Mixpanel vs Amplitude: Which one is right for your Website Analytics (2025)

Analytics tools help businesses get the necessary insights to understand the complete story of a user’s interaction, from their first visit to their final purchase and beyond.

Mixpanel and Amplitude are two popular platforms in the field of product-centric analysis, but they serve different philosophies and needs.

Your choice influences how you manage campaigns, develop new products, and plan for long-term growth.

This guide breaks down the key differences between them and helps you match the strengths of each tool to your company’s goals and technical resources.

Keep reading to learn which platform provides more straightforward ways for tracking specific user journeys and how their pricing models actually work when you scale.

Let’s get started.

What is Mixpanel?

Mixpanel is a product analytics platform that helps teams understand how people use a website or app, where they encounter issues, and which users consistently return.

It tracks specific actions or “events” that users take, like clicks, signups, or purchases.

Its primary goal is to help you understand user behavior so you can improve your product, increase user engagement, and make better business decisions.

Key Features of Mixpanel

• Events and Properties: Record every meaningful action that users take and attach simple labels to those events. This helps you track what users do, not just what pages they visit.
• Funnel Analysis: Use funnels to visualize the steps users take to complete a goal, such as signing up or making a purchase. This helps you identify exactly where users drop off so you can improve those specific areas.
• Retention Analysis: Retention reports indicate whether users return to your product over time. This is the ultimate measure of your product’s value.
• Segmentation and Cohorts: Group your users based on their actions or properties. You can analyze the behavior of your most valuable users to understand what makes them successful and try to replicate that for others.
• Session Replay and Heatmaps: Identify trends using reports and heatmaps, then replay individual user sessions to pinpoint specific UX issues.
• Warehouse Connectors: Send data to your data warehouse (BigQuery, Snowflake) for deeper analysis or long-term storage.

Pros of Mixpanel

• User-Friendly Interface: This is Mixpanel’s biggest advantage. Compared to many other powerful analytics tools, Mixpanel is relatively easy for non-technical team members to use. You can build reports and answer questions without needing to write code.
• Product-Focused Analytics: Designed for product managers, designers, and growth teams who need to understand user journeys and retention. Tracking users actions provides more detailed insights into engagement than tools that simply track pageviews.
• Powerful Core Features: Its funnel and retention analyses are best-in-class for most product decisions.

Cons of Mixpanel

• Cost at Scale: Mixpanel’s pricing is usage-based (events, replays, features). Their free plan offers 1 million monthly events, after which you’ll be charged $0.28 per thousand events. As your product grows and you have more users, the cost can increase significantly.
• Cloud-Only: Mixpanel is primarily a hosted SaaS. If you require full self-hosted control of raw event storage, Mixpanel does not provide it by default.
• Data Governance Issues: Mixpanel users can select between EU and US-based cloud data residency and make requests to delete or export data. While this gives users some control over their data, it does not guarantee complete ownership of their data.
• Data Sampling: Mixpanel’s free plans may occasionally use data sampling for complex queries, which means it analyzes only a subset of your data to provide faster, but slightly less accurate results.

What is Amplitude?

Amplitude is a powerful product analytics platform designed to help teams understand user behavior and improve their products.

Its goal is to help you improve key metrics, such as user activation, engagement, and retention, by providing a deep, behavior-based understanding of your customers.

Key Features of Amplitude

• Event-Based Product Analytics: Track specific actions, see where users drop off, or which steps lead to conversion using funnels and retention analysis. Gain real-time insights into your users interactions with your product.
• Session Replay and Activation tools: Watch real user sessions and get AI-powered summaries of session replays to identify UI issues. Connect customer data across your entire data ecosystem and utilize in-product guides, surveys, or onboarding flows to deliver more personalized experiences.
• Behavioral Cohorts: Create user groups for targeted communications and understanding the behaviors of your most valuable users.
• A/B Testing and Feature Management: Amplitude allows you to test different versions of a feature with segments of your audience. You can analyze key metrics, such as engagement, conversion, or retention, to measure their real impact. This helps you make data-driven decisions about what works best before rolling out changes to everyone.
• Integrations: Send event streams or historical exports to your CRM or data warehouses.
• Data Governance and Privacy Controls: Amplitude’s comprehensive security protocols provide you with full control over your data. It includes options for EU data residency, PII controls, IP address governance, event retention, and access control. The platform is designed with privacy in mind to ensure full compliance with GDPR, CCPA, and other relevant privacy laws.

Pros of Amplitude

• Deep User Insights: Amplitude is highly praised for its powerful analytics and the ability to handle complex queries that allow you to dig deep into user behavior. You can easily create funnels, analyze retention, and segment users to understand what drives engagement and conversion.
• User-Friendly Visualizations: Many users find the interface clean and modern, making it easier to build charts and interpret complex data.
• Cross-Platform and Scalable: It is designed to analyze user journeys across web and mobile apps simultaneously, handling the data volumes and complex needs of large enterprises.

Cons of Amplitude

• Significant Learning Curve: Despite its user-friendly interface, the platform’s power and depth can be overwhelming, particularly for less technical users.
• Cost: While the free tier is attractive, offering core analytics for up to 50,000 monthly tracked users, Amplitude can become expensive as your user base and event volume grow. The pricing for higher tiers is not always transparent and requires contacting sales, which can be a hurdle for some businesses.
• UI Can Feel Complex: Some users report that the interface can become cluttered when tracking a large number of events.

Which One to Choose: Mixpanel vs Amplitude?

Your choice depends on your team’s needs, resources, and primary goals.

Choose Mixpanel if:

• Your team prioritizes speed and ease of use above all else.
• You want a tool that your entire team can use to answer queries without requiring much analytical skills.
• Your primary need is to track key funnels, user retention, and segmentation to make immediate product decisions without making a significant upfront investment in data instrumentation.

Choose Amplitude if:

• Data accuracy and depth of analysis are your main priorities.
• You need to perform cross-platform analysis, run feature experiments, and implement strong data governance as you scale.
• You can invest in the setup and budget for growth.

Vemetric: A Mixpanel and Amplitude Alternative

If you’re looking for a modern, privacy-focused, and cost-effective solution, Vemetric is a great alternative to Mixpanel and Amplitude.

It is an open-source analytics platform that provides a detailed view of the entire customer journey.

Vemetric offers the following benefits for marketing and product teams:

• Strong Privacy and Compliance: Vemetric is designed with privacy at its core. It utilizes cookieless tracking and anonymizes user data by default, making it compliant with regulations such as GDPR and CCPA without requiring a complex setup. This eliminates the need for cookie consent banners, leading to a smoother user experience and more accurate data collection.
• Unified Analytics: Combine custom events like button clicks or video plays with website traffic statistics like page views, bounce rates, and referrals for in-depth user behavior analysis. Monitor how users interact with your product, view live user activity, session duration, and heatmaps in a single view.
• Simple and Affordable: Vemetric has a user-friendly interface and a transparent pricing plan based on event volume. This can be a significant advantage for startups and small to medium-sized businesses looking for a convenient solution that avoids the complex pricing and potential cost spikes associated with other platforms.

Final Words

The biggest cost isn’t the tool itself, but the time your team spends implementing and using it.

Carefully review each tool and choose the one that best suits your budget, privacy requirements, and growth goals.

If you like this article, don’t forget to check out our guides on:

• PostHog vs Google Analytics
• Plausible vs Matomo
• PostHog vs Mixpanel

FAQs