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9 Mixpanel Alternatives You Should Try TODAY

Businesses are always on the lookout for more about their customers that will enable them to take make data-informed decisions to maximize customer satisfaction, increase customer retention, and drive pipeline. After all, which company doesn’t want to know specific patterns and behaviors of their users to easily convert them into customers and maximize revenue?

Mixpanel is a tool that helps with just that.

Created for product analytics, the tool comes with a number of features that help you dive into customer behavior and understand how users are interacting with your product. The tool also offers a multitude of integrations that make collecting and unifying data a breeze,

That said, some users have experienced problems with the product that make them look for Mixpanel alternatives. For instance, you need to spend 10-30 hours to set it up, it doesn’t track data retroactively, and it doesn’t track traffic sources.

If you’re also looking for an alternative to Mixpanel or have been considering using Mixpanel for your product analytics needs, this article will be of immense help as I will be talking about some alternative web analytics tools to make your life easier.

Google Analytics

Google Analytics is a famous free web analytics tool that gives insights about your website. It tracks and analyzes metrics, such as bounce rate, conversion rate, website traffic, etc.

Google Analytics 360 vs. Google Analytics Standard: Which is Right for Your Company
From glassCanopy

Google Analytics was released in November 2005 after Google bought “Urchin” in March 2005. Urchin was a web analytics tool that was developed in 1998.

Google Analytics organizes and displays data in four basic sections:

Audience

Google Analytics explores “who” your users/customers are in the audience section. It tracks metrics like demographics, retention, and location to help you analyze information about your users. By using this data, you can adjust your marketing strategies according to different user segments.

  1. Number of users and sessions
  2. Average pages a user visits per session
  3. Average time a user spends on the website
  4. Ratio of new users to recurrent users
  5. Bounce Rate

Acquisition

Google Analytics provides data about “how” your users/customers are landing on your website in acquisition section. It tracks different marketing channels such as email marketing, social media ads, and organic traffic in order to assess how well your marketing strategy is working. This can help you find and implement the best way to market your product and attract customers.

  1. Organic sessions and paid sessions
  2. Google Ads
  3. Search Console

Behavior

Google Analytics shows “what” actions are your users/customers are taking on your website in behavior section. It explains certain patterns and behaviors to understand user experience. Therefore, tracking metrics about behavior helps you to understand how UX affects user engagement and retention.

  1. Frequency of newsletter engagement
  2. Average time a user spends on a page
  3. Most searched terms and phrases by your users
  4. Pages that receiving the most traffic
  5. Advertising

PS: Just like Mixpanel, you need to set up custom events to track user engagement and behavior in Google Analytics.

Conversions

Google Analytics helps you to track whether your users are taking desirable actions in the conversions section. In other words, it looks at whether your users are turning into customers.

Pricing

One of the best advantages of Google Analytics is that it is free. Unlike most web analytics tools, the basic version provides a great variety of features and lets you track different parameters. Therefore, without spending any money, you can improve your revenue. Google, also, offers a premium version of Google Analytics called Google Analytics 360. It tracks different metrics and provides additional details in analyses, which is mostly beneficial only for bigger scale companies. The cost of this version starts from $150,000 per year and ranges according to the business scale. To have a better idea about the cost, you need to contact to sales representative and fill out a form about your product.

Google Analytics pricing
From Google Analytics

Heap

Heap is a web analytics tool that helps its customers to build a better digital presence. It was founded in 2013 with the aim of providing valuable information about the customer base to companies of all sizes. Its main motto is to “capture everything”, meaning focusing on each and every action taken by its users. One of the greatest advantages of Heap is that it automatically and retroactively tracks data from day one without requiring its users to manually code or tag. This helps you to make better decisions and take action faster.

Here are some key features that Heap provides:

  • Core: By providing codeless retroactive analytics, Core feature helps you to see automatically captured data and its analysis. Core feature displays complete user history with unified customer identity and prevents data blackouts.
  • Attribution: It helps companies to track customer behavior and patterns rather than just the basic facts about their visits. This lets you learn more about your customers and helps you to strategize easier and better ways to promote and sell your product.
  • Conversion: This feature enables Heap users to see retroactive funnels that show page/s that the users are tend to leave. It also compares how similar user groups are converted into customers. Both these functions helps you to see weaknesses and strengths in your user engagement and plan accordingly.
  • Enrichment: It combines CRM (customer relationship management) and behavioral data to enable you to access them with one click. This makes the tracking, organizing, and analyzing of these data easier and more convenient.
  • Warehouses: Heap stores any data it tracks in retroactive data warehouses. These warehouses helps you to have access to all information tracked from the day one (history of your data).

Pricing

There are four different versions you can choose from according to your preferences and business scale. Each of them offers a variety of features and analyses. To get more information about the prices of each version, you need to contact a sales representative.

Heap pricing
From Heap

HockeyStack

HockeyStack is an analytics and attribution platform used by over 7000 companies. Using HockeyStack, you can build any dashboard you need with metrics from different departments. Custom dashboards allow you to connect the dots to better understand what drives revenue for your SaaS.

For example, you can build a dashboard showing the marketing to expansion journey:

A marketing to expansion journey funnel in HockeyStack

A chart showing your active users:

HockeyStack dashboard showing the number of active users

Visualize the activation rate based on different customer segments:

HockeyStack report showing the activation rate for churned and retained trials

And even get a complete breakdown of feature adoption:

HockeyStack's engagement by feature report

HockeyStack also comes complete with numerous other features and capabilities that can help you get a better understanding of your product’s performance and customer behavior such as

  • Surveys: Using HockeyStack surveys, you can get key insights from your customers about how they found out about your product and what they think about their experience so far.
  • Step-by-step user journey: HockeyStack enables you to view each action and conversion of the user journey to dive deeper into customer behavior.
  • Funnels & goals: Users can set goals that make the most sense for their business such as signups, activations, paid conversions, or even blog post and landing page views.
  • Revenue attribution: Go into granular detail on what really drives revenue by finding out the MRR of each content piece and marketing channel

and more.

HockeyStack Pricing

HockeyStack two different pricing plans, both of which have a 14-day trial with a 30-day refund guarantee.

You can check out the pricing page here.

Hockeystack pricing

HockeyStack Integrations

  • Paddle
  • Stripe
  • Hubspot
  • Crisp Chat
  • Mailchimp
  • Intercom
  • Pipedrive
  • Chameleon
  • Salesforce
  • Zapier (coming soon)

HockeyStack Summary

The unique benefit of HockeyStack is its ability to unify your product, marketing, revenue, and sales data using no code. HockeyStack essentially liberates your data from data silos, allowing you to uncover unique insights that you wouldn’t be able to with siloed data.

  1. You can integrate with Stripe, Paddle, Hubspot and other SaaS platforms to build every single dashboard that you can think of, using all sales, marketing, revenue, and product metrics.
  2. You can create funnels, goals, and surveys, which are rare to get with other tools on this list.
  3. You don’t need any developers: tracking is cookieless, and the script is small, so it doesn’t increase your site loading time.

Matomo

After the rebranding of Piwik, a web analytics tool founded in 2007, Matomo was released as a free and open-source web analytics tool. Matomo emphasizes safe data collection, data privacy, and 100% of data ownership by its users making it a great Mixpanel alternative. They aim to prevent privacy sacrifices that their users need to make in order to gain insights into their products. Because Matomo is an open-source tool, its users can study and change the code for their own benefits, using the tool to its full potential.

Matomo sections into four menus:

  • Visitors: This menu presents data about your audience. Because Matomo tracks and analyzes individual users, it has a level accuracy and precision that cannot be seen in any other tool. You can get information about geographical location, time of visit, and demographics of your users through visitors menu.
  • Actions: This menu is similar to the behavior menu in Google Analytics. It displays data about landing and exit pages, most frequently visited pages and search terms, and event tracking.
  • Referers: In this menu you can find data about traffic sources, including users coming from a link, social media ad, or a blog post.
  • Goals: This menu enables you to set specific goals for your product. You can set simple goals like a certain number of visits to specific page on your website or complex goals like understanding customer behaviors through different parametrics.

Use Cases

  • Cornell University

While looking for an alternative for Google Analytics for their library database, Cornell University decided on Matomo because of its motto of providing transparent analytics and data privacy. It was crucial for Cornell to protect reader privacy; therefore, they chose Matomo, a free and open-source tool.

  • Majestic

By surveying the internet, Majestic created the largest commercial Link Intelligence database. They used Matomo for the purpose of being able to control their data. Because Matomo provided them with both small and big-picture data, they were able to analyze metrics and make data-driven decisions.

  • Verbraucherzentrale Bundesverband (VZBV)

VZBV is an umbrella organization, focusing on making policies based on consumer needs and desires. Matomo helped VZBV to measure and compare metrics for more than 10 websites they own and guide them to make proper data-based decisions.

Pricing

Matomo offers its customers two different versions: on-premise and cloud. While the on-premise version is free, the cloud version costs €19 for 50,000 hits and increases as the number of hits increases (for example, the cloud costs €13,900 for 100 million hits).

Matomo pricing
From Matomo

Pendo

Pendo is a product analytics and onboarding tool that helps software companies to develop a better user experience by providing companies with valuable insights about their product. It primarily focuses on the ways to help product teams to measure user engagement and user feedback.

Similar to other web analytics tools it has features to track common metrics. However, it also offers you unique features, which give you an evaluation of customer feedback and an understanding of customer satisfaction.

Pendo for Mobile
From Pendo.io

Pendo was founded in 2013 by Todd Olson, Erik Troan, Eric Boduch, and Rahul Jain who had previous experiences in well-known technology companies such as Google and Cisco. While creating Pendo, their aim was to make product managers’ lives easier by providing them with a tool that can tell them how customers are feeling about a product. They also wanted to offer features that will help companies to assess customer loyalty, revenue, and retention.

Pendo divides its tools into four different categories, which help you with onboarding, retention, feature adaptation, company growth, upselling, and cross-selling existing customers.

  • Insights: It is an product-analytics features that helps you to track and assess the ways your users are interacting with your product.
  • Sentiment: It is a feature that enables you to embed polls and surveys into online platforms. By asking specific and quick questions, polls and surveys enables marketing teams to track customer behaviors and customer satisfaction.
  • Guidance: This feature helps you to embed user-friendly walkthroughs and tips into your product to improve onboarding and optimize feature adaptation.
  • Feedback: It is a two-way communication feature that makes it easier for you to gather feedback about user experience and to keep your users updated about improvements.

Use Cases

  • RE/MAX

RE/MAX is a well-known international real estate company. With the help of Pendo-powered in app-training RE/MAX launched a new CRM (customer relationship management) to 130K real estate agents. Pendo offered RE/MAX guidance through the adaptation period and analytics to test different strategies by A/B tests.

  • Verizon Connect

Verizon Connect is a GPS fleet tracking solution that provides a real-time multi-perspective view to improve driver safety and productivity. To decrease the costs of customer acquisition while encouraging possible customers to interact with the platform, the automated product demos and user onboarding with the help of Pendo guides. As a result, they attracted possible customers and ensured that all of their users were able to see the value of their product.

  • Coursera

Coursera is an online course platform that works with different universities and organizations to offer online courses and certifications. During the Covid-19 pandemic, with the trend of the world going online, Coursera teamed up with Pendo to meet the rising demand for online courses. With the help of Pendo, Coursera scaled and automated quickly and easily to improve their user experience and welcome new users.

Pricing

Like any other web analytics tool, Pendo offers a free version for the basic features and analysis. If you want to gain access to unique features and much detailed analysis, you need to contact a sales representative.

Pendo pricing
From Pendo.io

CleverTap

Founded in 2013, Clever tap is a web analytics tool that aims to build an online presence and indestructible user engagement for companies through analytics, segmentation, and engagement tools. Because CleverTap is the only integrated analytics system that is built to offer solutions for customer retention, it stands out among other web analytics companies. It mostly focuses on building solid relationships with your users and your product to increase customer loyalty and satisfaction.

What Makes CleverTap Different?
From CleverTap

CleverTap platform divides into several different subsections:

  • Behavioral Analytics: By tracking specific actions and routes your users are taking throughout their visit, you can learn more about specific customer behaviors and patterns. This enables you to asses weaknesses and strengths of your product while providing you information about how you can improve your user experience.
  • Messaging Channels: This feature allows you to reach your users through a single platform and contact them by mobile, email, web, and etc. By keeping your customers engaged and satisfied, CleverTap enables you to form loyalty between your product and your users.
  • Product Experiences: CleverTap helps you to create the best user experience for your users by offering different tools for design, testing, and development. You also do not need to code unlike other web analytics tools.
  • Lifecycle Optimization: CleverTap categorizes your users into stages of conversion lifecycle. This makes it easier for you to see the stages which needs improvement and gives you power to encourage your users progress in the lifecycle.
  • Campaign Optimization: CleverTap offers you essential tools to optimize your campaigns. Everything you need to enhance your user engagement and ROI (return of investment) is under your hands.
  • Orchestration: This allows you to organize the other subsections that I have been mentioning. You can coordinate omnichannel campaigns (integration of different marketing channels to engage with customers) by looking at behavior analytics and lifecycle stages.
  • Segmentation: Segmentation allows you to reach your target audience with the correct techniques and messages. By perfecting your audience, CleverTap helps you to propagates your success.
  • Individualization: This allows you to treat users with care and enables personalization. Therefore, you can track data on individual bases and tailor campaigns specific to individuals rather than groups.

Use Cases

  • Home Credit

Home Credit is a consumer finance provider, aiming to improve financial inclusivity. Indonesia leg of Home Credit faced challenges when they wanted to send push notifications to large groups of people. By getting help from CleverTap’s behavioral analytics and messaging channels, they were able to boost their user engagement: Their push notification CTRs are 3.5 times higher than the industry average.

  • SafeBoda

SafeBoda is an app that aims to increase the usage of informal transportation and provide safe commuting options. They worked on user engagement, retention, and churn rate with CleverTap. By making data about their customer base and specific actions taken by their customer, CleverTap enabled SafeBoda to see their weaknesses and strengths and act accordingly. As a result, their retention rate rose to 75% in Nigeria.

  • KoinWorks

KoinWorks is a super financial app (a service that tries to solve a wide range of user problems) that connects investors and borrowers. They were having a hard time obtaining real-time analytics, improving transaction success rates, and getting help from omnichannel engagement. CleverTap offered integrated solutions and analytics to build a consistent and powerful user engagement, which in turn increased their sales per customer by 30%.

Pricing

CleverTap divides its customer base into two groups: for startups (up to 100K MAUs – monthly active users -) and for enterprises (more than 100K MAUs). The cost for startups starts from $200 a month for 20,000 MAUs (with a 14-day free trial) and increases by $200 per month for each additional 20,000 MAUs up to 100K MAUs. From there, you need to contact a sales representative to learn more about custom pricing.

CleverTap pricing options
From CleverTap
CleverTap pricing
From CleverTap

Fullstory

Fullstory is a web intelligent software that helps you to improve user experience and user engagement by capturing video and playback of your customers’ sessions. It was founded by former Googlers in Atlanta in 2014, aiming to make user-friendly and easy-to-use products that add value to its users’ lives. Fullstory offers features like digital experience intelligence, on-the-fly conversions, and robust developer tools to enable its users to create the best user engagement.

FullStory feature diagram
From Fullstory

Fullstory has three main features that help you to track and analyze your data:

  • Search: Fullstory allows you to search web analytics metrics and customer experience like you are searching on the internet. You can access easily to any type of data you want and gives you the opportunity identify and build metrics by simply typing them out.
  • Highest Fidelity Playback: Fullstory not just only captures videos of customer sessions but assets, the DOM (Document Object Model), and JS console (JavaScript console). This allows you to communicate with your customers to understand and solve user experience problems in real-time.
  • Page Insights: This feature helps you to track data both about what your customers are interacting with (for example, most used elements on a page) and what they don’t interact with (dead or foul elements). This is crucial for you to understand customer behavior and improve your user engagement.

Use Cases

  • GAP

GAP is an American clothing retail company founded in 1969. GAP obtained comprehensive and granular data about customer experience in the shopping process without compromising anything in return with the help of Fullstory. As a result, they saved 10% of the time used for accessing session information and overall was 12 minutes faster in session visibility than any other competitors.

  • Travel + Leisure Co.

Travel + Leisure Co. is a travel membership company consisting of resorts and travel clubs. Fullstory enabled them to increase their conversion rate by 9% for customers interacting with key features and decreased the booking time by almost 20%. Overall, Travel + Leisure Co. offered a better user experience to its customers through Fullstory.

  • Jumbo Interactive

Jumbo Interactive is an Australia-based company that resells lottery games under the agreement. With the help of Fullstory, they were able to identify more than 7 critical bugs and saved $10,000 by the bug identification. It was vital for Jumbo Interactive to identify, prioritize, and solve bugs because they were threatening their operations.

Pricing

Fullstory offers three different price plans (one of them is free) according to your product’s needs and goals. You need to contact a sales representative for a custom price plan.

FullStory pricing plans
From Fullstory

Countly

Countly, founded in 2013, is a web analytics tool that tracks product analytics, product performance, and customer behavior to improve customer journeys in web, desktop, and mobile applications. It can be installed on-premises or cloud according to your product’s needs. Countly also enables its customers to create their own plug-ins that fit into their product analytics. Their motto is “your data, your rules”, emphasizing data privacy.

Countly’s framework consists of two main sections:

  • Security and Data Ownership: Countly allows you te be in control of your own data whether you are using Countly on-premises or cloud. It is an open-source tool; therefore, you can see behind scenes of data tracking and analysis.
  • Industrial Grade Analytics and Marketing: Countly offers a 360 degrees view of your product to enhance your user experience and increase your revenue. They provide with a dashboard that shows unique and detailed metrics and analysis, saving you time and money.

Use Cases

  • Atom Bank

Atom Bank is a bank built exclusively for mobile gets help from Countly for their mobile analytics. Countly can track data on-premises and has a flexible configuration; therefore, it is a great tool for Atom Bank to obtain analytics from. It offers secure and verified data without compromising quality.

  • Steris

Steris is a medical equipment company, aiming to provide safer and healthier tools. Countly helps Steris to be in accord with regulatory rules (for example, HIPAA). Features such as the ability to restrict dashboard access and granular level user permissions enable Steris to be in control of their data.

  • Fullfat

FullFat is a company that develops video games, especially for hand-held devices. They are using Countly’s plugin architecture to extend their product analytics according to their needs, desires, and goals. While also offering default plugins, which are convenient to use, Countly also allows you to create your own plugins. In the end, Countly defends the idea of “your data, your rules”.

Pricing

There are two types of editions that you can choose from according to their prices. While the Community Edition is free (therefore lacks some features), Enterprise Edition is costs different for different businesses. You need to contact a sales representative to learn more about tailored plans.

Countly pricing plans

Amplitude

Founded in 2012, Amplitude is a web analytics tool that helps you to analyze user behavior data. With Amplitude, you can track real-time data with little time and effort and predict behaviors and patterns from the outcomes of certain metrics.

Amplitude feature diagram
From Amplitude

Amplitude focuses on four different categories:

  • Data Management: With Amplitude, you can track real-time data and have everything that you need to integrate sources and analyze customer data under your hands.
  • Product Analytics: Amplitude offers variety of features to give you detailed insights into your product. Therefore, you can make data-driven decisions and predict possible outcomes.
  • Personalization: By allowing its customers to combines product analytics and automated machine learning, Amplitude offers personalized analyses according to needs of its customers.
  • Experimentation: Amplitude offers A/B testing, which product analytics and customer behaviors are embedded in, to allow your teams to scale their experiments.

Use Cases

  • Walmart

Walmart is a retail corporation that consists of hypermarkets, department stores, and grocery stores. They use Amplitude to recognize how their customers are interacting with their online products and find the right ways to engage with their customers.

  • Ford

Ford is an automobile manufacturer company. Amplitude helps Ford to learn more about its customers by offering them personalized analytics. The detailed analytics enables Ford to strategize for the future and take risks accordingly.

Pricing

Amplitude offers three versions that you can choose according to what features and analytics you want. The most basic version is free. However, for the cost of the other two versions, you need to contact a sales representative.

Amplitude pricing plans
From Amplitude

Why do companies look for Mixpanel alternatives?

If you read Mixpanel reviews online, you’ll see that users look for alternatives to Mixpanel for several reasons. Here are some complaints that users have:

The user experience is sub par

Mixpanel has a lengthy and rigid setup process that leaves users agitated. Before you can start tracking analytical data, Mixpanel requires you to set the right parameters and configure the tool. What’s worse, if you decide that the parameters you initially chose don’t work for you, you’ll have to start the process from scratch.

Additionally, while Mixpanel does offer several features, this means that there are a ton of parameters and subsequent configurations. This can be a downside for non-technical users as they might get confused and not understand how the tool works at all. Needless to say, the learning curve can be pretty steep, particularly for business users.

Manual event tracking takes a ton of time

Mixpanel is one of the best tools out there that focuses on tracking event-based data. Event-based data deals with the specific actions your users are taking throughout their visit to your website. Even though this can give you a huge advantage in terms of customer patterns and behaviors, it takes a ton of time to set up manual events to track.

Mixpanel requires you to write codes for every different type of event that you want to track. It may seem as if you are only going to write a few rows; however, the reality is completely the opposite: You need to set up hundreds of events to track your website engagement. For your product, it’s worse as you probably have more events on your product than on your website.

No marketing attribution features

Marketing attribution modeling is a framework that essentially allows you to figure out which touchpoints contributed to a conversion. It assigns values to different marketing channels and touchpoints such as Instagram ads, a pop-up in an online game, or a blog post to assess which channel contributes the most to revenue.

In simple words, marketing attribution modeling helps you determine which marketing channel brings more customers. By measuring marketing attribution, you can improve your marketing strategies and attract more customers. Therefore, it is crucial for a web analytics tool to track marketing attribution.

Mixpanel lacks the ability to track marketing attribution: If you are using Mixpanel, you cannot get data about how your users are landing on your website.

This is a huge disadvantage because if you cannot know the best way to market your product, you cannot attract more users. It is, however, worth mentioning that there is some kind of source tracking: You may know from which source your users are coming from – Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, etc. -. However, since Mixpanel does not provide details about specific marketing channels, it can be difficult for the marketing team to figure out the best marketing strategy.

Additionally, source tracking in Mixpanel also requires coding knowledge making it even more difficult for non-technical team members.

Tracking step-by-step user journey requires development resources

User journeys are composed of several individual events, which helps you see your product’s weaknesses and strengths. For example, by tracking user journeys you can get information about which part of your product you are losing user engagement.

In Mixpanel, however, you need development resources to achieve this. Because tracking routes requires you to manually “knit” events together, you need to spend a lot of development hours tracking the step-by-step user journey.

Conclusion

It is crucial for businesses to track data about user experience and customer behaviors in order to market their products effectively and increase their customers. Businesses that don’t track and analyze important data about their product will eventually be wiped from the market. Therefore, we looked at several different web analytics tools that you can choose according to your product and your preferences. It is hard to give an answer to the question “which platform is better” because each and every product needs different features and analytics. At the end of the day, it is important to be clear on what your product is doing and what do you want to gain by using any of these platforms.

FAQ

What do you use Mixpanel for?

Mixpanel is a great web analytics tool if you are tracking event-based data. It offers a great variety of both common and unique features that you can use to track action taken by your users. Mixpanel also tracks different metrics and provides detailed analysis about them to ensure your product’s success.

Is Mixpanel free?

Unfortunately, Mixpanel is not free after 1,000 tracked users. Even though the free version is good for small-scale businesses, it is not beneficial for large companies that track data about thousands and millions of data about users. The cost of the Mixpanel starts at around $799 a year and increases as the number of tracked users increases.

What makes Pendo different than Mixpanel?

Even though it may seem like there is no difference between Pendo and Mixpanel at the first glance, they focus on two completely different things. While Mixpanel focuses on CRM and CRM capabilities, Pendo focuses on product marketing and product management.

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