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Mixpanel vs Amplitude: Which One Should You Use?

Mixpanel and Amplitude: two of the most well-known and powerful product analytics tools out in the market. These two tools are constantly competing, both against each other and against other analytics tools like Google Analytics, as companies try to determine which one is the best tool in terms of features, cost, and efficiency.

They both are excellent tools that track, collect, and analyze data about your website, giving you insight into different product usage metrics and product success metrics. However, they have some fundamental differences that separate them from each other.

While Mixpanel offers various basic dashboard templates and sends data externally to analyze, Amplitude offers customizable dashboards and analyzes data via internal data integrations.

Another main difference is how they track data. Even though both Mixpanel and Amplitude are event-based products, meaning they track events rather than pageview data, Amplitude can be programmed to track page views and website load.

Therefore, before further discussing which one is better than the other, we need to first talk about their metrics, features, integrations, etc.In this article, we’ll compare Mixpanel’s and Amplitude’s strengths and weaknesses and try to choose which SaaS analytics tool will create the best value for you and your business.

Mixpanel

Amplitude

No-code & Retroactive Tracking

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Easy-to-use

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Marketing Analytics

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Understand what drives revenue for your SaaS

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Flows

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Capterra Rating

4.5/5

4.5/5

Free Trial

Free plan

Free plan

Plans with all features prices start at

Undisclosed

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Mixpanel

Mixpanel is a product analytics tool that was founded in 2009 by Suhail Doshi and Tim Trefren. Mixpanel can turn your raw data into actionable insights with enhanced product usage analytics features. The tool makes storing and tracking mobile data easier with its data collection abilities.

Mixpanel is an event-based product that tracks events rather than pages or individual users. It provides you with the user behavior within your product, advanced reports and core reports, and data analysis. Therefore, with Mixpanel, you can learn more about specific user journeys and patterns, helping you to enhance your product and make changes accordingly.

Some of the most popular features are Interactive Reports, Team Dashboards & Alerts, Limitless Segmentation, and Group Analytics.

Amplitude

Amplitude is a web and mobile B2B SaaS analytics tool that was founded in 2012 by Spenser Skates, Jeffrey Wang, and Curtis Liu. Amplitude focuses on user journeys, user behaviors, and segmentation, helping you to understand the user journey, dive deeper into user lifecycles, and even identify specific user patterns.

Some of the most popular features are Data Management, Product Analytics, Personalization, and Experimentation.

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Mixpanel vs Amplitude: Pricing

Mixpanel

Mixpanel offers three price plans according to monthly tracked users: Free, Growth, and Enterprise. The Free plan consists of all the basic features of Mixpanel and offers 100K monthly tracked users at no cost.

On the other hand, the Growth plan starts from $25/month and is customizable according to your needs and preferences. The price may increase based on the number of your monthly tracked users. Similarly, the Enterprise plan is also tailor-made specific to your business.

Therefore, you need to contact a sales representative to learn more about the plan and price.

From Mixpanel

Amplitude

Like Mixpanel, Amplitude also offers three different price plans for its behavioural analytics platform: Starter, Growth, and Enterprise.

The plans are not tied to a specific variable like monthly tracked users; therefore, the prices vary according to differences in types of reports and features.

While the Starter plan is free, you need to contact a sales representative to learn more about the costs of the Growth and Enterprise plans.

From Amplitude

Mixpanel vs Amplitude: Data Enrichment

Mixpanel

Data enrichment is the process in which the data in hand is supported with various metrics, tools, and information to turn that data into actionable insights. It is a critical process because it is hard to understand what your data means and how you can use it for your benefit without enhancing it.

One of the most significant advantages Mixpanel has over Amplitude is the powerful Data Enrichment feature that Mixpanel offers. This feature helps you improve and crown your behavioral data with business and demographic data.

In other words, Mixpanel helps you make connections between different types of data and user behavior, giving insights into your product, users, and overall audience with its true data enrichment feature.

Mixpanel’s Lookup Tables are the fundamentals of Data Enrichment. They help Mixpanel customers integrate events, profiles, and provide them with actionable data to improve engagement and streamline the customer journey.

For example, Mixpanel’s Lookup Tables can connect missing data with the events and/or people properties and then manage those according to the combined analytics.

Amplitude

On the other hand, Amplitude does not offer true data enrichment, which with you can complete the missing data. However, it provides advanced segmentation to enrich your analytics. This is not a counter feature of Mixpanel’s Lookup tables, but Amplitude Segmentation can help you get to know your audience, their behaviors, and preferences.

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Mixpanel vs Amplitude: A/B Testing

A/B testing is critical to understand what drives your growth and will help you enhance that growth. It’s also vital while optimizing user journeys.

With A/B testing, the split-testing method, you can test different versions of your product, changing a different variable each time to understand how your customers react to it. You can try variations of web page designs, emails, onboarding processes, marketing campaigns, and many more. This way, you can see how user behavior changes on the different versions.

Both Mixpanel and Amplitude provide A/B testing and experimentation tools that can help you test different versions of features to see which one works better for you and your customers. However, Mixpanel has a clear edge over Amplitude because of the notification sending feature.

Mixpanel

Mixpanel can send notifications to its customers via SMS, push notifications, email, and in-app messages. Mixpanel also runs tests on mobile apps, which allows you to track and use mobile data to enhance your product. This helps you control your testing, manage any problems quickly, and get results efficiently.

Amplitude

Amplitude relies on third parties to send notifications and track mobile data, which means that it may not be the best tool for A/B testing. However, if you already have an external tool to do this, sending notifications would not be a big problem.

Mixpanel vs Amplitude: Funnels

Funnels and funnel reports are great features to understand customer journeys and where your users are dropping off. This visual data analysis helps you assess your weak areas such as web pages or points to improve them to become your strong spots.

Mixpanel and Amplitude have a very similar funneling process and funnel reports that you can utilize to identify weaknesses and strengths. Some common flows they both offer are onboarding and checkout flows, with which you can track conversion rates by building different funnels.

Mixpanel

With Mixpanel funnel reports, you can track various spots on your website to understand user journeys and flow. Here is a look at Mixpanel’s funnel report:

Mixpanel Funnels
Mixpanel Funnel Reports From Ruben Ugarte

Amplitude

Like Mixpanel’s report, Amplitude’s report also provides valuable insights that you can use to assess your strengths and weaknesses.

However, Amplitude is slightly better for funnel reports since it lets you view both ordered and unordered funnels separately. This is especially helpful in building and analyze funnels in different orders.

Here is Amplitude’s funnel report:

Amplitude Funnels
Amplitude Funnel Reports From Ruben Ugarte

Mixpanel vs Amplitude: Reporting & Customization

It is almost impossible to separate Mixpanel and Amplitude from each other when it comes to reporting. They are versatile reporting tools since they provide core reports, such as segmentation, funnels, and retention reports. They both also allow you to visualize your data as graphs, bars, trends, etc.

They both help you understand what your data means and how you can utilize it to turn it into actionable insights. However, the difference is hidden in “customization,” meaning when and how to customize your dashboards and reports.

Mixpanel

With Mixpanel, you first get the basic dashboard with essential and concise information. Then, if you want, Mixpanel enables you to customize those basic reports according to your needs and preferences.

Therefore, you will be able to acquire reports more quickly and easily.

mixpanel-dashboard-homepage
Workflow From Mixpanel

Amplitude

On the other hand, Amplitude processes and displays data in reverse order. With Amplitude, you need first to choose the specific customizations. Then, it turns data into reports according to your preferences.

This is helpful if you want to select the specifics of what you want to see and get from your reports. However, having a customization process first can be overwhelming and slow if you don’t yet know what you want to choose.

Even though the core reporting process of Amplitude can be a little bit tiring, its Advanced Reporting features are worth mentioning especially in the context of data analysis.

If you have sufficient data to work with, it offers features that can help you to quickly and efficiently identify and solve problems in your product, sales and content marketing strategies.

Amplitude Dashboard for Product and Marketing Teams
Workflow From Amplitude

To summarize, I can say that Mixpanel is quicker than Amplitude for basic reporting since it offers dashboards rather than customized reports as the first action.

This saves a lot of time and effort that can be used elsewhere to improve your product. However, Amplitude is better at advanced reporting, which can build better and deeper reports.

MixPanel vs Amplitude: Data Accuracy and Collaboration

One of the main concerns with analytics tools is the accuracy of data. Since Amplitude and Mixpanel integrate large volumes of data from your product, and since they have access to unlimited data history, they’ve also provided features that can help you with data governance. These features simplify maintaining your data structure, too.

The tools’ features help ensure that the many people from your company who have access to your data can easily understand and use the information.

Even though the two tools’ have named their data governance features differently, they’re essentially equal in terms of accuracy.

Mixpanel

Mixpanel’s Lexicon API is a data dictionary. Project managers and admins can add events, write descriptions, and organize data and their properties so that other users in the project can understand user behaviour and get actionable data when needed.

Project managers can also create custom events, filter event properties and add tags to events. These all make it easier to manage large volumes of data. Also, organized data is easier to edit and control, and any discrepancy is easier to detect.

Amplitude

A similar feature on Amplitude is called Govern. While the main features of Govern, such as managing event and event properties, are available to all pricing plans, some additional data management tools require users to purchase the Govern add-on.

The features included in the add-on include bulk editing our schema, viewing validation errors, and setting/changing a property’s data type. On the other hand, the core capabilities of Govern are more or less the same as Mixpanel’s Lexicon.

Mixpanel vs Amplitude: Reviews

Mixpanel

“I always liked the simplicity of Mixpanel and the level of support & document available to make the entire integration fast & smooth. The feature of Funnels is very good and it definitely gives the ability to understand a lot of data points.”

“Customer segmentation and the ability to slice & dice the cohorts data is something that can be improved for sure.”

“Mixpanel provides you with several types of reports you can analyze data with such as Insights (break down user actions to show how many share X, Y or Z detail such as campaign UTM) and Funnels (conversions between user actions). You can also use Mixpanel to send notifications (email, push, in-app) to users based on their actions. It’s a very powerful analytic and marketing tool.”

“Mixpanel also does get expensive as you track more user actions (events), but it’s only powerful and useful when you track every user action, big and small. Otherwise, your analysis would be based on an incomplete picture and cause incorrect findings.”

Positive: “Tracks both events and profiles. Collects wide specter of attributes, some of them automatically. Provides quite comprehensive documentation, including some obscure use cases.”

Negative: “Mixpanel does not document the whole protocol and this is VERY inconvenient when server-side events are to be implemented, or your application requires proxifiying to work around adblockers. The protocol itself is not suitable for seamless proxifying.”

Amplitude

Positive: “The tool is fantastic and has so many functionalities that make the growth analysis simply great. What I liked most was the ability to create different cohorts based on the custom events tracked and the segments of users created.”

Negative: “The only thing that was a bit complex was with the tracking ID. You have to be careful with the usage of the user id and the app id on the web scripts on your webpage as you could easily track events to another user that is not the one that is using the tool in that moment.”

Positive: “Very useful tool for funnel/conversion analysis. Great support team – customer success managers willing to upskill your team.”

Negative: “Initially, learning to use the product requires upfront investment. There are some basics, conceptual model things that must be learnt e.g. If I change someone else’s charts, or do I make a version of it, or do I edit their version.”

Positive: “This is a great tool for deep analysis and to get clear and precise charts to show clients.”

Negative: “It can be very complicated to understand and manage. Before becoming an expert, I had to play with it for a long long time. The guide is useful but the product is complicated.”

Mixpanel vs Amplitude: UI/UX

When it comes to usability, both Mixpanel and Amplitude have a simple and straightforward UI that makes them very easy to use. However, some slight nuances might affect which one you would prefer.

Mixpanel

Mixpanel has an intuitive user interface where everything is where you’d expect it to be. All the titles and subtitles are pretty self-explanatory, data analysis and tracking user behavior is simple.

Mixpanel also provides its customers with tutorial videos for features on the navigation panel. This helps you get to know the features and the tool better and increase your chances of getting the reports and information you need with great ease.

That said, one of the downsides of Mixpanel is setting it up is labor-intensive, meaning you need to spend extra time and effort to get the product working for your needs and preferences.

If you choose to work with the code provided, you need to be confident and have prior knowledge of coding. This is especially problematic if you are looking for a tool that can be used by everyone in your company and not only power users.

Amplitude

Amplitude offers a very positive experience and usage. It is a seamless and easy-to-use tool that you can quickly adapt to. It is a customization-orientated product that focuses on data visualization elements such as graphs, colors, and other personalization elements in its core reports and advanced reports.

Even though it seems like there are a lot of aspects to consider in Amplitude, its UI is still user-friendly and clear. However, like Mixpanel, for the initial set-up, coding knowledge is needed to give the proper commands for event tracking.

Mixpanel vs Amplitude: Main Differences

Here are the main differences between the two tools:

  • Workflows

While Mixpanel offers its users a couple of basic dashboard templates at the beginning of their user journey, Amplitude app expects its users to customize the dashboard before they can start using it.

  • Data Integrations

Mixpanel allows users to send data externally to some of the analytic platforms such as HubSpot or Salesforce. Also, it allows you to work with your users’ data via its CRM features like optimization tests which means you won’t need to integrate another CRM tool.

On the other hand, Amplitude allows you to work with your users’ data directly via data integrations with its partner offers such as Kochava or Branch.

  • A/B Testing Features

While A/B Testing is a vital feature of an analytic tool, Mixpanel comes with various ways to send notifications to its users. These ways include SMS, e-mail, push notifications, and in-app messages. This is an advantage for companies looking for ways to make their user journeys more engaging.

Plus, Mixpanel also provides the A/B testing features for mobile apps. However, Amplitude doesn’t offer those notifications unless using external tools.

  • Alerts

Your KPI metrics analyze your success, so it’s always a good idea to have alerts for any changes in your KPIs. Unfortunately, Amplitude does not offer alerts based on KPIs which means a piece of the puzzle is missing. However, Mixpanel comes with automatic alerts to monitor your KPIs, so you can have a chance to answer quickly for any circumstances.

  • Data Export

Both tools can show you the unlimited data history of your products. Amplitude comes with some benefits for exporting this data. With Amplitude’s free plan, you can export your data collected to CSV. Once, you download the CSV file then you can import them to Excel or any other place you wish to process them.

However, Mixpanel does not offer to export data on its free plan. So, if you have a free plan then any data analytics process has to be done via Mixpanel.

Mixpanel vs Amplitude: Summary

We talked about many different elements and essential features of Mixpanel and Amplitude. Now, let’s zoom out and summarize what these tools can do for you:

Mixpanel

  • Mixpanel has an overall 4.5/5 on Capterra out of 96 reviews and 4.5/5 on G2 out of 711 reviews.
  • The Data Enrichment feature allows you to complete missing data, combine behavioral, business, and demographic data, and manage that data both individually and separately.
  • You can get notifications about A/B testing, enabling you to act more quickly according to the data.
  • It is easy to build and manage funnels and funnel reports but cannot separate ordered and unordered funnels.
  • The reporting process is seamless and quick since it provides you with a basic dashboard and allows you to customize according to your needs and preferences.
  • It has a clear and simple UI that you can easily manage. However, prior code knowledge is required, making the setup process labor-intensive.

Amplitude

  • Amplitude has an overall 4.5/5 on Capterra out of 42 reviews and 4.5/5 on G2 out of 1,284 reviews.
  • It does not have a data enrichment feature that can combine behavioral data with other data types, but its segmentation is advanced and powerful.
  • It relies on external tools for sending notifications for A/B testing.
  • The funnels and funnel reports are easy to create and clear to understand. You can also view ordered and unordered funnels separately, allowing you to perform data analysis on different orders.
  • The reporting process can be overwhelming since it requires you first to customize. However, it has robust customization that you can benefit from as you build reports for different needs and preferences. It is also better at advanced reporting.
  • It offers a positive UX with a user-friendly UI. It mainly focuses on graphs and visuals, which can be supported with its customization tools. You need to have coding knowledge to set up event tracking.

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Key Takeaway

Mixpanel and Amplitude are great tools for product data analysis, but they have limitations. Therefore, it requires a lot of research, reading, and experimenting to understand which one can benefit your product the most.

If you’re interested in easy-to-use dashboards, Mixpanel is your best bet with a wide range of templates. However, if customization is your priority, then you can opt for Amplitude. Alternatively, you can also try out other more affordable options such as Google Analytics, or better, a no-code tool that supports custom dashboards, such as HockeyStack. In addition to consolidating data from various areas such as Sales, Marketing, and Product with a wide range of integrations, Hockeystack can also be used to track customer engagement via elaborate funnels, calculate MRR and LTV, and even NPS scores with surveys.

At the end of the day, there’s no settling the Mixpanel vs. Amplitude debate and you can never say which tool is better. To make the choice that’s better for your business, you just need to consider your needs and preferences and what you want from the tool you choose.

FAQ

Which is better Amplitude or Mixpanel?

This question has a complicated answer because each of the tools offers high standard features and has similar purposes. If you wonder which suit best for your company, consider your company needs first. The main clear conclusion of a difference is Amplitude wins on data retentions and data export. However, Mixpanel has a good command of predictive analytics. On the other hand, Mixpanel provides more beneficial integrations than Amplitude that making it more compatible in its field.

How expensive is Amplitude?

Amplitude offers its users three main pricing plans: the Starter Plan, Growth Plan, and Enterprise Plan. The starter plan is free and includes a couple of main analytics features. Growth and Enterprise plans’ prices are undisclosed.

What is Mixpanel used for?

Mixpanel is a product analytics tool, which helps you to understand your customer by analyzing customer interactions with your website/app/product. You can track user data in real-time to define user behaviors and market trends.

Who are Amplitude’s competitors?

Some of Amplitude’s competitors are Google Analytics, HockeyStack, and Mixpanel.

Google Analytics

Google Analytics is one of the most popular web analytics services that provide its users basic tools and data statistics for mostly SEO (search engine optimization) purposes. Briefly, it helps you to track and analyze the traffic of your website/product by the customer to collect the important data.
HockeyStack

HockeyStack is an end-to-end SaaS analytics tool that helps you understand which marketing channel or sales campaign brings the highest LTV & increase retention with no code.
Mixpanel

Mixpanel is the one who has an important seat among the competitors with its various analytics features. It offers you the right tracking methods to stand up in the market during your marketing journey. With its easy-to-use interface tracking data is easy and beneficial.

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