Mixpanel vs Plausible
Both are analytics tools. Here is what separates them.
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.
What Plausible is
Plausible Analytics is a web analytics tool that reports how many people visit a site and what they do there, without cookies and without collecting personal data. It is built as a direct alternative to Google Analytics for site owners who want the numbers but not the tracking. The tracking script is under 1 KB, small enough that it does not meaningfully affect how fast a page loads. Because it sets no cookies and stores no personal data, a site running it does not need a cookie banner for analytics, and the product is compliant with GDPR and CCPA. It does not follow visitors across sites or devices, and the rest of the design follows from that: there is no individual-level profile to query, so every report is an aggregate. The dashboard updates in real time and fits on a single screen. It answers the questions most site owners actually have, which pages get read, where visitors came from, which campaigns worked, and what people did before they left. Goals can be configured with custom properties to track signups, purchases, clicks and form completions, and revenue can be attributed to them. Scroll depth, file downloads and outbound clicks are tracked automatically rather than needing separate setup, and bot traffic is filtered out by default. Teams can manage several sites under one account, sort them by traffic, and control who sees which of them. Two-factor authentication is available. There is an API for reading statistics and for sending events from a server, plus integrations with Google Search Console, Google Tag Manager and WordPress. Existing Google Analytics data can be imported, so moving does not mean losing the history. Plausible is open source under the AGPLv3 licence and the code is public and auditable on GitHub. It can be self-hosted, so a team that wants its analytics on its own infrastructure can run the whole thing itself. The hosted service is based and hosted in the EU. Uku Taht started the project in December 2018 and paid subscriptions launched the following year. The company is self-funded and profitable, has no outside investors, crossed one million dollars in annual recurring revenue in 2022, and is now a team of ten serving more than twenty thousand paying subscribers. Pricing starts at four dollars a month on an annual plan and runs to ninety dollars a month, with a free trial.
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