Mixpanel is a web and mobile analytics platform that brings together product and marketing data so teams can see the impact of their actions and understand the customer journey.
It’s a well-rounded tool with features that help product teams understand how customers navigate their website or app. It’s also straightforward to set up, GDPR compliant, and easy for non-technical folks to use, thanks to an intuitive UI and drag-and-drop reports.
However, Mixpanel is just one of many product and web analytics platforms. Some are cheaper, others are more secure, and a few have more advanced or specialist features.
This article will explore the leading Mixpanel alternatives for product teams and marketers. We’ll cover their key features, what users love about them, and why they may (or may not) be the right pick for you.
Mixpanel: an overview
Let’s start by giving Mixpanel its dues. The platform does a great job of arming product teams with an arsenal of tools to track the impact of their updates, find ways to boost engagement and track which features users love.
Marketing teams use the platform to track customers through the sales funnel, attribute marketing campaigns and find ways to optimise spend.
There’s plenty to like about Mixpanel, including:
- Easy setup and maintenance: Mixpanel’s onboarding flow allows you to build a tracking plan and choose the specific events to measure. When Mixpanel collects data, you’ll see an introductory “starter board.”
- Generous free plan: Mixpanel doesn’t limit freemium users like some platforms. Collect data on 20 million monthly events, use pre-built templates and access its Slack community. There are also no limits on collaborators or integrations.
- Extensive privacy configurations: Mixpanel provides strong consent management configurations. Clients can let their users opt out of tracking, disable geolocation and anonymise their data. It also automatically deletes user data after five years and offers an EU Data Residency Program that can help customers meet GDPR regulations.
- Comprehensive features: Mixpanel gives marketers and product teams the tools and features they need to understand the customer, improve the product and increase conversions.
- Easy-to-use UI: The platform prioritises self-service data, meaning users don’t need to be technically minded to use Mixpanel. Drag-and-drop dashboards democratise access to data and let anyone on your team find answers to their questions.
You wouldn’t be reading this page if Mixpanel offered everything, though. No platform is perfect, and there are several reasons people may want to look for a Mixpanel alternative:
- No self-hosted option: You’ll never have complete control over your data with Mixpanel due to the lack of a self-hosted option. Data will always live on Mixpanel’s servers, meaning compliance with data regulations like GDPR isn’t a given.
- Lack of customisation: Mixpanel doesn’t offer much flexibility when it comes to visualising data. While the platform’s in-built reports are accessible to everyone, you’ll need a developer to build custom reports.
- Not open source: Mixpanel’s proprietary software doesn’t provide the transparency, security and community that comes with using open-source software like Matomo. Proprietary software isn’t inherently wrong, but it could mean your analytics solution isn’t future-proof.
- Steep learning curve: The learning curve can be steep unless you’re a developer. While setting up the software is straightforward, Mixpanel’s reliance on manual tracking means teams must spend a lot of time creating and structuring events to collect the data they need.
If any of those struck a chord, see if one of the following seven Mixpanel alternatives might better fulfil your needs.
The top 7 Mixpanel alternatives
Now, let’s look at the alternatives.
We’ll explain exactly how each platform differs from Mixpanel, its standout features, strengths, common community critiques, and when it may be (or may not be) the right choice.
1. Matomo
Matomo is a privacy-focused, open-source web and mobile analytics platform. As a proponent of an ethical web, Matomo prioritises data ownership and privacy protection.
It’s a great Mixpanel alternative for those who care about data privacy. You own 100% of your data and will always comply with data regulations like GDPR when using the platform.
Main dashboard with visits log, visits over time, visitor map, combined keywords, and traffic sources
(Image Source)
Matomo isn’t short on features, either. Product teams and marketers can evaluate the entire user journey, capture detailed visitor profiles, combine web, mobile and app reports, and use custom reporting to generate the specific insides they need.
Key features:
- Complete app and web analytics: Matomo tracks performance metrics and KPIs across web, app and mobile. Understand which pages users visit, how long they stay and how they move between devices.
- Marketing attribution: Built-in marketing attribution capabilities make it easy for marketers to pinpoint their most profitable campaigns and channels.
- User behaviour tracking: Generate in-depth user behaviour data thanks to heatmaps, form analytics and session recordings.
Strengths
- On-premise and cloud versions: Use Matomo for free on your servers or subscribe to Matomo Cloud for hosting and additional support. Either way, you remain in control of your data.
- Exceptional customer support: On-premise and Matomo Cloud users get free access to the forum. Cloud customers get dedicated support, which is available at an additional cost for on-premise customers.
- Consent-free tracking: Matomo doesn’t ruin the user’s experience with cookie banners.
- Open-source software: Matomo’s software is free to use, modify, and distribute. Users get a more secure, reliable and transparent solution thanks to the community of developers and contributors working on the project. Matomo will never become proprietary software, so there’s no risk of vendor lock-in. You will always have access to the source code, raw data and APIs.
Common community critiques:
- On-premise setup: The on-premise version requires some technical knowledge and a server.
- App tracking features: Some features, like heatmaps, available on web analytics aren’t available in-app analytics. Features may also differ between Android SDK and iOS SDK.
Price:
Matomo has three plans:
- Free: on-premise analytics is free to use
- Cloud: Hosted business plans start at €22 per month
- Enterprise: custom-priced, cloud-hosted enterprise plan tailored to meet a business’s specific requirements.
There’s a free 21-day trial for Matomo Cloud and a 30-day plugin trial for Matomo On-Premise.
2. Adobe Analytics
Adobe Analytics is an enterprise analytics platform part of the Adobe Experience Cloud. This makes it a great Mixpanel alternative for those already using other Adobe products. But, getting the most from the platform is challenging without the rest of the Adobe ecosystem.
Adobe Analytics Analysis Workspace training tutorial
(Image Source)
Adobe Analytics offers many marketing tools, but product teams may find their offer lacking. Small or inexperienced teams may also need help using this feature-heavy platform.
Key features:
- Detailed web and marketing analytics: Adobe lets marketers draw in data from almost any source to get a comprehensive view of the customer journey.
- Marketing attribution: There’s a great deal of flexibility when crediting conversions. There are unlimited attribution models, too, including both paid and organic media channels.
- Live Stream: This feature lets brands access raw data in near real time (with a 30- to 90-second delay) to assess the impact of marketing campaigns as soon as they launch.
Strengths:
- Enterprise focus: Adobe Analytics’s wide range of advanced features makes It attractive to large companies with one or more high-traffic websites or apps.
- Integrations: Adobe Analytics integrates neatly with other Adobe products like Campaign and Experience Cloud). Access marketing, analytics and content management tools in one place.
- Customisation: The platform makes it easy for users to tailor reports and dashboards to their specific needs.
Common community critiques:
- Few product analytics features: While marketers will likely love Adobe, product teams may find it lacking. For example, the heatmap tool isn’t well developed. You’ll need to use Adobe Target to run A/B tests.
- Complexity: The sheer number of advanced features can make Adobe Analytics a confusing experience for inexperienced or non-technically minded users. While a wealth of support documentation is available, it will take longer to generate value.
- Price: Adobe Analytics costs several thousand dollars monthly, making it suitable only for enterprise clients.
Price:
Adobe offers three tiers: Select, Prime and Ultimate. Pricing is only available on request.
3. Amplitude
Amplitude is a product analytics and event-tracking platform. It is arguably the most like-for-like platform on this list, and there is a lot of overlap between Amploitduce’s and Mixpanel’s capabilities.
The Ask Amplitude™ feature helps build and analyse conversion funnel charts.
(Image Source)
The platform is an excellent choice for marketers who want to create a unified view of the customer by tracking them across different devices. This is possible with several other analytics platforms on this list (Matomo included), but Mixpanel doesn’t centralise data from web and app users in a signal report.
Amplitude also has advanced features Mixpanel doesn’t have, like feature management and AI, as well as better customisation.
Key features:
- Product analytics: Amplitude comes packed with features product teams will use regularly, including customer journey analysis, session replays and heatmaps.
- AI: Amplitude AI can clean up data, generate insights and detect anomalies.
- Feature management: Amplitude provides near-real-time feedback on feature usage and adoption rates so that product teams can analyse the impact of their work. Developers can also use the platform to manage progressive rollouts.
Strengths:
- Self-serve reporting: The platform’s self-serve nature means employees of all levels and abilities can get the insights they need. That includes data teams that want to run detailed and complex analyses.
- Integrated web experimentation. Product teams or marketers don’t need a third-party tool to run A/B tests because Amplitude has a comprehensive feature that lets users set up tests, collect data and create reports.
- Extensive customer support: Amplitude records webinars, holds out-of-office sessions and runs a Slack community to help customers extract as much value as possible.
Common community critiques:
- Off-site tracking: While Amplitude has many features for tracking customer interaction across your product, it lacks ways to track customers once they are off-site. This is not great for marketing attribution, for example, or growing search traffic.
- Too complex: The sheer number of things Amplitude tracks can overwhelm inexperienced users who must spend time learning how to use the platform.
- Few templates: Few stock templates make getting started with Amplitude even harder. Users have to create reports from scratch rather than customise a stock graph.
Price:
- Starter: Free to track up to 50,000 users per month.
- Plus: $49 per month to track up to 300,000 users.
- Growth: Custom pricing for no tracking limits
- Enterprise: Custom pricing for dedicated account managers and predictive analytics
4. Google Analytics
Google Analytics is the most popular web analytics platform. It’s completely free to use and easy to install. Although there’s no customer support, the thousands of online how-to videos and articles go some way to making up for it.
GA dashboard showing acquisition, conversion and behaviour data across all channels
(Image Source)
Most people are familiar with Google’s web analytics data, which makes it a great Mixpanel alternative for marketers. However, product teams may struggle to get the qualitative data they need.
Key features:
- User and conversion tracking: People don’t just use Google Analytics because it’s free. The platform boasts a competitive user engagement and conversion tracking offering, which lets businesses of any size understand how consumers navigate their sites and make purchases.
- Audience segmentation: Segment audiences based on time and event parameters.
- Google Ads integration: Track users from the moment they interact with one of your ads.
Strengths:
- It’s free: Web and product analytics platforms can cost hundreds of dollars monthly and put a sizable dent in a small business marketing budget. Google provides the basic tools most marketers need for free.
- Cross-platform tracking: GA4 lets teams track mobile and web analytics in one place, which wasn’t possible in Universal Analytics.
- A wealth of third-party support: There’s no shortage of Google Analytics tutorials on YouTube to help you set up and use the platform.
Common community critiques:
- Data privacy concerns: There are concerns about Google’s lack of compliance with regulations like GDPR. The workaround is asking people for permission to collect their data, but that requires a consent pop-up that can disrupt the user experience.
- No CRO features: Google Analytics lacks the conversion optimisation features of other tools in this list, including Matomo. It can’t record sessions, track user interactions via a heatmap or run A/B tests.
- AI data sampling: Google generates insights using AI-powered data sampling rather than analysing your actual data, which may make your data inaccurate.
Price:
Google Analytics is free to use. Google also offers a premium version, GA 360, which starts at $50,000 per year.
5. Heap
Heap is a digital insights and product analytics platform. It gives product managers and marketers the quantitative and qualitative data they need to improve conversion rates, improve product features, and reduce churn.
Heap marketing KPI dashboard
(Image Source)
The platform offers everything you’d expect from a product analytics perspective, including session replays, heatmaps and user journey analysis. It even has an AI tool that can answer your questions.
Key features:
- Auto-capture: Unlike other analytics tools (Mixpanel and Google Analytics, for instance), you don’t need to manually code events. Heap’s auto-capture feature automatically collects every user interaction, allowing for retroactive analysis.
- Segmentation: Create distinct customer cohorts based on behaviour. Integrate other platforms like Marketo to use that information to personalise marketing campaigns.
- AI CoPilot: Heap has a generative AI tool, CoPilot, that answers questions like “How many people visited the About page last week?” It can also handle follow-up questions and suggest what to search next.
Strengths:
- Integrations: Heap’s integrations allow teams to centralise data from dozens of third-party applications. Popular integrations include Shopify and Salesforce. Heap can also connect to your data warehouse.
- Near real-time tracking: Heap has a live data feed that lets teams track user behaviour in near real-time (there’s a 15-second delay).
- Collaboration: Heap facilitates cross-department collaboration via shared spaces and shared reports. You can also share session replays across teams.
Common community critiques:
- Struggles at scale: Heap’s auto-capture functionality can be more of a pain than a perk when working at scale. Sites with a million or more weekly visitors may need to limit data capture.
- Data overload: Heap tracks so much data it can be hard to find the specific events you want to measure.
- Poor-quality graphics: Heap’s visualisations are basic and may not appeal to non-technically minded users.
Price:
Heap offers four plans with pricing available on request.
- Free
- Growth
- Pro
- Premier
6. Hotjar
Hotjar is a product experience insight tool that analyses why users behave as they do. The platform collects behavioural data using heatmaps, surveys and session recordings.
It’s a suitable alternative for product teams and marketers who care about collecting qualitative rather than quantitative data.
New heatmap feature in hotjar
(Image Source)
It’s not your typical analytics platform, however. Hotjar doesn’t track site visits or conversions, so teams use it alongside a web analytics platform like Google Analytics or Matomo.
Key features:
- Surveys: Product teams can place surveys on specific pages to capture quantitative and qualitative data.
- Heatmaps: Hotjar provides several heatmaps — click, scroll and interaction — that show how users behave when browsing your site.
- Session recordings: Support quantitative analytics data with videos of genuine user behaviour. It’s like watching someone browsing your site over their shoulder.
Strengths:
- User-friendly interface: The tool is easy to navigate and accessible to all employees. Anyone can start using it quickly.
- Funnel analysis: Use Hotjar’s range of tools to analyse your entire funnel, identifying friction points and opportunities to improve the customer experience.
- Cross-platform tracking: Hotjar compares user behaviour across desktop, mobile and app.
Common community critiques:
- Limited web analytics: While Hotjar is great for understanding customer behaviour, it doesn’t collect standard web analytics data.
- Data retention: Hotjar only retains data for one month to a year on some plans.
- Impacts page speed: The tool’s code impacts your site’s performance, leading to slower load times.
Price:
- Free: Up to five thousand monthly sessions, including screen recordings and heatmaps
- Growth: $49 per month for 7,000 to 10,000 monthly sessions
- Pro: Custom pricing for up to 500 million monthly sessions
- Enterprise: Custom pricing for up to 6 billion monthly sessions.
7. Kissmetrics
Kissmetrics is a web and mobile analytics platform that aims to help teams generate more revenue and acquire more users through product-led growth.
As such, the platform offers more to marketers than product teams — particularly online store owners and SaaS businesses.
Kissmetrics funnel report
(Image Source)
Kissmetrics provides a suite of behavioural analytics tools that analyse how customers move through your funnel, where they drop off and why. That’s great for marketers, but product teams will struggle to understand how customers actually use their product once they’ve converted.
Key features:
- User journey mapping: Follow individual customer journeys to learn how each customer finds and engages with your brand.
- Funnel analysis: Funnel reports help marketers track cart abandonments and other drop-offs along the customer journey.
- A/B testing: Kissmetrics’s A/B testing tool measures how customers respond to different page layouts
Strengths:
- Detailed revenue metrics: Kissmetrics makes measuring customer lifetime value, churn rate, and other revenue-focused KPIs easy.
- Stellar onboarding experience: Kissmetrics gives new users a detailed walkthrough and tutorial, which helps non-technical users get up to speed.
- Integrations: Integrate data from dozens of platforms and tools, such as Facebook, Instagram, Shopify, and Woocommerce, so all your data is in one place.
Common community critiques:
- Predominantly web-based: Kissmetrics focuses on web-based traffic over app- or cross-platform tracking. It may be fine for some teams, but product managers or marketers who track users across apps and smartphones may want to look elsewhere.
- Slow to load large data sources: The platform can be slow to load, react to, and analyse large volumes of data, which could be an issue for enterprise clients.
- Price: Kissmetrics is significantly more expensive than Mixpanel. There is no freemium tier, meaning you’ll need to pay at least $199 monthly.
Price:
- Silver: $199 per month for up to 2 million monthly events
- Gold: $499 per month for up to five million monthly events
- Platinum: Custom pricing
Switch from Mixpanel to Matomo
When it comes to extracting deep insights from user data while balancing compliance and privacy protection, Mixpanel delivers mixed results. If you want a more straightforward alternative, more websites chose Matomo over Mixpanel for their analytics because of its:
- Accurate web analytics collected in an ethical, GDPR-compliant manner
- Behavioural analytics (like heatmaps and session recordings) to understand how users engage with your site
- Rolled-up cross-platform reporting for mobile and apps
- Flexibility and customisation with 250+ settings, plentiful plugins and integrations, APIs, raw data access
- Open-source code to create plugins to fit your specific business needs
- 100% data ownership with Matomo On-Premise and Matomo Cloud
Over one million websites in 190+ countries use Matomo’s powerful web analytics platform. Join them today by starting a free 21-day trial — no credit card required.
