Mixpanel pricing and better alternatives

There’s no other way to say it: Mixpanel can get expensive as you scale. Its pricing model is based on product usage, meaning the more you grow and the events you track, the more you pay.

Is it worth the cost? Do the features included allow you to gain a picture of user behavior in a way that delivers a good return on investment? Or are other tools more comprehensive?

These are the questions we’ll explore in this article. We'll examine Mixpanel pricing in detail and consider why teams might choose Mixpanel or more affordable alternatives.

Mixpanel is a first-generation, fully vertically integrated product analytics tool that helps you analyze interactions with your product. Teams choose it because they can build detailed funnels, track cohorts, and create granular segments from one intuitive dashboard.

Mixpanel’s retention analysis enablement is another major reason people use the tool. By accurately tracking user paths and drop-offs enables teams to see where users are getting stuck or leaving the product.

Another benefit of Mixpanel is that it’s customizable. This means it supports query-time data modeling, including custom events or custom sessions, to allow teams to tailor their analytics to specific business needs and gain deeper insights into user behavior.

Mixpanel’s pricing is based on 2 factors - Monthly Tracked Users (MTUs) and event, meaning you pay for the number of events you track within the platform rather than the number of seats (unlimited for each plan). Events could be any user interaction or action you decide to track, from sign-up clicks to error messages.

Here, we look at the three available plans in more depth.

Mixpanel’s Free Plan

The Free plan comes with these key features and allows for up to 20 million events per month:

Price: Free

Mixpanel’s Growth Plan

With the Growth plan, you get 10K events and a price per event that scales as you grow. As well as the features included in the free plan, you can access:

Price: $28/month

Startups get their first year for free if they were founded less than five years ago and have up to $8M in total funding.

Mixpanel’s Enterprise Plan

Allowing you to analyze up to 1 trillion events, the Enterprise plan comes with everything in the Growth plan PLUS:

Price: Custom pricing.

At first glance, Mixpanel’s pricing plans look relatively affordable. However, there are two significant issues that make it expensive to use at scale:

Event-Based Pricing Is Restrictive

Mixpanel’s pricing is essentially tied to your company’s growth: the more you grow, the more it would cost you. Like many first-generation analytics tools, Mixpanel’s pricing is based on the number of events tracked and monthly tracked users or MTUs.

Let’s take their free plan to illustrate this - while it offers a fair bit of great functionality, you can only use it until you reach 20 million events; as your product gets more engagement, you'll be forced to upgrade. Once you upgrade, MTUs come into play since you need to estimate the number of events based on active users.

Event-based pricing is deceptive in its usability. For example, 20 million events might seem appealing, especially if you’re just starting, but let's consider it in the context of an e-commerce platform. You could hit this limit just by measuring onboarding steps and cart abandonment for 1,266 users within a month.

While MTU-based pricing may appear affordable on the surface, some overages get added based on event volume - events include everything, right from button clicks to scrolls to cart abandonments. Event-based pricing can result in very high overage charges.

Another important point with event-based pricing is how unpredictable it can be. For example, suppose your platform experiences a sudden spike in user activity due to a special event or promotion. In that case, you might incur significantly higher costs for the entire month, even though the surge occurred in just one day. Event-based pricing results in high overage charges, which makes it impossible to predict and adhere to a budget every month.

As a vertically integrated SaaS application, Mixpanel is more expensive compared to a warehouse-native platforms like Optimizely Warehouse-Native Analytics. This means:

Expenses Associated With Collecting Cross-Channel Data

A modern approach to product analytics means considering customer insights from sources such as customer service and marketing. However, to build a complete picture of user behavior across channels, you cannot use Mixpanel alone. The workarounds users have developed involve additional instrumentation and costs.

Siphoning business data from warehouses, for example, means paying for reverse ETL tools and maintaining jobs. Transferring duplicated instrumentation data between other platforms costs time and can result in errors.

You can pay extra for a data warehouse integration add-on inside Mixpanel. However, this can still result in data inconsistencies because of duplication. It also adds significant licensing and maintenance costs.

Here we look at two tools that are less expensive than Mixpanel. You can also read our full guide to Mixpanel alternatives here.

Optimizely Warehouse-Native Analytics’s affordability rests on its warehouse-native nature, which provides a few advantages. In a data warehouse-native platform, you can store data at the lowest fidelity, because cloud-based object storage is relatively inexpensive. Secondly, in contrast to Mixpanel, Optimizely Warehouse-Native Analytics can offer the true benefit of the elasticity of a data warehouse. This elasticity ensures that you do not have to pay for unused resources. For example, if your data analytics workload fluctuates, Optimizely Warehouse-Native Analytics can optimize costs accordingly. Mixpanel, on the other hand, will cost you for the events you set up at their peak capacity, regardless of actual usage. Lastly, in traditional tools like Mixpanel, there can be significant costs associated with building and managing ETL and reserve ETL pipelines to/from data warehouses like Snowflake, BigQuery, or Databricks.

You can still get all of the templated reports offered by Mixpanel e.g. funnel, path, cohorts etc. But you can go much further with ad hoc exploratory analysis to answer any question, forking off from the templates analysis. So you get more advanced analytical capabilities at a lower cost.

Optimizely Warehouse-Native Analytics Pricing

With a growth plan starting at $49/month/seat and a 14-day free trial, Optimizely Warehouse-Native Analytics is positioned for affordability and scale.

Heap is a product analytics platform for companies just getting started with understanding their user data. Inside the user-friendly dashboard, you can easily build reports and run analyses.

Though Heap doesn’t publicly disclose their pricing, we know it’s a cheaper alternative to Mixpanel because its pricing is based on session volumes rather than events. This means that you are charged for the number of times you conduct analyses rather than the number of users you acquire as you grow.

Heap is also well known for its Auto Capture feature. This allows you to automatically capture user interactions like button clicks, visits, and hovers, cutting down the time it takes to set up and start using the product.

Heap as a Mixpanel Alternative

Heap Pricing

Heap does not publicly disclose pricing. Pricing model based on session volumes.

If you’re looking for a product analytics platform that you can grow alongside rather than one that holds you back because it’s expensive or requires several different tools, look to Optimizely Warehouse-Native Analytics.

Our insights-based model provides a more affordable alternative to Mixpanel pricing, and because we are warehouse-native, the data we deliver provides a more complete picture of user behavior across channels.