Choosing Between Mixpanel and Amplitude for Analytics
If you’re a business owner, you’ve probably asked yourself the question: how well is my business really doing?
Fortunately, that’s where metrics and KPIs come in. Gone are the days you solely relied on manpower to monitor changes in your business outputs. With technology taking a massive leap toward automation, businesses now rely on the right tools to analyze their marketing strategies.
Mixpanel and Amplitude are two such tools that are excellent for tracking, collecting, and analyzing data. While they’re both considerably popular platforms, the Mixpanel and Amplitude debate has been around for a long time. This article dives headfirst into understanding their differences, comparing their capabilities and pricing options, and deciding which fits your business best.
Quick Overview: Mixpanel and Amplitude
Mixpanel
Mixpanel has garnered quite the attention in the market. The platform is especially great for converting raw data into practical insights. What sets it apart from its competitors is that it takes an event-based tracking approach. This means rather than monitoring individual users, Mixpanel tracks specific events, which provides a better understanding of business patterns.
Mixpanel also allows users to collaborate with team members over Team Dashboards, ensuring everyone is on the same page. Their limitless segmentation feature is ideal for tailoring your product and marketing strategies to various user groups.
Amplitude
Amplitude is a leading B2B SaaS analytics tool that dives into user behaviors similar to its rival Mixpanel. A notable feature is its data management, allowing users to store and organize big data. The product analytics feature is great if you’re looking to see how users engage with your product and services.
Businesses rely on decision-making, and with Amplitude, you can experiment with different campaigns by executing A/B tests. This means you’re no longer shooting in the dark and instead have factual data to rely on before taking your next step.
Mixpanel and Amplitude: Core Differences
While the two platforms share similarities, such as event-based tracking and cross-device analysis, a few core differences can easily tell them apart.
Mixpanel focuses on user insights, allowing businesses to identify metrics and make more informed decisions. It provides insights into performance indicators, including conversion rates, customer satisfaction, customer retention, and turnover rates. Best of all, it’s user-friendly. The user interface is straightforward and doesn’t need heavy datasets to perform efficiently.
Amplitude, however, does a great job of providing comprehensive reporting and quantitative data analysis. Amplitude offers personas charts that group users into clusters based on user behavior and impact charts that help determine if users interacting with your features are taking action. It’s better suited for businesses dealing with large amounts of data. Since there’s a significant learning curve, it works best for individuals with hands-on experience with sophisticated data analytics. Amplitude, unlike Mixpanel, requires you to get your data sorted at the very start, preventing haphazard data, and has its own CDP.
Use Cases
The Mixpanel and Amplitude debate would be incomplete without examining the use cases of the two platforms.
Mixpanel Use Case
Mixpanel, like Amplitude, focuses less on tracking traffic sources and more on monitoring events. This takes understanding user behavior to a new level, where you’re provided with details on every button click.
Mixpanel also assigns users identification numbers, allowing cross-platform tracking across websites and platforms. This is especially ideal if you want to see how users interact with your business ecosystem rather than a sole aspect of it. The premium version of the tool also enables communication with users so that you can send out tailored messages to groups based on their interactions with your products.
Amplitude Use Case
When it comes to understanding user interaction, Amplitude tracks movements across different pages of your website. These movements can be as simple as a click and allow businesses to identify actions that set browsers apart from longtime customers.
Was it a promotional video that motivated them to download your application or that pop-up online text? With Amplitude, now you know. It zooms into granular events, helping you understand the best tactics to drive user engagement and conversion.
Data Collection and Integration
Since Mixpanel and Amplitude utilize event-based tracking, their data collection methods are also quite similar. They both offer flexible data collection through SDKs, which cover iOS, Android, Python, and Node.js, to name a few.
When it comes to data integration, both platforms employ several external tools and solutions that allow them to handle large data sets from various sources. Mixpanel supports event analysis for Redshift, BigQuery, and Snowflake and cloud storage such as Azure, Google Cloud, and AWS. Amplitude is not far behind in the race either, as it supports Blaze, Salesforce CRM, Chameleon, and Datazoom, apart from the ones Mixpanel supports.
Mixpanel and Amplitude: Funnels and Reporting
Funnels are great visualizations to understand customer journeys. They help assess weak aspects of your business and give insights on how to improve them. While Mixpanel and Amplitude offer a seamless funneling experience, Amplitude has a slight edge in terms of its feasibility. It allows users to view ordered and unordered funnels separately, which comes in handy when building funnels in different orders.
Both platforms are versatile reporting tools, providing visualization options like trends and graphs. However, if you’re looking to access your reports easily and customize them according to your business needs, Mixpanel is the way to go. It has a basic dashboard that keeps your data nice and concise in one place.
Amplitude, however, takes a different approach by letting you choose your specifications before generating your reports. While it’s a great feature, navigating it can get tricky if you’re unsure what you’re looking for. Amplitude’s reporting features are ideal for in-depth data analysis and sorting large datasets.
Mixpanel and Amplitude: Pricing and Scalability
Mixpanel is more transparent about its pricing options. They offer a free Starter plan for anyone looking for a product-market fit. It offers unlimited integrations and collaborators, and pre-designed templates to kickstart your journey. Their Growth plan includes all the features in the Starter plan with additional data pipeline add-ons, a Mixpanel modeling layer, and unlimited saved reports for monitoring and updating KPIs. The Enterprise plan is better suited for large organizations. It offers advanced access controls, shared data views, and automated provisioning. Pricing may vary depending on your monthly tracked user.
Amplitude’s Starter plan targets startups; it’s free and offers core analytics charts, advanced collaboration, data planning tools, unlimited users, and data sources. Their Growth plan is aimed toward teams that require full visibility into their customer journey and offers advanced behavioral analytics, cohorts, SSO integration, and onboarding support. The Enterprise plan is for organizations relying on insights to drive their business strategies. This plan offers CSM support, advanced permissions, and password-protected links. For more information on the pricing of the Growth and Enterprise plans, you will need to contact their sales representative.
If we compare the pricing plans of Mixpanel and Amplitude, you can get away with using both starter plans for start-ups and established businesses of any size. However, this varies according to your specific needs and requirements. Amplitude’s Starter plan offers more comprehensive features. However, their paid plans are affordable, given Mixpanel’s user-friendly interface and tool experience.
User Experience and Support: Mixpanel and Amplitude
Regarding user experience, it is safe to say that both do not disappoint. However, there are a few things to consider.
Mixpanel has an intuitive interface, which means you’ll find everything where you expect it to be. There are also some tutorial videos in case you hit a wall. But there’s a catch. The setting up process of Mixpanel can get laborious and has a fair share of coding knowledge requirements which may be a put-off for non-technical users.
Amplitude, conversely, has a customizable interface and allows for seamless adaptation. You might also need some preliminary coding knowledge for Amplitude, but that’s only for the initial event tracking setup. Once that’s done, you’re golden.
Mixpanel and Amplitude: The Jury’s Out
Now that we’ve taken a closer look at both platforms, it’s clearly its neck and neck. It all boils down to your business’s requirements and what you want to achieve from the tool.
If we talk usability, while both have user-friendly interfaces, Mixpanel requires some hands-on coding experience to get you started. This is why opting for the Starter plan is always a smart move. When it comes to dealing with large datasets, Amplitude is definitely the better fit since Mixpanel is better suited to a small user base. While both free Starter plans offer the same features, Mixpanel comes up to be lighter on the pocket if you upgrade.
That said, it’s probably clear now that there’s no settling the Mixpanel and Amplitude debate. The bottom line is: make an informed decision according to your business needs. You have to ask yourself how deep you really want to dive into analytics.
We hope this article helps. What’s your say in the never-ending Mixpanel and Amplitude rivalry? Are you team Mixpanel or Amplitude?
