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.
Table of Contents
Introduction to Mixpanel
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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
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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.
A fully managed No-code Data Pipeline platform like Hevo helps you integrate and load data from 100+ different sources like Mixpanel and Amplitude to a destination of your choice in real-time in an effortless manner.
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Hevo with its minimal learning curve can be set up in just a few minutes allowing the users to load data without having to compromise performance. Its strong integration with umpteenth sources allows users to bring in data of different kinds in a smooth fashion without having to code a single line.
Check out some of the cool features of Hevo:
- Completely Automated: The Hevo platform can be set up in just a few minutes and requires minimal maintenance.
- Transformations: Hevo provides preload transformations through Python code. It also allows you to run transformation code for each event in the pipelines you set up. You need to edit the event object’s properties received in the transform method as a parameter to carry out the transformation. Hevo also offers drag and drop transformations like Date and Control Functions, JSON, and Event Manipulation to name a few. These can be configured and tested before putting them to use.
- Connectors: Hevo supports 100+ integrations to SaaS platforms, files, databases, analytics, and BI tools. It supports various destinations including Google BigQuery, Amazon Redshift, Snowflake Data Warehouses; Amazon S3 Data Lakes; and MySQL, MongoDB, TokuDB, DynamoDB, PostgreSQL databases to name a few.
- Real-Time Data Transfer: Hevo provides real-time data migration, so you can have analysis-ready data always.
- 100% Complete & Accurate Data Transfer: Hevo’s robust infrastructure ensures reliable data transfer with zero data loss.
- Scalable Infrastructure: Hevo has in-built integrations for 100+ sources like Mixpanel and Amplitude, that can help you scale your data infrastructure as required.
- 24/7 Live Support: The Hevo team is available round the clock to extend exceptional support to you through chat, email, and support calls.
- Schema Management: Hevo takes away the tedious task of schema management & automatically detects the schema of incoming data and maps it to the destination schema.
- Live Monitoring: Hevo allows you to monitor the data flow so you can check where your data is at a particular point in time.
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Understanding the Differences between Mixpanel and Amplitude
Here are the factors you can keep in mind to establish the differences between Mixpanel and Amplitude:
Mixpanel vs Amplitude: 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:
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Here is an example of an Amplitude workflow:
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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.
Mixpanel vs Amplitude: 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.
Mixpanel vs Amplitude: 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:
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This is what a Mixpanel Funnel Report looks like:
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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.
Mixpanel vs Amplitude: 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:
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This is what the same report looks like in Mixpanel:
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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.
Mixpanel vs Amplitude: 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:
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This is what a Retention report looks like in Amplitude:
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The Retention Reports for Amplitude and Mixpanel show a lot of similarities with Amplitude offering a few extra options to help you calculate retention.
Mixpanel vs Amplitude: 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.
Mixpanel vs Amplitude: 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.
Mixpanel vs Amplitude: 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:
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This feature is called Lexicon in Mixpanel, and this is what it looks like:
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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.
Mixpanel vs Amplitude: 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:
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Here are the pricing plans for Amplitude:
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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.
Visit our Website to Explore Hevo
Extracting complex data from a diverse set of data sources can be a challenging task and this is where Hevo saves the day! Hevo offers a faster way to move data from Databases or SaaS applications like Mixpanel and Amplitude into your Data Warehouse to be visualized in a BI tool.
Hevo is fully automated and hence does not require you to code. Wanna try Hevo? Sign Up for a 14-day free trial. You can also have a look at the unbeatable pricing that will help you choose the right plan for your business needs.
Amit is a Content Marketing Manager at Hevo Data. He is passionate about writing for SaaS products and modern data platforms. His portfolio of more than 200 articles shows his extraordinary talent for crafting engaging content that clearly conveys the advantages and complexity of cutting-edge data technologies. Amit’s extensive knowledge of the SaaS market and modern data solutions enables him to write insightful and informative pieces that engage and educate audiences, making him a thought leader in the sector.
