Mixpanel vs Amplitude: 9 Critical Differences

Mixpanel is a powerful Product Analytics tool that offers deep insights into product usage and user behavior to help teams build better products. Amplitude caters to an in-depth analysis of user behavior. While Mixpanel works as a one-stop analytics shop, Amplitude tries to be the best in the market for actionable analyses.

This blog talks about Mixpanel vs Amplitude in great detail. It starts with a brief introduction to Mixpanel and Amplitude digging into its features, benefits, purpose, etc., before diving into the factors you should consider before choosing between Mixpanel and Amplitude. These factors include Funnel Reports, Insights Reports, Data Integrations, and many more as seen later in the blog.

Introduction to Mixpanel

Mixpanel offers a user-friendly user interface along with deep analytics capabilities on the go. This allows you to answer your most complex questions and understand why your users convert, which features to prioritize, and what makes your customers come back for more.  

With Mixpanel, you can see Top User Flows, Build Funnels, Create Cohorts, and so much more with just a few clicks. This means no more reliance on external help or investing copious periods writing SQL queries.

Here are a few key benefits of Mixpanel:

• Group Analytics: Mixpanel allows you to calculate metrics at the company or account level, like Active Usage, Product Adoption, and Retention through Group Analytics. This add-on is mainly used by B2B SaaS companies to understand their customers’ usage patterns to prevent churn and drive upsell. 
• Scalable Infrastructure: Mixpanel allows you to analyze raw user event stream data at scale, without the need for any pre-computation. Mixpanel’s infrastructure returns high-volume queries in seconds after ingesting trillions of events per year.
• Security and Privacy: Mixpanel complies with global security and privacy regulations to ensure that your customer data is protected in transit and at rest from end to end. You can manage cybersecurity risks through Mixpanel’s native SOC 2 Type II certification, user permissions, and role controls, along with advanced encryption capabilities. 

Introduction to Amplitude

Amplitude allows you to empower your teams with Self-Service Insight into what customer actions and features lead to outcomes, what bets to make, and where to double down. You can optimize your outcomes by knowing which experiences and behaviors impact business value and customers. 

Amplitude also allows you to get a deeper insight into the different strategies you can implement to improve retention, grow lifetime value, understand conversions, and democratize data. Amplitude lets you remove all the barriers between teams and the insights that lead to game-changing results.

Here are a few key benefits of Amplitude:

• Cross-Functional Data Access: Amplitude provides the benefit of remarkably high adoption. Increased visibility for teams with common data vastly improves decision velocity and quality. 
• Breadth and Depth of Insights: Amplitude can easily analyze billions of events in less than a second. It also boasts a 99.9% uptime. You can instantly answer complex and simple questions with a 360-view of user journey across channels, devices, and products.
• Security and Governance: You can integrate, manage, and transform your entire data ecosystem with precise data tracking for key actionable insights. Amplitude offers tools that your team will trust and engineers will praise.  

Understanding the Differences between Mixpanel and Amplitude

Here are the factors you can keep in mind to establish the differences between Mixpanel and Amplitude:

• Workflow and Reporting Customizations
• Data Integrations 
• Funnel Reports
• Insight Reports
• Retention Reports
• A/B Testing Abilities
• Advanced Reporting Tools
• Data Accuracy
• Pricing

1. Workflow and Reporting Customizations

In terms of Workflow, Amplitude wants you to customize first. It also provides dashboard creation in the front and center of its Analytics Workflow. Mixpanel, on the other hand, tries to be quicker about this process by offering basic dashboards first, followed by options to be selected, if you want them.

Here is how the workflow for Mixpanel looks like:

Here is an example of an Amplitude workflow:

If you have sufficient data, Amplitude offers you more advanced reports to work with. For instance, if you’re a Marketing Team of power users who analyze and act on data more often, Amplitude is a good choice because it provides more options and caters to more use cases.    

2. Data Integrations

In terms of Data Integrations, Mixpanel is a more smooth and robust tool in sending data out to external platforms such as Salesforce and HubSpot. It also allows you to send a webhook of the user to any other tool.

Mixpanel also comes with a Marketing Automation suite. You can work with your users’ data by messaging them based on conditions and by running multiple optimization tests. This means Mixpanel can act as a CRM apart from integrating well with external CRM tools. This is supplemented by the fact that the user attribute that Mixpanel stores; represent the most recent value. This is a method common for CRM data.

Amplitude, on the other hand, prefers to be the clean tool where you can work on deep analysis. This works in Amplitude’s favor based on the workflow of Amplitude dashboards that this caters to.

Mixpanel also has built-in notifications. Your team can receive alerts via email, push, SMS, or in-app inside Mixpanel. Amplitude only provides that via partners such as Intercom, at extra cost.  

3. Funnel Reports

Funnel Reports are used to understand where your users are dropping off in your product. A few common flows are checkout, onboarding, and other product flows. Both Mixpanel and Amplitude let you build funnels on the go and see the conversion rate in between steps. Here is an example of a Funnel Report in Amplitude:

This is what a Mixpanel Funnel Report looks like:

You can filter steps to only include certain users such as Canadian users or iOS users. Amplitude Funnels are different from the ones offered by Mixpanel since they let you look at ordered and unordered funnels. Ordered Funnels must be completed in a specific sequence while Unordered Funnels can be completed in any random order. 

4. Insight Reports

The Insights or Segmentation Reports allow you to segment your data by relevant user or event properties. Primarily, you’ll be slicing your data to seek out trends and find answers to the basic questions. For instance, you wish to look at the breakdown of the pricing plans that users are selecting when they become paid subscribers.

You will be interested in an event that keeps track of when a user becomes a subscriber and splice it by pricing plan.

The aforementioned report looks like this in Amplitude:

This is what the same report looks like in Mixpanel:

This data can be depicted in different formats like Trends, Tables, and Bars. This data can also be filtered by Cohorts, User Attributes, and other properties. Both Amplitude and Mixpanel offer roughly the same functionality in this report.

However, Amplitude stands out because of its built-in minor improvements in how you can analyze your data such as easily running calculations like finding averages or summing.  

5. Retention Reports

Retention Reports are another fundamental report that uses Cohort Analysis to group users into groups (called cohorts). 

The Retention Reports in Mixpanel look like this: 

This is what a Retention report looks like in Amplitude:

The Retention Reports for Amplitude and Mixpanel show a lot of similarities with Amplitude offering a few extra options to help you calculate retention.

6. A/B Testing Abilities

In terms of testing abilities, Mixpanel has a clear edge over Amplitude since Mixpanel has the ability to send notifications to its users via SMS, push notifications, email, and in-app messages. This feature isn’t available in Amplitude, so it relies on third-party tools to provide this functionality. Mixpanel also provides A/B Testing abilities that can be run on mobile apps. This proves useful when tracking mobile data in your apps.  

7. Advanced Reporting Tools

Mixpanel uses Predict Models to look at individual users that are most likely to complete a particular conversion action. Mixpanel lets you know how to boost engagement because it gives you a glimpse of where the users are stuck. Mixpanel partners with the best-in-class messaging tools so that you can power your campaigns with behavioral segmentation.

Similarly, Amplitude uses Personas to cluster similar users into behavioral cohorts. The Personas chart allows you to carry out exploratory Data Mining analyses of the ways in which your user base navigates your product. It guides you through the process of creating a comprehensive set of user personas for your product. This can then be used to drive retention and engagement. 

8. Data Accuracy

Both Amplitude and Mixpanel provide features that help you maintain the structure and accuracy of your data. 

This feature is called Taxonomy in Amplitude, and this is what it looks like:

This feature is called Lexicon in Mixpanel, and this is what it looks like:

In both cases, you can add descriptions and rename events so users understand what they do and hide any data that isn’t accurate or relevant. The functionality has noticeable similarities across both tools and not enough differences for either one to come out on top. 

9. Pricing

Mixpanel provides a generous free plan with the key reports you need to get started along with 100k Monthly Tracked Users. For more features, you can upgrade to the Growth Plan. The Growth plan starts at $200/year and Enterprise plans start at around $3000/year. 

Amplitude offers an Enterprise plan starting from $5000/month and a Growth plan that starts at $1500/month.  

Mixpanel charges you based on Monthly Tracked User (MTU)-in other words, for the amount of data you will be collecting. Amplitude, on the other hand, charges you based on the features you want to use. Here are the pricing plans for Mixpanel:

Here are the pricing plans for Amplitude:

The free plans in both Mixpanel and Amplitude generously provide most of the stuff that people might need. 

Conclusion

This blog talks about the key differences between Mixpanel and Amplitude in great detail, highlighting the factors like Workflow and Reporting Customizations, Data Integrations, Funnel and Insights Reports, and Pricing Model to help you make an educated decision. 

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