Marketing
Chartbeat
American web analytics company.
What it is
Chartbeat is a real-time analytics platform built for editorial teams rather than marketers. It measures engaged time — how long readers actively spend with content — rather than raw pageviews, and newsrooms use it to decide what to promote while traffic is happening. Headline testing, alerts for spikes and dashboards for the front page give editors immediate feedback, while historical reporting covers audience behavior over time.
Chartbeat pricing
Chartbeat does not publish a plan ladder we could verify. Pricing not verified.
Prices are read from the vendor's own pricing page. Vendors change plans without notice — check the source before you budget. Price verification log.
Key features
Realtime dashboard
Live view of concurrent visitors, referrers and page performance.
Engaged time
Measures active reading rather than just loads of a page.
Headline testing
Try alternate headlines and promote the one that holds readers.
Alerts
Notifications when traffic spikes or drops on monitored pages.
Strengths and trade-offs
What works well
- Real-time attention data, not just pageviews
- Built around editorial decisions
- Big-screen dashboards for newsrooms
Where it falls short
- Priced for publishers
- Little value outside editorial contexts
- Historical analysis is not the focus
Who it is for
Publishers making live decisions about content placement.
Our verdict
Excellent for newsrooms and irrelevant for almost everyone else.
Frequently asked questions
- Does Chartbeat measure the whole audience?
- It measures through a JavaScript tag on your pages, so AMP versions, native apps and off-site syndication need their own handling to be counted.
- Is Chartbeat for marketers or editors?
- Mainly editorial teams: the realtime view and engaged-time metric exist to guide coverage decisions while a story is live, not to track campaigns.
- Who is Chartbeat best for?
- Publishers making live decisions about content placement.
- What are the main drawbacks of Chartbeat?
- The trade-offs we noted: Priced for publishers; Little value outside editorial contexts; Historical analysis is not the focus.
What we checked
- Public APIOffers a documented API you can build against.Not checked
- Mobile appHas a native app for iOS or Android, not just a mobile website.Not checked
- Open source / self-hostableSource is open and the tool can be run on your own infrastructure.Not checked
- SSO (SAML)Supports SAML single sign-on on at least one plan.Not checked
“Not checked” means exactly that — we have not verified it, and we do not guess.
Tools that do the same job as Chartbeat
Same job, different pricing. Verified starting price first.
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