Focusing on product quality and customer service was the key to success. However, with the new age, there are so many options on the market. That’s why the customer simply expects more from businesses.
Nowadays, customers want a better customer experience as much as they want quality products.
To offer your customers the best experience, you have to figure out the behavioral patterns and analyze them.
And that’s where product analytics tools come for your help. With product analytics tools, you can:
- You can improve your marketing strategy to outrun your competitors.
- You can understand your customers better and take the proper steps to develop your website, revise your products and boost your customer retention rate.
- You can perform a SWOT analysis, an abbreviation for strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. Once you grasp your product performance’s weak and strong points, you can offer a better customer experience.
There are many product analytics platforms, and Mixpanel ranks high in the lists. However, in this article, I will:
- Inform you about Mixpanel’s features, pricing plans, along with its pros and cons
- List 11 alternative product analytics tools such as Heap, Pendo, and Google Analytics, and compare them with Mixpanel
- Include reviews of alternative product analytics platforms’ users for clarity
First, I would like to explain what Mixpanel is and list its features.
What is Mixpanel?
Mixpanel is a product analytics tool that is preferred by many product teams over the world. With Mixpanel, you can view how people engage with your product, track your customer conversion and retention, and construct better outcomes along with a better user experience.
Mixpanel Key Features
- A/B Testing
- Customer Engagement
- Retention features
- Visual coding
- Mobile Surveys
- Notifications, bookmarks, annotations
- Event tracking
- Comprehensible Data Analytics
Mixpanel Pricing
Mixpanel offers a Free trial; however, you need to contact their sales rep.
Mixpanel has three pricing plans:
1- The Starter Plan
Pricing: Free
You get access to:
- Unlimited data history & seats
- Core reports (including Flows)
- Data dictionary
- US or EU data residency
- Monitoring & alerts
2- The Growth Plan
Pricing: It starts at $799 per year.
You can customize your Mixpanel plans and add extra features your business needs to your Plan. To calculate the final price, you can use Mixplanel’s pricing slider before your purchase.
You get access to:
- Everything included in The Starter Plan
- Unlimited saved reports & cohorts
- Impact report with causal inference
- Data modeling
- Group Analytics & Data Pipelines add-ons
- Email support
3- The Enterprise Plan
Pricing: Custom priced.
This Plan is mainly for larger organizations.
You get access to:
- Everything included in The Growth Plan
- Advanced access controls
- Experiments & Signal reports
- SSO & automated provisioning
- Seasonal & events-based pricing
- Premium services
However, Mixpanel has some weak points that you can’t ignore. As a result, there are many alternatives for Mixpanel, and before I start listing those, I want to explain why Mixpanel can be replaced.
Why would you need an alternative to Mixpanel?
I’ve listed tons of features above, but that doesn’t mean that Mixpanel is perfect. From online user reviews, I compiled a few reasons for you to reconsider an alternative tool to Mixpanel:
1) Doesn’t offer the best customer service
According to some users, Mixpanel’s customer support is insufficient. It’s not surprising because only two of its plans offer email support on weekdays between 12am-5pm. In addition, many comments are stating that the customer service is too slow to reply.
One specific review said that because the Mixpanel tech team didn’t reply quickly, they had to spend significant time with setup processes.
2) Not easy-to-use
If it’s your first time working with a customer analytics tool, you’ll have difficulty. Some customers stated that they’re having difficulty managing their reports because there are too many properties.
In addition to that, another customer mentioned that although the platform is packed, they couldn’t find the valuable features right away because the toolset is complicated. Also, its dashboard is not user-friendly, so new users spend a lot of time figuring it out.
3) It’s slow for its price.
One of the biggest complaints about Mixpanel is that it’s slow. Accırding to some reviews, the software gets very slow at times, especially if you’re tracking a considerable size of data. Since the tool is costly, one expects a better performance.
However, comments say that the application is slow, the UI is not scalable, and engineering and deploying take too much time.
4) Data tracking is complex.
Various people commented that Mixpanel’s data tracking is simply not good. Comments state that they usually miss data from their reports, and they cannot export data completely.
Contrary to its competitors, Mixpanel is product analysis software that requires engineering knowledge to customize event tracking. While implementing, you’ll need to guess fundamental user interactions such as clicks, purchases, and so on.
If you want to change data later to track different events, you have to start from the beginning. Despite this, you can still end up with inconsistent and inconvenient data.
Because of all the cons I’ve listed before, I prepared a list of alternative tools for product analysis solutions and user analytics.
Top Alternatives to Mixpanel
Since now you know what Mixpanel is, its features, and the challenges it comes with, I can introduce my list of alternatives.
Here it is:
- Woopra
- Google Analytics (a free option)
- Heap
- Amplitude Analytics
- Kissmetrics
- Pendo
- Clevertap
- Adobe Analytics
- Countly
- Fullstory
- Quantum Metric
Let’s begin.
1) Woopra
Woopra is a customer journey analytics and product analytics platform that helps users unify and track product and sales data, analyze customer journeys and retention and offer hundreds of built-in triggers for real-time engagement on user behavior.
Woopra is a great product analytics solution for tracking user activity, multichannel data collection, customer segmentation, goal setting. With its tons of features, product managers can easily track data and optimize the customer experience. It’s a great option for big businesses and small businesses with a budget.
- Compared to other tools, Woopra is more expensive.
- Woopra offers more features than Mixpanel, for example, site search and time-on tracking.
- Also, its configuration is easy, so Woopra is a beginner-friendly option, although it offers more features.
Woopra Reviews
👍 Pros:
“With Woopra, we have everything under control. The reports are very complete and detailed, allowing us to know the behavior of users. Its configuration is very easy, even for inexperienced users. Woopra is a software designed to perform analysis of user behavior; these analyses help us to improve.”
👎 Cons:
“I would like to be able to export data as CSV or connect it directly to PowerBI to make advanced analysis. That’s because, besides the UI looking great and the tool giving you lots of inbuilt metrics, like retention, I would like to be freer to create my own data views.”
Woopra Pricing
- Free Plan: offers 500K actions per month, 90-day data retention, core analytics, 30+ integrations
- Startup plan: $349 per month, and offers 1 million actions per month, 2-year data retention, advanced analytics, and drill-down reporting.
- Pro Plan: $999, and offers 5 million actions/month, people metrics/formulas, automation, data loader, and premium support.
- Enterprise Plan: Custom priced and offers 50 million+ actions/month, data warehouse sync, custom objects, and dedicated support.
2) Google Analytics
Google Analytics is one of the most well-known analytics tools, and it’s preferred by one in every two websites.
Google Analytics is free and has many features like converse analytics, social analytics, mobile analytics, content analytics, and 166 tools. With Google Analytics, you can improve your funnels to improve your conversion rates and with a little background knowledge.
- Compared to expensive options like Mixplane and Woopra, Google Analytics is more suited to small businesses.
- Google Analytics is easier to set up and use than Mixplane.
- However, Google Analytics is not good as Mixplane when it comes to event tracking.
Google Reviews
👍 Pros:
“Overall, I am very happy with using Google Analytics and would definitely recommend it to anyone who believes the digital presence of their website is important to their business.”
👎 Cons:
“Apart from getting the data of users from country-wise or platform wise, Google Analytics doesn’t provide much data even though Google can provide a lot more and few times I find missing or inaccurate data. As an administrator, I expect more user data, So I can provide a content which user expects.”
Google Analytics Pricing:
- Free.
- However, Google Analytics 360 begins at $150,000 per year and increases if your site gets more than one billion hits in a month.
3) Heap
Heap is a user interaction tracking and product metrics analytics solution that helps you to find out how users interact with your content and their digital experiences.
Heap offers customer journey Mapping and customer segmentation for product and marketing teams trying to improve their website or digital product. Although it doesn’t offer A/B testing like Mixpanel, it’s very dynamic.
- In contrast to Mixpanel, Heap offers automatic event tracking, and it’s a better option for websites that change constantly.
- Unlike Mixpanel, Heap tracks “first touch” and “the last touch” simultaneously. “First touch” is the first landing page of users that could lead to any type of event. “The last touch” is the last page the user lands on while operating on an event.
For example, if you have an e-commerce store, the homepage will be your landing page where a user experiences “the first touch,” If they click on the products page, the action from the homepage to the products page will be their first touch.
The last touch is the last action of an ideal user flow, which is to land on the order confirmation page from the order details page.
With this feature, you can have a better understanding of user actions and optimize your user funnel.
- Heap doesn’t only offer a better funnel analysis than Mixpanel but also better customer support.
Heap reviews
👍 Pros:
“Heap has a very intuitive platform that requires zero development support to track and analyze key events that users take within your product. I love how I can set up a comprehensive dashboard for a feature to help my team measure the success of new enhancements or brand new product launches. Furthermore, Heap provides suggested analysis and reports to help you consider ways to look at usage data you may not have considered yet.”
👎 Cons:
“There’s a bit of a steep learning curve required, and at times it requires the broader team to look at an event or a funnel to validate if the tracking is in line with the business objectives corresponding to a particular metric. It does require a few training sessions with fuller attention to all minute details, and finally, it needs the user to get started and make a few mistakes to learn along.”
Heap Pricing:
- Free version: Up to 10,000 sessions/month
- Premier, Pro, Growth plans Custom priced.
4) Amplitude Analytics
Amplitude is a digital optimization platform used by many product managers to personalize their digital products and optimize their products.
With Amplitude, you can see how active users navigate your website or application and which features they interact with the most. Also, Amplitude tools work across mobile applications and tablet versions of websites.
It’s a product analytics solution that offers real-time analytics, powerful behavioral analytics, cross-platform tracking, and extensive customer support.
- Compared to Mixpanel, just like the other tools I’ve mentioned, Amplitude offers better customer support.
- According to reviewers, Amplitude’s road maps and feature updates are more convenient than Mixpanel’s.
Amplitude Reviews
👍 Pros:
“It contains almost everything I need for basic analytics. I do not need to write a query again, and just with simple clicks, I could find out the result! Besides that, it also has a lot of built-in functions for users to use, which could give the users a lot of benefits.”
👎 Cons:
“Amplitude premium pricing is very high. Starting from $995/ month for a business package. The amplitude-free Plan does not have a basic AB test framework. The speed of the SQL query can be slow for some users.”
Amplitude Pricing:
- Free version: Up to 10 million user actions per month.
- Enterprise: Custom priced.
5) Kissmetrics
Kissmetrics is an analysis tool that features behavioral analytics, customer segmentation, and email campaign automation.
It is a great tool for marketers and product teams who want to increase their conversions rate, engagement, and retention. With Kissmetrics, you can track your traffic sources and see how they affect conversions and contribute to revenue.
- With Mixpanel, you can match every user with an alias but only once. It means that you can’t change the alias of a user after it’s given. On the other hand, Kissmetrics gives you an advantage: you can alias whenever a user pays a visit to your website.
- However, note that Mixpanel provides three types of properties: event property, user property, and super property. Meanwhile, Kissmetrics only offers user properties. This can be a good thing or a bad thing according to what your business needs.
With Kissmetrics, you can track every action a user does and analyze across all other actions, but it can become overwhelming. Don’t forget at any given time, a property can only retain one value, so with Kissmetrics, it could be hard to see the change of properties.
- Kissmetrics is a better option for marketers who want to be able to keep user identity across the entire conversion funnel and mainly targets single user-level tracking of all actions.
Kissmetrics Reviews
👍 Pros:
“Overall, the best thing about Kissmetrics is that it allows to do data-driven marketing better, and we simply have not seen another tool that could be a one-to-one replacement for it on the market.”
👎 Cons:
“It takes a long time to implement it correctly, especially if you have a complicated website with too many different events and properties. They do help you to implement it, but after it’s done, you pretty much need to take care of new events tracking yourself. (Though, their support team still helps you if you ask them questions).”
Kissmetrics Pricing:
For Saas & Ecommerce:
- Silver: $299 per month, billed annually.
- Gold: $499 per month, billed annually.
- Platinium: Custom priced.
6) Pendo.io
Pendo is a product analysis software for product development teams and digital product creators who want to improve their product experience for their users.
It is easy-to-use and gives you a lot of information about your customers’ behavior by tracking their clicking paths, page views, and so on. With Pendo.io, product teams can find out which features are popular among users, provide users with release notes and message the segmented groups.
- Although compared to Mixpanel, Pendo.io has fewer integrations, these are the integrations Mixpanel does not offer.
- Pendo.io is a better choice for businesses that need mobile analytics software for UX and product marketing. It also calculates Revenue for User.
However, Mixpanel is still more convenient for analytics and data teams who want product analysis software that focuses on engineering.
Pendo.io Reviews
👍 Pros:
“Pendo allows me to streamline where I work, how I work, and more effectively communicate with customers and internal stakeholders and have the data to back me up!”
👎 Cons:
“Not much to dislike, but if anything, it is usually a minor annoyance with some specific UI features. The ability to do daily Emails or choose the day of the week for email subscription would be nice.”
Pendo.io Pricing:
- It has a Free version.
- Other plans are Custom priced.
7) Clevertap
CleverTap is a customer engagement and mobile app marketing platform that helps brands create a better user experience and drive user engagement with their content.
Clevertap offers campaign insights and analysis, multichannel tracking, and Custom even tracking for mobile brands that want to strengthen their connections with their users.
- Compared to Mixpanel, Clevertap offers better product support, according to reviewers.
- Clevertap offers a cleaner dashboard than Mixpanel.
- Clevertap is a great option for B2C companies from various industries such as commerce and media, and entertainment.
- Clevertap offers A/B testing but lacks a user behavior analytics tool compared to Pendo.io.
Clevertap Reviews
👍 Pros:
“It’s easy to integrate. It gives you a complete picture of what your user is doing on the application. It can be integrated with third-party marketing attribution platforms like branches. It helps is user retention by sending target notifications.”
👎 Cons:
“The focus is more on Mobile Applications than the website.”
Clevertap Pricing:
All Clevertap plans are Custom priced.
8) Adobe Analytics
Adobe Analytics is an analytics tool that offers web analytics, marketing analytics, attribution, and predictive analytics and lets its users analyze and improve their user journey.
With Adobe Analytics, you can compare different metrics across different reports, create and manage segments, and export data in multiple ways. It offers a deeper understanding of personalized experiences, content monetization, and campaign return on investments.
- Compared to Mixpanel, Adobe Analytics gives you more complex features and has many customization options.
- However, Adobe Analytics is an expensive option with many implementations, so it’s not the best option in the market for smaller teams.
- Also, Adobe Analytics works better with Adobe products, so if you are already using other Adobe products and volunteer to spend time on engineering for a detailed predictive analysis, Adobe Analytics is a great option for you.
Adobe Analytics Reviews
👍 Pros:
“It’s an extraordinary platform to track all the activities which are undertaken by your customers, prospects, users. I have managed to track all my website traffic data and put them to use by creating dashboards for better decision-making for all marketing campaigns. The best thing about Adobe analytics is that I could manage to track multiple points sources at a time, unlike Google Analytics.”
👎 Cons:
“Because of the level of customization, there can be some confusion if you are not organized/clearly labeling things and/or if you are inheriting someone else’s set up.”
Adobe Analytics Pricing:
Custom priced.
9) Countly
Countly is a product analytics solution that helps teams track product performance and customer journey, and behavior across applications. It allows you to enhance your products to provide more personalized and customized customer experiences and reach your business and revenue goals.
Countly’s main specialty is that it offers a great number of plugins and integrations so teams can combine them however they desire and work with the required data.
- Compared to Mixpanel is more popular among small businesses since it offers a “forever free” community version.
- Countly offers a secure database for your analytics data and %100 control over it; meanwhile, Mixpanel has access to your data and control over your data flow.
- Unlike Mixpanel, you can create your own custom plugins with Countly to reach beyond the analytics and marketing limits you currently have without any restrictions.
Countly Reviews
👍 Pros:
“Countly is recognized for its enterprise mobile analytics and marketing platform. It definitely does best in mobile data analysis and directly works with the customer to increase engagement. Its key function in “user retention” helps understand custom activity in any feature of your application and send that information to the server. It enhances customer satisfaction through its intuitive and well-design app features.”
👎 Cons:
“Google API is not its best feature. Requires a better configuration view page and customization features are not clear as well as limited control on some demographics.”
Countly Pricing
- Community edition: Free
- Enterprise edition: Custom priced.
10) Full Story
Fullstory is a behavioral analytics platform that aims to create better digital experiences through user experience analytics.
Its features include conversion funnels, advanced search capabilities, a visualized replay of real user sessions, and powerful developer tools, and you don’t have to instrument events. It also offers strong data analysis and sturdy collaboration tools for a broad spectrum of integrations.
- Many companies add Full Story integration that works with Mixpanel’s JavaScript Library to benefit from both of the tools.
- Compared to Mixpanel, which is a pure analytics tool, you can’t do A/B testing on FullStory. However, if you’re a beginner and your product is still in the early stages, Full Story is a better option because it records the screen and shows you the entire customer session. You can view how your users navigate through your product, which bugs they run into, or if bugs are reported.
Full Story Review
👍 Pros:
“Gives a nice overview of how website visitors are browsing the site and how they are moving from one page to the next page. We can also see where they are clicking, where they are spending more time etc.”
👎 Cons:
“The initial setup may sometimes take a bit of time to get going. You need to be patient for the first couple of minutes while your first sessions appear, but after that, the product is very smooth.”
Full Story Pricing:
It offers a free version. Paid Plan is custom priced.
11) Quantum Metric
QuantumMetric is a user and product analysis software that helps businesses to increase retention, customer loyalty, and conversions.
Quantum Metric comes packed with features such as A/B testing, conversion tracking, link and keyword tracking, and so on. Like Fullstory, Quantum Metric has a replay engine so you can view your customer’s session.
- Quantum Metric comes with multi-site and multi-site features Mixpanel doesn’t have.
- With Quantum Metric, you can track site search and time-on-site to enhance your user experience analysis.
- Overall, Quantum Metric is a better option for those who want to focus on behavioral analytics rather than event tracking and statistical analysis.
Quantum Metric Reviews
👍 Pros:
“The customer session feature has been very useful. It’s allowed us to quickly identify both broader site issues and issues with individual orders in customer service. The search analytics are very useful and used all the time to optimize search.”
👎 Cons:
“Among its disadvantages, it is that the automatic capture of events sometimes yields values of easy interpretation, it is required to be an expert analyst who can understand and analyze the information generated.”
Quantum Metric Pricing:
- Custom priced.
Conclusion
There are many alternatives to Mixpanel, as you can see. You can choose one according to your business needs. To summarise:
- Google Analytics is a free alternative that businesses with small budgets can consider.
- If you want more features and can afford them, Woopra and Adobe Analytics might be the best tool for you.
- For mobile applications, Pendo.io is a great alternative to Mixpanel; if you want a safe database, you can also consider Clevertap.
- If you want to focus on UX and user behavior analytics but still want a wide range of features, choose Quantum Metric.
- If your marketing team could benefit from single user tracking and multiple aliases for better funnel analysis, then choose Kissmetrics.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why is Mixpanel better than Google Analytics?
Mixpanel is an advanced product analytics tool with many features. It is based on event tracking and offers numerous integrations. However, it’s not affordable nor easy-to-use.
What is the difference between Segment and Mixpanel?
Segment is a customer data platform (CDP) that helps businesses to collect, manage and share their data. Mixpanel is a product analytics tool.
What do you use Mixpanel for?
Mixpanel helps businesses view how people engage with their product, track customer conversion and retention, and construct better outcomes along with a better user experience.
Is Mixpanel good?
Mixpanel is an advanced analytics tool with many features. It is a good tool for medium to large businesses that can afford it.
Who uses Mixpanel?
Brands such as Uber, Yelp, Rakuten Viber, Docusign and Expedia use Mixpanel.
