region.
• Data Enrichment: Enhances data with custom attributes and helps monitor user interactions with your product.
• Customer segmentation: Analyzes customer behavior by segments.

You can get Chartmogul for free if your annual recurring revenue is under $120,000. Paid plans start at $99 monthly.

9. Plausible

Plausible is a lightweight, privacy-focused web analytics tool ideal for teams prioritizing simplicity and compliance. It's a super nice bootstrapped Google Analytics alternative that we use daily.

Key features:

• Privacy-first Design: No cookies or personal data collection.
• Real-time Data: Provides live updates on website activity.
• Custom events: Tracks specific actions like button clicks or form submissions.
• Traffic sources: Identifies where users are coming from.

Plausible has a free 30-day trial to get you started. After that, you'll pay based on the monthly visitors your website receives. The cheapest plan is $9 monthly for up to 10,000 visitors.

10. Intercom

Intercom is a customer messaging platform that helps businesses engage users through live chat, email, and product tours.

Key features:

• Live chat: Provides real-time communication with users
• Product tours: Guide users through product features
• Behavioral messaging: Sends automated messages based on user activity
• Help center: Creates a knowledge base for self-serve support

You can also use the native Featurebase integration to send feature requests from support chats to your public voting board to see what the majority of customers want to see first.

Intercom offers a 14-day free trial. After that, you'll pay at least $29 per seat on your team. While this may not seem like a lot initially, the useful features will drive the cost up considerably.

11. Zendesk

Zendesk is a customer service platform that helps businesses manage and improve customer support experiences.

Key features:

• Ticketing system: Organizes and prioritizes customer requests.
• Self-service Portal: Allows users to find answers independently.
• AI-powered Tools: Automates repetitive tasks and provides smart recommendations.
• Multi-channel support: Handles queries from email, chat, social media, and more.

You can also use the native Featurebase integration to save requests as actionable tasks in Featurebase and automate follow-ups to always close the feedback loop.

Zendesk has a free trial plan, and paid plans start at $19 per user monthly.

12. Segment

Segment is a customer data platform (CDP) that centralizes and routes user data across tools.

Key features:

• Data collection: Gathers user interactions from multiple touchpoints.
• Integration library: Connects with hundreds of apps and platforms.
• Identity resolution: Unifies user data from different devices and sessions to ensure seamless data flow.
• Real-time streaming: Processes data instantly for up-to-date product insights.

There is a free plan for up to 1,000 visits per month. Paid Segment plans cost from $120 per month and up.

P.S. You can use the Featurebase ↔ Segment integration to easily sync your customer data with all of your feedback. This game-changer lets you prioritize ideas by customer revenue, company size, etc.

Conclusion

A product-led growth strategy is one of the final stones in the gauntlet for SaaS startups. You'll have higher customer engagement, better feature adoption, and many other benefits. With the PLG tools mentioned above, you can turn your product usage data into pure gold while making life easier for your sales team.

Featurebase helps you replace 4+ tools by letting you collect feedback, announce product updates, build a Help Center, and run surveys. It has helped thousands of companies, like Senja, User.com, and Screenstudio, reach the next level by giving them the tools to build products users love.

What's best is that it comes with a Free plan, and the onboarding is super simple, so there's no downside to trying it out! 👇

💙 Start building products your users love with Featurebase for free →