Many startups ask us to compare the pros and cons of Amplitude vs. Mixpanel as well as the pricing structure for both options. Both are solid solutions for tracking and analyzing user behavior on your site or app, and this article will help you decide which is the best one for your product.
Amplitude vs. Mixpanel: Free Plan Comparison
We are first going to first compare the free plans before moving on to the first tier of paid plans on Amplitude and Mixpanel. As a startup, you might be relatively price-sensitive, so we hope this format of comparing pricing helps you decide which analytics platform best suits your needs.
Amplitude Free Plan: Pros and Cons
Actions Limit
On the free plan of Amplitude, you get a whopping 10 million actions per month. An action is any activity that is tracked by Amplitude. Unless you have thousands of monthly active users that perform hundreds of actions each, you'll be comfortably within this limit.
User Segmentation
You can manually segment your users by action taken on a chart. This is important for identifying key patterns among users. You can easily visualize actions in reports and even create custom dashboards for your team to view.
Data Retention
Amplitude has unlimited data history for each user tracked! No fine print. Even on the free plan, you can enjoy unlimited data retention for each user.
Data Export
Amplitude allows you to export your data to CSV. After you download the CSV, you can process this data in anyway you wish. This includes importing your data to Excel or other services to further analyze your data.
Alerts
Amplitude does not offer alerts based on KPIs. So, if you want to be notified when your users aren't scrolling past your hero image, you're out of luck.
Mixpanel Free Plan: Pros and Cons
Actions Limit
While Mixpanel's free plan doesn't have an actions limit, it does have a limit of 1000 users tracked per month. This means you can only track actions for 1000 unique users with at least one action per month. If you exceed this limit, you'll have to pay the à la carte rate per tracked user. This rate is 20% above their normal one.
User Segmentation
Just like Amplitude, Mixpanel allows you to create "exploratory reports" and custom dashboards that can visualize user behavior. You also get access to Signal. Signal uses predictive analytics to illuminate the characteristics that make users more likely to stay engaged.
Data Retention
Mixpanel only offers 90 days of data history on their free plan. That means you can only query for data that is up to 3 months old per user. If you want to track seasonal or cyclical behavior, you're out of luck.
Data Export
Mixpanel does not offer a data export function on the free plan. Any visualization or analytics will have to be done through their platform.
Alerts
Mixpanel offers automatic alerts and monitoring for when your KPIs spike or dip, and even identifies the users causing the alert. This is a great tool for startups that want to be able to respond to a sudden increase or decrease in activity.
Amplitude vs. Mixpanel: Paid Plan Comparison
If you find the free plans to be too limiting, read on to learn about the paid plans! To best cater to our audience of startups, we will only be comparing the first tier of paid plan per service and not the enterprise plans.
Amplitude Paid Plan: Pros and Cons
The first paid plan that Amplitude offers is called the Growth plan. Amplitude does not allow you to sign up for the Growth plan—you must contact their sales department. This leads to some guesswork on some of the numbers listed below, as the specific numbers will likely change based on your needs.
Actions Limit
Amplitude actually does not list the action limit on their site for the Growth plan. However, according to this article, it may be 100 million actions per month (up from 10 million on the free plan). This should comfortably accommodate a startup with a bigger user base, or a startup that's looking to grow their user base.
Data Retention, Data Export
Amplitude already offers unlimited data retention and CSV data export on their free plan, and the Growth plan is no different.
Predictive Analytics
The Growth plan is where things get exciting for Amplitude. You'll have access to Personas, which automatically groups users together by behavior patterns, allowing you to target anyone from the most active users to the least active. You also get access to a feature called Compass, which helps you find the user actions that are predict high retention rates, as well as the Engagement Matrix, which helps you discover the adoption and usage frequency of different features on your site or app.
Mixpanel Paid Plan: Pros and Cons
Actions Limit
Mixpanel's paid plan, also called Growth, starts you at the same 1,000 monthly tracked users, but you can pay to expand this up to 25,000 monthly tracked users.
Data Retention
Data retention on the Mixpanel Growth plan is 12 months (up from 90 days). This is good news for startups that want to look at patterns over the course of a year, but you still won't be able to compare year-to-year data for your tracked users.
Data Export
More good news for Mixpanel Growth subscribers—you now have access to a raw data export of up to 12 months of data history, matching the data retention of the plan.
Predictive Analytics
Mixpanel's free plan already has access to their suite of predictive analytics, and the Growth plan is no different.
Amplitude Paid Plan: Pricing
Amplitude doesn't have concrete numbers for the Growth plan on their site. According to the source we mentioned previously,, the pricing could be as much as $995/month, equating to $12,000/year. Quite a steep price to pay if you want to upgrade, but if you can comfortably stay within 10 million monthly actions and don't need the predictive analytics, the Amplitude free plan is still a solid choice. For startups that are really looking to go all in on user analytics and user retention, the Amplitude Growth plan is an expensive but worthy service.
Mixpanel Paid Plan: Pricing
Mixpanel's Growth plan starts pretty cheap at $89/month for 1,000 monthly tracked users, but you get about a 30% discount if you buy yearly ($779/year for 1,000 users). If you want to track more than 1,000 users, you pay about $40/month for each additional 1,000 users. If you have high traffic and high unique monthly users this could quickly get pricey, although Amplitude's Growth plan is more expensive than the maxed out Mixpanel Growth plan.
Amplitude vs. Mixpanel: Which one wins?
Deciding between Amplitude and Mixpanel is complex and depends on your startup's specific needs. Looking at features alone, Amplitude and Mixpanel pretty much breakeven on the Growth plan, with the key difference being unlimited data retention and export in Amplitude vs. 12 months data retention and export in Mixpanel. However, Mixpanel offers more flexible (and cheaper) pricing on their Growth plan, so keep this in mind if your startup is fairly price-sensitive. Side note: if you're price-sensitive and are looking for a cost-effective cloud hosted database, consider using Firestore.
However, if your desire is to make the most out of a free plan, we think Amplitude comes out ahead in most categories. It wins on actions per month, data retention, and data export, while Mixpanel only wins in the predictive analytics category. At Aloa, we experience monthly actions and users way below the limit imposed on both free plans, so our decision was based on the best free plan. The average length of a client engagement is more than 90 days, so the 90 day data retention of Mixpanel's free plan simply wouldn't be enough to draw meaningful conclusions about our users. In the end, we decided to use Amplitude's free plan because it best fit our needs.
We hope this comparison was helpful in making a decision between Amplitude and Mixpanel! If you have any questions or think we missed a key factor in our analysis, email us at resources@aloa.co!
