Mixpanel vs amplitude can any of them do AI product analytics?

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Product analytics tools like Mixpanel and Amplitude help you gain a deep understanding of how customers engage with your products. Both Mixpanel and Amplitude are self-serve product analytics tools that are working towards democratizing data.

With the exponential rise and demand for AI integrated products, this produces mammoth amounts of data sets from these apps. But product analytics with AI means these systems learn and improve over time, making predictions more accurate. This lets you look at huge amounts of data, giving deep insights that old methods simply won’t match through identifying patterns, delivering data insights, and making predictions of future trends.

As AI product analytics becomes more popular, a big question arises: Can Mixpanel and Amplitude really offer the insights from AI data analysis we need?

In this article we’ll be comparing Mixpanel and Amplitude under different use cases but also discuss how other tools specifically built for AI products like Phospho are evolving product analytics out of necessity.

Overview of Mixpanel and Amplitude

As a quick overview of each it’s first useful to understand how differently they approach product analytics: Amplitude emphasizes data instrumentation and governance while Mixpanel focuses on ease of use.

Mixpanel

Mixpanel is a cross-platform analytics system that offers much more than just data analysis. It’s an all in one service that works great with analytics, but at the same time provides you with push notifications, marketing automation, and even a CRM.

As an analytics system, it perfectly tracks all the user events (sign-ups, page views, clicks, transactions, etc) and presents them in user-friendly data reports. The analytics gathered can be used to create funnels and user cohorts for even deeper understanding of your user base.

Mixpanel was initially focused on mobile app analytics, meaning that everything concerning gathering data from your subscription based app should work just fine, which adds points to it as a service mobile app developers should choose.

Mixpanel’s philosophy centers around getting teams started with product analytics as quickly as possible, making sure that implementation is fuss-free and that everyone picks it up and can use it right away.

They want their tool to inform the decisions of everyone in the company. This means making an analytics tool anyone can use regardless of their technical expertise.

Amplitude

As opposed to Mixpanel, Amplitude’s initial focus was on presenting the deepest and most precise product analytics, and so it remains to this day. You won’t find any notifications or marketing tools here, only high fidelity reports.

The depths of the event based data tracked that you can dive into is truly remarkable. The downside to it is that Amplitude requires a lot of data to work properly, otherwise your results may be rather inaccurate.

That’s why this analytics system is usually popular with huge businesses and enterprises that have at least several tens of thousands of MAU (monthly active users) and want to be in full control of their customer journey.

Amplitude places extreme importance on data instrumentation, ensuring that measures are put in place so that you’re working with good-quality data.

It’s worth noting now that they both have surface-level AI-powered capabilities, but none significantly augment the data analysis they can already provide.

They might have different approaches and philosophies, but Mixpanel and Amplitude are both product intelligence platforms that are neck-to-neck when considering they serve the same market, solve the same problems, and are designed to help you get a deeper view of the customer journey. So, what are the key differences between them so we can make a better-informed decision?

Key Differences Between Mixpanel and Amplitude: Features and Use Cases

Based on what we’ve talked about in the introductory part to this article, you probably get the idea that these two analytics systems share some things in common, but they do have distinctive features that differentiate them from one another. So let’s have a look at what makes them unique and different.

1) Dashboards and Reporting

Working with large amounts of data and graphs can easily overwhelm you, so for some it’s important to have a platform that doesn’t get you lost in the numbers.

For this, Mixpanel’s dashboard is far better suited. It provides a number of very basic dashboards but it can also be a data storytelling interface with the option to create your own custom ones after you’re familiar with the platform. You can enrich the data with different charts, long-form text, pictures, or videos, so that individuals can convey reports and insights much better.

Amplitude, on the other hand, is less beginner-friendly and requires customisation beforehand, which may be confusing to new users or less data-savvy team members. On the flip side, Amplitude offers far more flexibility for in-depth and advanced reporting capabilities with filter customisations, widgets, advanced chart visualisations, and Amplitude Notebooks.

This is definitely where Amplitude can compensate for Mixpanel’s superior ease of use by providing more insights into user behavior if you can manage the complexity.

2) Event-based Tracking and Data Collection

Both Mixpanel and Amplitude are based on event-based analytics. Unlike Google Analytics (GA), which is session based, Amplitude and Mixpanel track the actions that individuals take as they engage with your product.

Amplitude's event tracking is more focused on measuring user behavior within a product, while Mixpanel's event tracking is customizable and more focused on tracking individual user behavior across multiple touch points.

Both tools provide SDKs for data collection from various platforms. Amplitude offers a wider range of SDKs and supports server side data ingestion APIs.

3) Cohort and Retention Analysis

Amplitude provides robust features for analyzing user cohorts and tracking retention over time. This allows you to track and compare the behavior of specific groups of users. It enables you to understand how different user cohorts retain and engage with your product, allowing you to identify the factors influencing retention from different types of users to make more informed product decisions.

Mixpanel also offers both cohort and retention analysis capabilities, allowing you to study the behaviour of different users. But it’s worth knowing that Amplitude’s focus on this is far more detailed and offers more options for segmentation and visualization.

4) A/B Testing

Mixpanel’s A/B testing tool helps you test the impact of new features by testing different variants. The tool will help you identify which variant performs better and contributes more highly to an increase in the KPIs you’re tracking.

Amplitude’s ‘Experiment’ feature does A/B testing like Mixpanel, but it’s also a feature flagging tool that helps product, engineering, and design teams collaborate in planning, tracking, and analyzing product changes.

5) Pricing

Both Amplitude and Mixpanel have three pricing tiers. Both include free plans as well as scholarship programs. Their free plans offer the essential features but obviously you will need to try the product to understand if it works for you with limited functionality.

Mixpanel’s Growth plan starts at $28/month and for enterprise plans you have to contact their sales team. Mixpanel lets you create your own Growth plan right on the site, where you can state the number of monthly tracked users that you need and not overpay which suits startups really well. If you go over, the platform still works you would just pay extra the following month.

Their scholarship program gives startups their first year free and $50,000 in credits for overages. The requirements for this are that you have up to $8M in total funding and are less than 5 years old.

As for Amplitude, they have a free plan with limited features, the Plus plan at a higher price of $49/month, and an enterprise plan that includes a lot of security compliance and governance controls.

However, if only comparing free plans, Amplitude allows for 10 million actions per month for free. So, if you’re a startup or small business with a few thousand users or less, you’ll get very far with this plan.

They offer 3 scholarship programs: a free 1 year growth plan to startups with under $10M in funding and with fewer than 20 employees. Their 2 other scholarships are: a free Growth plan for startups with a Black co-founder with under $30M in funding and less than 150 employees, and a 25% discount on the growth plan for 1 year if your startup has less than $25M in funding and have Y Combinator, AWS, or Sequoia companies at any funding level.

6) Integrations and importing data

As we’ve already mentioned, Mixpanel is not just a reporting system, it’s a full fledged platform that, apart from just showing data, allows you to take certain actions with it. Here’s the list of what can be found only in Mixpanel:

• Integrations with HubSpot, Salesforce, and Zapier.
• Marketing automation suite that practically turns Mixpanel into a CRM.
• Built-in notifications (via SMS, email, or push).

Mixpanel is a clear winner in this “arms race”, however, we once again see that Amplitude stands its ground in being the analytics system only, without trying to spray itself too thin, which is still appreciated.

You can start with all new data on both Mixpanel and Amplitude. And if you’ve already got some data from other platforms, that’s doable on both Amplitude and Mixpanel.

You can ingest data through SDK integration, from a CDP, through cloud ingestion, data pipelines, or other business applications.

7) Use Cases: Mixpanel VS Amplitude

Mixpanel dominant use cases:

Mobile-first startups looking for a combination of user analytics, marketing, and CRM. Ideal for teams needing quick and accessible insights without data analysis expertise or siloing team members.

Amplitude dominant use cases:

Large enterprises with lots of data already and need secure data management. Amplitude is ideal for requiring detailed user analytics capabilities for building customer personas, measuring feature impact, reviewing their user journey, and funnel analysis for growth-hacking.

Choosing between them will largely come down to business goals and how much of your team you want involved in the process. Remember though, both tools still have their limitations when it comes to AI product analytics, This is where we see more demand for both accessible and comprehensive data analytics platforms like Phospho, especially for LLM apps.

The Evolution of Product Analytics with AI

As we’ve mentioned, more and more apps are integrating LLMs for more interactive and conversational features at an unprecedented rate. We could even argue as consumers we now even expect these AI capabillties in our everyday apps as a standard.

The problem is, as we’ve highlighted in previous articles, the sheer pace of development in AI LLMs and their models has not been matched by that of product analytics tools for AI products.

Even with tools such as Amplitude and Mixpanel, they have their limitations under this context. For example, the lack of broad customisation options and steep learning curves that come with Amplitude. Or the difficulties in easily A/B testing different versions of your app not just features with Mixpanel.

There’s a need for product analytics to evolve specifically for LLM apps as there is a huge pool of untapped data in these conversations with users.

This is why we built Phospho to bring together the best parts of the tools we’ve looked at in this article and bring them to AI product analytics for LLM apps.

Introducing Phospho – The Future of AI Product Analytics

Phospho is an open source text analytics platform designed for LLM apps to monitor, learn and evaluate text data to drive effective iteration. Here are some features we’ve specifically developed to help you derive rich customer insights to tailor products to customer needs and preferences so you can drive long-term engagement and growth:

1. Real-Time Monitoring: this lets you track and log user inputs to identify issues or trends as well as continuously fine tune the performance of your LLM app.
2. Custom KPIs Extraction: Create your own KPIs and custom criteria to ‘flag’ for, and you can label whether it was a successful or unsuccessful interaction.
3. Continuous Evaluation: use our automatic continuous evaluation pipeline to keep improving your model’s performance.
4. Easy Integration: simply add Phospho to your tech stack with any popular tools and languages like JavaScript, Python, CSV, OpenAI, LangChain, and Mistral.
5. User Feedback Linking: collect, attach, and analyze user feedback in context to make targeted improvements toward overall app performance.

Our platform helps obtain qualitative and quantitative insights from end-user interactions. A few lines of code are enough to help product managers and developers quickly sift through an enormous amount of unstructured data to gain visibility into what aspects of the product could be optimised as highest priority.

Traditional text analytics are insufficient given the rapid evolution of gen AI. Consequently, they are incapable of providing the insights in real-time that we need. Without robust, more advanced analytics, we risk missing critical insights, trends, and opportunities for improvement in our LLM applications.

Advanced text analytics offer a competitive edge through faster and more effective iteration in line with users needs and sentiment.

So if you want to confidently iterate according to user needs and create more efficient, accurate, and user-centric LLM apps, sign up here and try out Phospho on your own data.

Mixpanel VS Amplitude VS Phospho: Which tool for you?

It’s important to remember that neither of the tools we’ve compared in this article are “better” than the other. There’s no winner or loser between Amplitude and Mixpanel. It all depends on how much AI is integrated in your product, your budget, your user base, and how much you want your team involved in the entire process.

In short, if you have a high user base (+20k users) and lots of data it would make sense to go with Amplitude’s more robust data management and enterprise centric approach. But if you’re an early stage startup with a lean cross functional team looking to get product insights for a smaller user base as quickly as possible, Mixpanel would suit your needs far better.

However, if you’re developing an AI product and/or an LLM app you will likely notice the need for more AI specific product analytics tools like Phospho in order to extract product insights from your users. By offering features tailor made for AI products while keeping the accessibility benefits for early stage startups teams and easy integration, this makes our platform best positioned for effective and data driven iteration cycles for your AI product.

If you want to integrate Phospho into your LLM app and get started, sign up here. We offer plenty of documentation as well to help you get started.