Mixpanel

Overview

Mixpanel is a product analytics platform built around event tracking — capturing every user action (button click, feature interaction, purchase) and making it queryable in real time. Founded in 2009, it pioneered the modern approach to product analytics and remains one of the strongest platforms for funnel analysis, retention cohorts, and user segmentation.

The fundamental difference between Mixpanel and tools like Google Analytics is intentionality: GA measures traffic, Mixpanel measures product behaviour. When product teams want to know what percentage of users who signed up in January are still active in March, and how that differs for users who used a specific feature in their first week — Mixpanel answers that question directly.

Key Features

• Funnels — step-by-step conversion analysis with breakdown by user properties and event cohorts
• Retention analysis — cohort retention curves showing how user engagement evolves over time
• User segmentation — create and save cohorts based on any combination of events and properties
• Flows — visualise the actual paths users take through your product
• Impact analysis — measure how specific events correlate with downstream metric changes
• A/B test analysis — measure the impact of experiments on any Mixpanel metric
• Messaging — in-app messages and push notifications triggered by user behaviour
• Data manager — schema management and property governance for large data teams
• SDKs and APIs — client-side SDKs for web, iOS, Android; server-side API; warehouse integrations

Pricing

Mixpanel Free includes up to 20 million monthly events — the most generous free tier in the product analytics category. Growth plans are usage-based starting from approximately $24/month for 25 million events, scaling with event volume. Enterprise pricing is custom and adds SLA guarantees, advanced access controls, and dedicated support.

Best For

Mixpanel is the right analytics tool for product and growth teams who need to understand user behaviour within a product — not just traffic to a website. It is particularly strong for subscription software, mobile apps, and consumer products where retention and feature adoption are the key metrics being optimised. Data analysts who want to build custom reports and run ad-hoc cohort queries will find Mixpanel's query model more flexible than GA4.

Limitations

Mixpanel requires developer instrumentation — teams need to add tracking calls to their product code for each event they want to measure. This upfront investment is a meaningful cost for small teams. Mixpanel is not a web analytics replacement; it lacks traffic source analysis, SEO data, and content-level page analytics. Complex queries over large date ranges can be slow on high-event-volume workspaces.

Verdict

The leading standalone product analytics platform for understanding in-product user behaviour. The free tier's 20M events/month makes it accessible for most teams. If you are building a software product and need to understand how users actually use it, Mixpanel is the right starting point.