Pendo vs. Mixpanel 2024 Comparison - Which tool is worth the effort?

Pendo is a great product adoption tool with strong analytics and surveying capabilities. But when it comes to customer support and detailed analytics, well…

That is where Mixpanel comes in.

Mixpanel is an easy-to-use analytics product that provides in-depth product analysis, but… it can’t help you with onboarding like Pendo does.

So which one is better for you?

Which one of these tools is the one that is the better fit for your needs and goals?

To help you find an answer to those questions, I will:

• Introduce Pendo and talk about the tool’s cons and pros,
• Introduce Mixpanel and talk about the tool’s cons and pros,
• Compare those tools side-by-side for you to have a better overview.

And also, if you want to skip all of those, you can benefit from this quick table:

Side-By-Side Comparison Table

What is Pendo?

Pendo is a robust product analytics and user engagement platform businesses use to build better products.

You can onboard users, introduce new features, survey users, gather feedback, and prepare a product roadmap with Pendo.

Although it is a great product that solves multiple problems at once, Pendo users usually complain that it takes them more than a few days to figure out how they can use the product.

It is definitely an amazing tool to add to your toolkit, but you might still have to find different solutions to provide engagement features such as resource centers.

Pros 🤩 Pendo is good for:

✅ The best feature Pendo provides is its in-depth analytics; meanwhile, its user segmentation truly makes a significant change in the way users consume onboarding material.

✅ Pendo puts together different solutions like user experience, user onboarding, and highly sophisticated data collection and analytics under one tool to guarantee customer success and easier customer engagement tracking for digital product teams.

✅ Founded in 2013, Pendo is among the first comers of digital adoption; it has a strong background and customer portfolio.

✅ Though Pendo is quite expensive, it offers a free trial and a freemium, something other platforms of its caliber rarely do.

Cons 😮‍💨 Pendo isn’t good for:

❌ Though Pendo represents itself as a digital adoption solution, its onboarding UX elements are pretty limited to the very basics, leaving out checklists, hotspots, and more.

❌ Being a highly sophisticated tool with a complex UI, it might be hard to set up and use if not used by an experienced user.

❌ Likewise, Pendo’s features tend to be complex and use case-specific, so it might be hard to leverage all features and possibilities without a fully established game plan dedicated to Pendo.

❌ Though Pendo does not publicly share its pricing, it is very well known that Pendo is more expensive than the market average.

❌ Yet another enterprise-level tool, Pendo’s customer service might not be as responsive as smaller products’ customer service teams.

Pendo Pricing

Pendo has a free plan called “Pendo Free“ for up to 1,000 monthly active users, one web and one mobile app.

For bigger plans, Pendo doesn’t have a set pricing.

Instead, you can get a custom plan for your business by contacting their sales team.

However, a former Pendo user claimed that they are a medium-sized business that paid $12,000/year for the standard package of Pendo, while another user upped this number to $20,000. Additionally, there is a Pendo customer that claims to pay $2000/year just for the “Guides” feature of the product – which is included in the free plan for up to 1,000 MAU

Pendo’s pricing is feature and usage-based, and it possibly scales with how many users you have, like other analytics tools.

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.

Here is a short list of available features:

• A/B Testing
• Customer Engagement
• Retention features
• Visual coding
• Mobile Surveys
• Notifications, bookmarks, annotations
• Event tracking
• Comprehensible Data Analytics

Pros 🤩 Mixpanel is good for:

✅ Mixpanel has a wide range of pricing options, most of which being comprehensive enough and affordable, making Mixpanel a good fit for small and medium businesses.

✅ Mixpanel solely focuses on data and analytics, and so it provides you with all the insight you need.

Cons 😮‍💨 Mixpanel isn’t good for:

❌ While being an expert is a good thing in most cases, the fact that Mixpanel provides a limited range of features. Compared to Pendo, Mixpanel can only help you with one specific use case.

❌ Mixpanel isn't easy to use. The tool is slow for its price, and figuring out how to fully benefit from the features will require some time.

Mixpanel Pricing

Mixpanel offers a Free trial; however, you need to contact their sales rep.

Mixpanel has three pricing plans:

1- The Starter Plan: Free

2- The Growth Plan: Starts at $799 per year.

3- The Enterprise Plan: Custom-priced.

Mixpanel vs Pendo