When it comes to running a business, you must stay on top of things – know how your business is doing and if your products and services need some points of improvement. But no one wants to spend hours gathering data and creating reports that may not even be accurate.
Getting data analysis software can greatly help you keep track of your business and marketing needs automatically. Every business should take advantage of what user analytics can do to help them succeed and grow. These tools make the excruciating task of planning your marketing activities and keeping track of the results a whole lot easier for you.
When it comes to data analysis, business owners often find themselves debating over Amplitude vs. Mixpanel. Both tools are actually solid and reliable solutions when it comes to user behavior tracking on websites and mobile apps. But which one is better? This article will help you decide which one is a better fit for your marketing and business needs.
Amplitude vs. Mixpanel: The company behind them
Amplitude
Amplitude is a tech company based in San Francisco. It is known to be the second biggest digital analytics provider although you should also take note that they have only been used on around 40,000 digital products.
Amplitude was established in 2012 by two app developers who wanted a more detailed data analysis tool. Today, Amplitude is the trusted tool for companies like Ford, Walmart, Burger King, and Traveloka.
Mixpanel
Mixpanel is a small company compared to the rest in this article and it is also based in San Francisco. Mixpanel was released in 2009.
Though a smaller player in the game, they are becoming a hit on the market as it has been confirmed that 30% of Fortune 100 SaaS companies have been using Mixpanel for their data gathering.
Today, Mixpanel is the trusted tool for companies like Twitter, Uber, ZipRecruiter, Rakuten Viber, and Expedia.
Amplitude vs. Mixpanel: Analytics tool and services
Amplitude
Amplitude uses an event-focused approach for data collection and this leads to more analytical outcomes. The events being tracked include when a user clicks on the read more prompt of your content, clicks on a call to action, scrolls down your webpages, and plays a video. Tracking these events gives you an idea of what makes a user go from a curious visitor to a customer.
With Amplitude, you also get to track down the areas in your website that visitors are not engaging with – even the pages where you lose them. So basically, the data gathered is more focused on what the users do after accessing the website. The data collected is presented in bite-size pieces that allow you to easily understand it. This way, you easily get to decide the appropriate actions to take.
The Amplitude premium packages will give you access to additional features such as predictive analytics, shared reports, and customization.
Amplitude also stands out in the way their charts and graphs are presented. Everything is done with high quality and colors are used to present the data clearly. You can export these reports to CSV that you can download. You can also import the data on Excel or other tools that you use.
Amplitude offers an engage add-on tool where you can categorize your visitors base on the activity they do on your website and send them targeted messages to help establish a connection and engagement. Of course, as an add-on tool, you will have to pay an extra cost to get this feature.
Mixpanel
Mixpanel gives an analysis of all the activities happening on your website – whether it is future users completing a form or making a purchase. It gives you details like navigation, scrolling, and button clicks – almost the complete user journey experience they had with your website.
It has the A/B testing function, which allows you to have an estimate of the success rates of two different variations of action on the content of your website. This predictive analytics feature allows you to make better decisions when it comes to calculating your next marketing move.
The business tier of Mixpanel is very helpful for exporting user information that you can use for CRM management. The premium package of Mixpanel allows you to communicate with groups and individuals too.
What makes Mixpanel stand out is that it lets you assign unique IDs to individual users. Once this is done, you can track the user journeys easily through multiple digital platforms and websites.
Overall, Mixpanel is good if you want to refine a lot of data and turn them into useful reports, created in a way that your needs are prioritized. It is also the best choice if you need to measure success rates for your next business or marketing move.
Take note that data exporting is not available in the free plan of Mixpanel. You should get the premium version if you want this option.
Unlike Amplitude, Mixpanel’s free plan has automatic alerts for monitoring. This is a good thing if you want to be able to respond right away to a sudden decrease or increase in the activities or events on your app or website.
Amplitude vs. Mixpanel: Ease of use
Amplitude
Amplitude has a more modern feel compared to Mixpanel. Responses to Amplitude’s usability and interface are mostly positive.
Amplitude makes use of bright colors in their user interface – it definitely catches your attention. The charts and graphs also make use of colors to help you understand the data clearly. It is one of the best graph-oriented data analytics platforms that you can get.
Amplitude makes use of the left-handed navigation pane layout that most of us are all used to so you will have no trouble using it.
If you get lost using it, there is an initial demo tour available that explains every tool and how you can use them.
For WordPress users, you have to take note though that you will need to drop code in the pages that you want to track using Amplitude during the initial setup manually. Unfortunately, there is no plugin available to make this task easier for you.
Mixpanel
Mixpanel has a smart navigation panel and all the menu titles are largely self-explanatory. You can easily tell the function of each tool so you do not really need to have any specific skills to use it.
If you get lost, Mixpanel also has a tutorial video that will explain every feature and tool to help you figure things out.
Overall, Mixpanel is very usable with a straightforward approach to how everything is presented for clarification.
Amplitude vs. Mixpanel: Pricing
Amplitude
Amplitude has a free plan. You can track up to 10 million actions per month before you will be asked to pay a cent. Unless you actually have thousands of active users each month, this will not be a problem. Plus, Amplitude will store unlimited data history on each user tracked – even for the freemium model.
Of course, Amplitude also has premium packages with more data analytical tools and features. There are two premium packages: Elite and Enterprise.
The Elite tier costs $2000 per month while you will have to contact their sales department if you want to use their Enterprise tier since the total cost is on a case-to-case basis so there is no general pricing when it comes to enterprise plans. But according to what Amplitude users have shared, you can expect to pay a couple thousand dollars per month.
Mixpanel
Mixpanel has a free plan but it only allows you to keep track of 1,000 users per month. If you go beyond the 1,000 limits, you will have to pay a per tracked user rate. So if you have more than a thousand users to track, you will save more money with the premium version.
The free plan can only keep track of 90 days worth of historical data, so if you want long-term evaluation, you may want to go for the paid version. The paid version is recommended if you want to track seasonal or long-term user behavior.
Under the premium engagement plan, you have four pricing tiers to choose from. The more money you pay, the more features you get. The first tier is the free version. The second tier is called the Startup and it costs $99 per month. The third tier is the called Business and it costs $999 per year. The highest tier is called the Enterprise and you will have to contact them for pricing.
Amplitude vs. Mixpanel: Customer support
Amplitude
Amplitude’s customer support is available through email. Priority support is given for those who are in a higher tier.
Mixpanel
Mixpanel’s customer support is available during office hours through a live chat or email. However, access to live chat will depend on what tier you have signed up for.
Amplitude vs. Mixpanel: Pros and cons
Amplitude
Pros
- Amplitude is a bit more complicated compared to crowd favorite Google analytics but it is still considered easy to use compared to other platforms.
- The analysis provided come in the form of charts and visualizations done in high quality and are easy to understand, making it easier for you to analyze data.
Cons
- Amplitude does not give off alerts on the freemium model plan. There is no way for you to be notified unless you log in to your account.
Mixpanel
Pros
- Mixpanel’s biggest advantage is that it can track individual users on multiple platforms for easy engagement monitoring.
- Mixpanel offers cheaper and more flexible pricing packages.
Cons
- Does not give you a detailed report on where your website traffic is coming from.
Other analytics tools to consider
If you still are not sure about Mixpanel vs. Amplitude, here are two more analytics tools that you should consider in the mix to give you additional options:
Google Analytics
This analytics platform is a natural go-to given that it is from Google and it is free and very easy to use. Google Analytics is currently being used by over 3 million businesses.
One advantage of Google Analytics compared to other data analysis software is that it is plugged into the Internet so it can give a more accurate report on where your visitors are coming from aside from telling you if they click on your paid ads and which website or social media platform they are coming from.
Google Analytics can also give you a list of the keywords that people are using when they type into a search engine and ended up with your website. This is useful if you need organic search data. And you also get a report on how long they stay on your website and which pages are the most visited.
All this information is vital for the marketing perspective of any business since it gives you a good idea of why people are engaging with you. Knowing the answer to this gives you the key points that you should focus on in your next marketing campaign.
As mentioned earlier, Google Analytics is free to use. You do not have to pay a single cent unless you are a big website that has over 10 million hits each month. Google Analytics does have a premium version called 360 but it is quite expensive at $150,000 per year. Take note though that the premium version is meant for big websites and comes with additional features.
The biggest advantage Google Analytics has is that it is very easy to use. Almost everybody uses Google and is familiar with how they work. If you are not familiar, their instructions are very clear and easy to follow too. Plus there is good customer support to rely on when you need help.
Of course, there are also some weak points. For instance, Google Analytics is hard to customize – you will need a great deal of technical knowledge to tweak it for any additional tracking needs. But most people can deal with it by using another tool along with Google Analytics to get all the data they need.
Oribi
Oribi is also making some noise as an all-in-one marketing analytical tool. They aim to help businesses of any size to make smarter decisions through their data-triggered guidance. This software eliminates the need to hire third-party experts to keep an eye on your mobile app or website.
Oribi takes pride in using cutting-edge technology to gather accurate data and advanced algorithms to interpret that data properly. Oribi highlights which stats and metrics are important for you, and these advanced reports allow you to zoom in on what needs your attention immediately.
With all these key features available, non-techies and newbie entrepreneurs can work independently until they can afford to have their own team. This makes it a great user base tool for those who are just starting out or for small businesses.
Oribi has tools specified for merchants and sellers to help them understand how their targeted audience behaves and getting the right insights that will make them improve their marketing efforts. Oribi also has tools that cater to agencies and companies that want to “stalk” their customers by providing marketing funnel reports, in-depth reports, a comparison of all marketing channels, and many more.
Today, Oribi works with big companies like Sony, Panasonic, Audi, Pizza Hut, and Abbott.
Oribi also will ask you to give as much information as you can about the website, app, or business that you want to gather data on. Do not be put off by this as this is their way of making sure their tools and algorithms will cater to your needs.
Oribi’s major selling point is that almost all analytic features are automated – you barely have to do a thing. The interface and simple dashboard creation also means you do not have to exert any effort into understanding how things work. The result is that you get to focus on reacting to the data instead of spending time understanding it first before making an action.
Oribi has a free version but you will get more features with their premium plans. Oribi’s premium plans have three packages. The business plan costs as low as $3000. The e-commerce plan costs as low as $250 per month. And the highest tier is the Agency plan, which costs as low as $650 per month.
The downside of Oribi is that although it is a user-friendly and effortless tool to use, it takes some time to set up.
FAQs
Is Mixpanel good?
Mixpanel is a good tool for businesses who want to track their users and engage with them. It is best as a marketing tool since it does a impressively thorough job in tracking users.
Is Mixpanel better than Google Analytics?
Both have their own strengths but comparing the two, Mixpanel has its advantages over Google Analytics. For one, Mixpanel has more detailed reports compared to Google Analytics – the data is so detailed that it feels like you are actually stalking every user.
Mixpanel is also more customizable compared to Google Analytics where you only get to deal with the information that it gives you as is. Mixpanel has a customized dashboard that lets you organize the metrics that you want according to importance.
Mixpanel provides more tools when it comes to tracking users although it has that downside where it can not tell you where your users are coming from like Google Analytics does.
Is Amplitude like Google Analytics?
A lot of Amplitude users find the two similar although Google Analytics is simpler and easier to use when you compare the two. You may need some coding if your website is hosted by WordPress for Amplitude though so newbies may find dealing with Amplitude to be a more complicated process compared to Google Analytics.
How is Amplitude better than Google Analytics?
Amplitude can provide you a more detailed report and has more tools and features compared to Google Analytics.
Amplitude is customizable so you can decide which data should be highlighted. Google Analytics makes this decision automatically for you. The data highlights may sometimes not be as important to you.
Amplitude is a better choice for product makers since they are made for product teams too – not only websites. Google Analytics is more focused on website monitoring.
Why track your users?
Boosts conversion
Tracking what your users click gives you an idea what they are interested in, what prompts caused them to click, which pages are most viewed, etc. All these data will help you boost conversion wherein a curious visitor turns into a paying customer.
Focused marketing
Marketing for a general audience is very difficult and rarely converts to sales. But if you focus your marketing efforts on a target audience, you have a higher chance of conversion. Tracking your users will give you an idea of what they want, what interests them, how they end up on your site, etc. Knowing how your users behave will help you learn how to draw them in and encourage more engagement.
Product and services improvement
Some data analysis tools offer product analysis where you can see how users interacts with your product. You will see which ones are popular and which ones are being ignored.
Conclusion
Data analysis software is a valuable tool that helps you keep track of almost every user data you need to keep an eye on your metrics, look for areas that need improvement, customer retention ideas, and measure your success.
As for Mixpanel vs. Amplitude, you just have to decide what type of actionable data you want. If you want to use the data you gathered to make reports with beautiful graphics and charts, Amplitude is the best choice. If you want to focus on engagement with your user specifically and have predictive analytics, Mixpanel is the best choice.
Each of the data analysis tools above has its own advantages when it comes to data governance and tracking. You just need to find the perfect fit for your business.