Kissmetrics vs Mixpanel
SaaS companies depend on user retention to become successful. To understand what makes users stick with their product, SaaS businesses use a variety of analytics tools.
Kissmetrics and Mixpanel are two SaaS analytics tools that you might consider adding to your tech stack. In this article, I’ll go into details of each tool so that you can make the best decision. You can check out all Mixpanel alternatives in this article!
Pro Tip:
TIf you are not satisfied with both tools, you can skip to the end of the article to see a better alternative 🙂
What is Kissmetrics?
Kissmetrics is a web-based digital platform designed to provide modern analytics based on your website traffic. It is suitable for various types of businesses and gives the unique ability to track every action of users. Today, a lot of important businesses like Microsoft, eBay, and WordPress get help from Kissmetrics.
Features of Kissmetrics
Kissmetrics provides a wide range of different features to its users. It aims to help the company to get an optimal level of growth and maximize revenue. It focuses more on the actions of people than aggregate data.
In other words, it highlights people, not pageviews. In order to do that, Kissmetrics uses some analyzing methods and features. Here are some main features it offers:
- Alias whenever user enters the website
Gives the ability to alias each time user reaches the website.
- User-type Property
Deeply more information about diversified users.
- Retention Reports Based on Events
It creates retention reports due to events to transmit.
- Researching the Trends
Searches and discovers the trending products and segments.
Applications Integrating with Kissmetrics
In the sense of gathering and storing user information, integrations with other SaaS products help a lot. For that reason, Kissmetrics integrates with various applications. Some of these are:
- Github
- Google Sheets
- Zapier
- Shopify
- Trello
- Twilio
- SQLServer
- Gmail
Pricing of Kissmetrics
Pricing categories of Kissmetrics divide into two groups: E-commerce and Saas. Both of these categories have the same amount of pricing. It has two editions: Silver and Gold. Silver one starts from a price of $299 per month and includes 10k monthly tracked users.
On the other hand, the Gold Edition has a price of $499 per month and includes 25k monthly tracked users.
The gold edition also includes services like revenue and cohort reports which are not served in the Silver edition.
Kissmetrics Reviews
A business technology analyst using Kissmetrics for a while concluded that:
“Running marketing campaign was made easy by Kissmetrics. The insight that we got from the campaign reports are pretty helpful in redesigning / realigning the audiences . We ran web analytics using Kissemetrics as well. It helped us in solving the abandon cart use case. We did get an individual profile of the customers which helped us in segmenting based on user behavior and visit metrics.”
Balaji Perumal, who is a manager on digital media stated that:
“It’s being used by marketing professionals, especially the digital marketing team, as it’s giving web analytics solutions to their users. The product helps us to track our customer conversion process and discover areas where we’re losing potential customers.”
Aaron Treguborf, who is working in a Software company sector, stresses that:
“I personally vetted and researched different analytics platforms two years ago. I realized that I had no idea if our blog content or social content was delivering top of the funnel leads and most importantly demos. After careful research and testing, I found that Kissmetrics is able to answer these questions and more! Currently, Kissmetrics is utilized by the marketing team, executive team and member success–with other departments researching the best way they can also use the data that Kissmetrics provides!”
Highlights of Kissmetrics:
| Features | Does the platform have it? |
| A/B testing | |
| Event comparison | ✓ |
| Developed user-tracking | ✓ |
| Different Property Types | ✓ |
| Mobile | |
| Rich Marketing Tools | |
| Well and simple design | ✓ |
| Custom Events | |
| Fast Data-Processing | Partially |
What is Mixpanel?
Mixpanel is also a web-based digital platform that provides both web and mobile analytics. Just like Kissmetrics, it achieves and transmits the analytics on the website from user to business. It is designed in a simple and understandable way, which allows companies to gather and classify information in the quickest way. Mixpanel is also used by many important companies like Uber, ZipRecruiter, and Twitter.
Features of Mixpanel
Contrary to Kissmetrics, Mixpanel focuses more on mobile technology. Although the scale of user-tracking is smaller than Kissmetrics, the information gathered by Mixpanel is thought to be more reliable by its users.
It emphasizes actions on websites more than page views. Here are some main features it introduces:
- Manual Incremental Properties
Keeping a record of each customer in order to maintain interest.
- Event, User and Super Properties
With all of these properties, it gives you the ability to convert your data into meaningful forms.
- Custom Events
Creating multiple events due to events you are already tracking.
- Retention Reports Based on Events and Properties
It creates retention reports to transmit based on both events and properties.
- A/B Testing
Comparing different versions of the same document to conclude which performs better.
- Mobile Application
It has a mobile application available for users.
- Advanced Segmentation
It allows qualified data analysis.
Applications Integrating with Mixpanel
Mixpanel also offers its customers to integrate with different platforms in order to improve the data-gathering process. Some of these are:
- Amazon Web Services
- Google Cloud
- Slack
- Zapier
Price of Mixpanel
Mixpanel offers three options of servicing its customers:
- Free edition
Includes 100k monthly tracked users. Customers who use the free edition of Mixpanel have the access to unlimited data history, core reports, data dictionaries, monitoring, and alerts.
- “Growth” Edition
Starts at $25 per month. In this option, you can choose the number of your monthly tracked users. It has all the accesses of free option, in addition to that, it includes unlimited saved reports, impact reports with causal inference, data modeling, and group analytics
- “Enterprise” Edition
Has the purpose of empowering teams in larger organizations. In other words, it aims to support higher-growth companies. You have to offer a chat for arranging a reasonable price for services in that option, and it includes some specified features in it such as advanced access controls, experimental signal reports, SSO & automated provisioning, seasonal & events-based pricing, and dedicated customer success.
Mixpanel Reviews
Mixpanel has 618 reviews on G2.
Manan Mora, CEO of a Computer Software company states that:
“We use Mixpanel to get an understanding of our SaaS user metrics. Mixpanel stores and displays user engagement and event data really well which lets us visualize the effectiveness of our software. The drop off points, block points etc. can be visualized fairly easily on Mixpanel and we can even send out targeted messages using the same platform.”
A marketing manager using Mixpanel for years stated that:
“Mixpanel is used by the entire organization. We work for an app startup and that’s the primary way that we track how users are using and engaging with our app. It’s also the main way to track how we’re acquiring new users–which ad campaigns they’re coming in through, etc.”
Frank Ramirez, Co-Founder, CTO, and Product Lead of SixPlus highlighted that:
“Mixpanel is primarily used by the product team to improve our funnel conversions and discover different user flows/paths. Furthermore, Mixpanel gives us the ability to run more sophisticated cohort analyses to determine the impact of features depending on when users interacted with our site. Their retention graphs naturally flow into these analyses.”
Comparison Tables
Based on user reviews, this table shows a comparison of good views and advantages of Kissmetrics and Mixpanel:
| Features | Does the platform have it? |
| A/B Testing | Yes |
| Event Comparison | No |
| Developed User-Tracking | No |
| Mobile Technology | Yes |
| Retroactive Tracking | No |
| Different Property Types | Yes |
| Rich Marketing Tools | Yes |
| Easy-to-use | No |
| No-code event tracking | No |
| Step-by-step user journey | No |
Comparison of Advantages of Two Platforms
According to user reviews of both platforms, these are their advantages:
| Advantage | Kissmetrics | Mixpanel |
| Marketing Features | ✓ | |
| Event Comparisons | ✓ | |
| Revenue Analytics | ✓ | |
| A/B Testing | ✓ | |
| Advanced BI Reporting | ✓ | |
| Rich Property Types | ✓ | |
| Custom Events | ✓ |
Disadvantages
According to user reviews, these features need more development in these tools:
| Disadvantage | Kissmetrics | Mixpanel |
| No A/B Testing | ✓ | |
| No Instant Customer Success | ✓ | |
| No Marketing Features | ✓ | |
| Price | ✓ | |
| Steep Learning Curve | ✓ | |
| No Marketing Attribution | ✓ |
A Better Alternative: HockeyStack
HockeyStack is an end-to-end analytics tool for SaaS companies. It unifies marketing, revenue, sales, and product data into one dashboard with no code so that you can understand what really drives revenue at your SaaS. It’s completely no code, and it doesn’t require any setup.
HockeyStack’s Features
HockeyStack offers these features with no code:
- Step-by-step user journey
- Custom dashboards
- Funnels and goals
- Insights
- Surveys
- Revenue analytics
- Segments
and more
HockeyStack Pricing
HockeyStack has a free forever plan and 3 paid plans. Paid plans have a 14-day trial with a 30-day refund guarantee.
You can check out the pricing page here.
HockeyStack Integrations
- Paddle
- Stripe
- Hubspot
- Salesforce (coming soon)
- Zapier (coming soon)
HockeyStack Pros and Cons
I might be biased, but this is an objective evaluation of HockeyStack’s pros and cons 🙂
HockeyStack Pros
The unique benefit of HockeyStack is its ability to unify your marketing, revenue, sales, and product data using no code. This allows you to uncover unique insights that you wouldn’t be able to by using multiple tools as they cause you to have fragmented data.
- You can integrate with Stripe, Paddle, and Hubspot and build every single dashboard that you can think of, using all sales, marketing, revenue, and product metrics.
- You can create funnels, goals, and surveys, which are rare to get with other tools on this list.
- You don’t need any developers, tracking is cookieless, and the script is small, so it doesn’t increase your site loading time.
HockeyStack Cons
HockeyStack generally lacks reporting features as it’s not focused on agencies and other reporting-based businesses.
- HockeyStack doesn’t have weekly e-mail reports
- The tool lacks some integrations, such as Salesforce, Mailchimp, and Zapier. (which are on the roadmap)
Conclusion
In conclusion, both of these platforms offer comprehensive analytics to their customers. Kissmetrics highlights the actions of people and includes a very wide analysis set based on these actions while Mixpanel offers automation, mobile tracking, and detailed product analytics with a steep learning curve.
If you need a no-code SaaS analytics tool that allows you to understand which marketing channel or sales campaign brings the highest LTV to your SaaS, you should definitely check out HockeyStack.
