Amplitude vs Mixpanel
Both are analytics tools. Here is what separates them.
What Amplitude is
Amplitude is a product analytics platform for tracking what people do inside a web or mobile app and turning that behaviour into cohorts, funnels and retention curves. It is sold as a set of named modules: Product Analytics, Marketing Analytics, Session Replay, Heatmaps, Guides and Surveys, Feature Experimentation, Web Experimentation and Data Governance. Pricing follows event volume rather than headcount. Every plan, the free one included, comes with unlimited seats, so adding a colleague who only reads dashboards costs nothing. Free covers 2 million events a month with no credit card, and includes 10,000 session replays and 2,000 AI feedback records. Plus also starts at $0, because the first 2 million events are free, and scales to 70 million events a month with two years of data retention and 20 behavioural cohorts. Growth and Enterprise move to custom event-based pricing quoted by sales, with 20,000 and 50,000 monthly session replays respectively. Product Analytics is the core: cohort, churn, retention, funnel, conversion and milestone analysis, plus a Conversion Drivers view that looks specifically at the users who completed every stage of a funnel. Alerts and heatmaps unlock from the Plus plan upward. Session Replay records individual sessions on the web through either the Browser SDK or a standalone SDK, and on iOS, Android and React Native. Text is masked by default and retention limits can be set to suit. It also works with the User Privacy API and the DSAR API, so deletion and subject access requests can be answered without unpicking recordings by hand. Experiment puts feature flags and testing in the same account as the analytics. Flags can be deployed client-side or server-side, with local evaluation for low latency and remote evaluation when targeting depends on user context, and the whole thing is exposed through APIs so rollouts can be driven from a CI/CD pipeline. The statistical options go past a plain T-test to sequential testing, CUPED, multi-armed bandits, mutual exclusion groups and holdouts. Access control tightens with the plan. SSO and project permissions need Growth or higher, and role-based access control is Enterprise only. Amplitude MCP pulls insights out into an external AI tool, and Active AI Visibility prompts are capped at 500 on Free, 1,000 on Plus, 2,500 on Growth and 5,000 on Enterprise.
What Mixpanel is
Mixpanel is a product analytics platform that measures how people actually use a product. It works from an event-based data model, recording user interactions as discrete events, which is what makes questions of this shape answerable: how many users who did one thing went on to do another. The company was founded in 2009, and the platform now covers product, web and mobile analytics. Alongside the core analysis, Mixpanel provides session replay for watching individual sessions back, experiments and feature flagging with support for multiple environments, and anomaly detection for movements in metrics that nobody thought to go looking for. Because the flags and the analytics sit in the same product, an experiment's exposure and its outcome are recorded in the same event data. Warehouse connectors keep data in sync with a data warehouse, and there is an API for everything else. Custom data retention policies can be set, which matters where there are internal or legal limits on how long behavioural data may be kept. Pricing starts at $0. The free tier allows up to 1 million events per month, which is enough to instrument a small product properly rather than just sample it, and startups can qualify for a plan that is free for the first year. At the other end, the Enterprise plan is quoted at up to 1 trillion events and comes with a dedicated account manager. The gap between those two figures is the point of the pricing: the same event model is meant to hold from a side project up to a company with heavy traffic, and Mixpanel is used by small and midsize businesses as well as enterprises. Support outside the enterprise tier runs through documentation and a community, so routine troubleshooting is self-service. Mixpanel is not open source. It integrates with other platforms, and the combination of warehouse connectors and configurable retention is how teams keep a usable copy of their event data on their own side rather than only inside the analytics tool.
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