Untappd Insights vs Brewlytics: Market Data or Your Own Guests?

Why This Matters for Breweries

Every brewery data pitch sounds the same until you ask one question: whose customers are these?

That question separates the two products in this comparison, and it decides which one can actually answer the thing keeping you up on a Tuesday. Next Glass — the company behind Untappd, Untappd for Business, and Untappd Marketing — also sells Untappd Insights, business intelligence pitched at breweries, distributors and retailers. It is the newest and most direct challenge to anyone claiming to be the intelligence layer for craft beer, including us.

So this page has to be careful rather than loud. Untappd Insights is a real product built on a genuinely enormous dataset. Next Glass self-reports more than 1.5 billion consumption moments across 180-plus countries and over 16,000 SaaS customers (verified 2026-08-18). Nobody in craft beer has a check-in dataset like that, and it would be silly to pretend otherwise.

But scale and resolution are different things. A dataset that covers the whole category at a market level cannot tell you that the couple who came in every Friday for eight months stopped coming in March. That fact lives in your point of sale, in transactions you already own — and if you run a taproom, it is worth more to you than any national style trend.

How It Works

Two terms decide this comparison. Define them once and the rest follows.

Network-level data means data collected from a consumer app's user base and aggregated across venues, brands and regions. Its unit of analysis is the category — a style, a brand, a market. It comes from the people who check in.

POS-grounded per-guest data means data read directly from your point-of-sale system, tied to individual guests, covering everyone who paid you — not just the ones who opened an app. Its unit of analysis is the person.

Both are legitimate. They answer different questions and they cannot substitute for each other, because they are sourced from different places.

Side by side

Where Untappd Insights is genuinely the better buy

If you distribute, this section matters more than anything else on the page.

Off-premise visibility. Your POS knows what happened in your taproom. It knows nothing about the bottle shop three towns over, or which of your accounts is actually moving the porter. Network data does, and no amount of POS integration will ever produce that view.

Category benchmarking. "Is cold IPA still climbing, or did it peak last year?" is a real planning question with real money attached to it, and it is not answerable from your own register. Market-level intelligence is the right tool.

Brand-level competitive read. How your flagship performs against comparable brands across venues is a distributor conversation, and having a number for it is better than having a hunch.

If those are your questions, buy market intelligence. That is what it is for.

Where network-level data runs out

The limit is not accuracy. It is who is in the sample.

Check-in data comes from people who open an app and log a beer. That is a real population, and a valuable one — but it is the enthusiast slice. It is not the retired couple who split a flight every Sunday, the industry crowd who come in after close, or the Tuesday regular who orders the same pilsner and never photographs anything. In most taprooms those people are the majority of the revenue and almost none of the check-ins.

So there are questions a network product structurally cannot answer for your specific taproom:

1. Which named guests have gone quiet in the last 60 days?
2. What does each of them actually drink — not what their region drinks?
3. Did the members who joined the mug club visit more after joining than before?
4. When the hazy drops on Thursday, which 74 people should hear about it and which 106 should be left alone?

Every one of those answers is sitting in your point of sale right now, unread. That gap — between category-level insight and per-guest reality — is the whole reason Brewlytics exists, and it is why these two products are complements far more often than they are rivals.

Example Brewery Scenario

Kettle Line Brewing runs a 15-barrel system in a mid-size market: a taproom on Square, plus cans in about 40 accounts across two counties. Their flagship is Second Shift Pilsner; the money-maker is a rotating hazy called Loose Gravel; the sleeper is a Baltic porter that only sells in winter.

Rosa, who owns it, has two problems that look like one problem.

Problem one is wholesale. Loose Gravel is flat in three accounts and she cannot tell whether that is the beer, the account, or the whole hazy category cooling off in her market. Her POS is silent here — those cans sold through a distributor, not her register. This is a market-intelligence question, and a category-level product is the right place to take it.

Problem two is the taproom. Winter mug club renewals are coming, 43 members have not been scanned in over two months, and the renewal email is about to go to all 180 members identically. She also has 60 cases of Baltic porter and no idea which guests are dark-malt drinkers.

No amount of national style-trend data solves problem two. But connecting Square to Brewlytics backfills 12 months of transaction history and answers it in an afternoon: a quiet-member segment built from real purchase gaps, visit frequency per member before and after joining, and a dark-and-malty taste segment of 88 guests who have actually bought the porter, the stout, or the dunkel at least twice.

Rosa ends up with both. Market data for the distributor meeting. POS data for the Thursday send. The mistake would have been buying one and expecting it to do the other job.

Practical Checklist

Before you take either demo, do this:

• Write your question down first. "How is my category doing?" and "who stopped coming in?" are different purchases. Most bad software decisions start with a fuzzy question.
• Split your revenue. If more than half of it comes through your own taps, your highest-value data is already in your POS and you are probably underusing it. If most of it is wholesale, market intelligence deserves the budget.
• Estimate your check-in rate. Count roughly how many guests you served last Friday, then how many logged a check-in. The ratio tells you what fraction of your room a network product can see.
• Ask both vendors one question in writing: can you show me a named guest, what she drinks, and when she last visited? The answer sorts the category faster than any feature grid.
• Get the price in writing. Untappd Insights pricing is not published (verified 2026-08-18), so budget for a quote, not a number off a page.
• Check which POS you are on. Barley reads Square today; Toast is next on the roadmap and Arryved is third. See the Square integration for what that connection actually reads.

How Brewlytics Helps

Brewlytics is not market research and does not pretend to be. It is the layer that turns transactions you already own into people you can actually market to.

POS Sync connects Square and backfills 12 months of history, so visits and spend are counted from real transactions rather than app check-ins — which means the guests who never check in anywhere still count.

Customer taste profiles map every beer on your list through the Beer Taste Genome, roughly 30 flavor dimensions, and build a profile per drinker from ratings and purchases. A guest stops being a row number and becomes "low-bitterness, high-body, dark malt." More on that in customer insights.

Taste segments and campaign automation turn those profiles into a send list. The hazy drop goes to hazy drinkers over iMessage and SMS; the porter crowd gets left alone until you have something for them. The mechanics are in loyalty and rewards.

The analytics dashboard carries the numbers a network product cannot see for your room: visits per guest before and after a mug club signup, who has gone quiet, and which taste segments are growing.

Free to start, Pro at $99/month plus a per-active-customer fee, no transaction fees. The wider operator picture lives at Brewlytics for breweries, the strategy context is in the complete guide to brewery marketing, and if you are comparing the venue-facing product instead, we wrote Brewlytics vs Untappd for Business.

FAQ

See the schema-ready FAQ block at the end of the page for the full set — covers what Untappd Insights is, its pricing, how it differs from Untappd for Business, whether it shows individual customer data, running both products, and what POS data a network product cannot see.

Ready to see who your regulars actually are?

Category trends are worth knowing. But nobody ever saved a Tuesday by reading a style report. The guests who pay your rent are already in your point of sale, named, with a year of history behind them — the only question is whether anything is reading it.

→ Book a demo and bring your POS login. We will backfill a year of history and show you your quiet regulars before the call ends. → See pricing, including the free tier. → Still shopping the wider field? Start with the best Untappd alternatives for breweries or the best brewery CRM software.