Heap vs Amplitude vs Mixpanel for Product Analytics

Looking for a good product analytics tool and wondering which one of Heap, Amplitude, and Mixpanel is the best option for your SaaS company? Let’s compare them!

There are plenty of tools for product analytics on review sites, but they don’t make the choice any easier.

The crux of the issue is – to make the right choice, you need to account for your priorities: your different jobs to be done, budget, and the size of your company. But don’t worry – we’re coming to help!

In this post, we’ll discuss exactly that – which tool is best for product analytics depending on the different criteria that different SaaS companies may have.

Let’s dive in!

Summary of Heap vs Amplitude vs Mixpanel for product analytics

• Product analytics studies user interactions with a product or service, allowing product teams to monitor, evaluate, and assess data related to customer engagement and behavior. This information is used by teams to optimize their product or service to improve user experience.

Let’s explore how Heap, Amplitude, and Mixpanel compare when it comes to product analytics.

• Heap is a robust product analytics platform that provides users with a plethora of in-depth insights into customer behavior and needs. With Heap, you can track user interactions in real time across all touch points within your product.

• Amplitude is a powerful analytics tool that gives organizations in-depth, real-time insights into product usage and user behavior. It offers various features, including event segmentation, funnel analysis, user cohorts, and retention analysis.

• Mixpanel is a simple and powerful product analytics tool that allows product teams to track and analyze in-app product engagement. It allows your team to see every moment of the customer experience clearly, so you can make changes that work.

• Userpilot is a product growth platform that drives user activation, feature adoption, and expansion revenue. It also helps product teams collect user feedback, streamline onboarding, and gather actionable insights from analytics.

• If you’re looking for a better option for product analytics, Userpilot exceeds both functionality and value for money compared to other tools on the list. Get a Userpilot demo for product analytics and drive your product growth code-free.

What is product analytics

Product analytics studies user interactions with a product or service, allowing product teams to monitor, evaluate, and assess data related to customer engagement and behavior. This information is used by teams to optimize their product or service to improve user experience.

Heap for product analytics

As a cutting-edge product analytics tool, Heap is packed with features that help you monitor product usage, activation, and adoption. Insights from Heap can help you identify points of friction in user journeys and optimize the user experience to drive product growth.

Here’s how Heap facilitates seamless product analytics:

• Once you install Heap’s code snippet into your product, it automatically starts tracking user actions. You can access this raw data on your Heap dashboard and label the most relevant events.

In-depth analysis on Heap.

• You can use the Live data feed for a glimpse of how users move through your product in real time. This makes it easier to identify and eliminate roadblocks.

Real-time data on Heap.

• You can use Session Replays to monitor the exact journey a user takes within your product. It’ll help you identify points where they struggle to complete an action or leave without taking the desired action.

Session replays feature on Heap.

• Head to the “Usage over time” chart in the Analyze section for an overview of different events, user behavior, and conversion rates. Heap provides numerous filters for these events too.

Usage tracking on Heap.

• Other product analytics features that come in handy include Journey Maps, Funnel analysis, Retention analysis, and Heatmaps.

Heap pros

As a cutting-edge digital insights platform, Heap offers several valuable features for product developers, marketers, and customer success teams. Let’s take a closer look at its benefits.

• Automated data capture – Heap’s Autocapture feature lets you automatically track user actions, such as clicks, swipes, page views, and form submissions. That means you don’t have to worry about setting up custom tracking for each event. Also, you can track events retroactively.
• Easy setup – Getting started with Heap is as easy as installing a code snippet into your product. In other words, you don’t need a lot of technical knowledge or expertise.
• Advanced analytics – Besides Autocapture, Heap also lets you track custom events and services-side events to help you build a comprehensive user behavior data set. With features like Heatmaps and Session Replays, it results in unparalleled insights into how users navigate your product and the paths that lead to desired outcomes.
• Real-time insights – With the Live data feed, you get a chronological and real time view of all Heap events (raw and labeled). That means you can track and analyze user interactions as they happen.
• Seamless collaboration – Features like Shared Spaces facilitate collaboration and reporting among cross-functional teams. Similarly, you can share Session Replays with other team members.
• Web and mobile support – Heap works on all kinds of products, be it websites, web applications, or mobile apps.
• Extensive integrations – Heap supports integrations with more than 100 platforms, including customer engagement tools, data warehouses, product adoption tools, etc.
• Emphasis on customer education – Heap provides a variety of helpful resources to get you get started with the platform and use it to the fullest. These include Heap University (video tutorials), Heap Plays (how-to guides), Help Center, and a comprehensive blog and content library.

Heap cons

Heap comes with an impressive set of features that provide you with a 360-degree view of how users navigate your product and interact with various elements. But the product analytics platform isn’t without limitations.

Here are a few drawbacks of Heap worth mentioning:

• Steep learning curve – While the setup is a cakewalk, Heap involves a fairly steep learning curve due to its vast array of features. As a new user, it’ll take you a while to get a grip on all its features.
• Data storage requirements – Heap’s Autocapture feature requires you to collect and store a ton of data. Things can get expensive quickly as your product attracts new users.
• Lack of an engagement layer – While Heap offers an in-depth overview of user behavior and product usage, it doesn’t let you act on these insights. You’ll need other customer engagement tools to trigger targeted in-app experiences based on data and insights from Heap.
• Limited segmentation capabilities – Heap lets you segment users based on events and properties. It can be restrictive when you want to build hyper-personalized user journeys.

Heap pricing

Pricing for Heap is available on request. You’ll have to contact the sales team for a quote. The final price will depend on various factors, including the number of sessions and integrations you need.

That said, Heap offers a free plan that lets you track up to 10,000 user sessions per month and stores your data for 6 months. Review platforms like G2 say that paid plans start at $3,600 per year. All paid plans come with a 14-day free trial, too.

Pricing plans of Heap.

You can choose from the following plans:

• Free – Ideal for teams looking to establish product-market fit.
• Starter – Suitable for startups looking to scale their business.
• Growth – Useful for companies that need advanced features, such as account analytics and report alerts.
• Pro – Tailored for enterprise businesses with robust security and compliance requirements.

It’s worth mentioning here that Heap offers a handy ROI calculator to help you get a clearer picture of whether it’s worth the investment.

Amplitude for product analytics

As a digital analytics platform, Amplitude is designed to provide you with a plethora of useful product-related insights. Whether you want to assess feature adoption or track conversions, Amplitude’s powerful analytics eliminate guesswork from the process. You can share these real-time analytics among different teams to facilitate collaboration.

Amplitude product analytics charts.

The features that facilitate seamless access to product analytics include:

• Automated report generation (with actionable insights)
• Instant visualizations (to map user journeys and understand product usage)
• Event recommendation (so you know what events and metrics to track)

Amplitude pros

Amplitude is one of the most feature-packed stand alone product analytics platforms for digital products at the moment. It’s designed to meet the needs of modern product and growth teams that want to embrace data-driven decision-making.

Let’s take a closer look at the benefits of Amplitude:

• Advanced product analytics – Amplitude enables you to dig deep into user behavior, including how they interact with your product and where they convert or drop off.
• Cross-platform analytics – Amplitude lets you track product usage across native apps, web apps, and web pages. It can help you understand how users move between these platforms.
• Designed for collaboration – It enables you to easily share dashboards and reports with other team members. Amplitude also facilitates collaboration among different teams, including product, marketing, and customer success.
• Powerful integrations – Amplitude connects with more than a hundred platforms, including data warehouses, marketing automation tools, ad networks, and customer data platforms. This helps you harness the full potential of product and user behavior data.
• Customer education – Amplitude offers an extensive resource center and a community where you can connect with product analytics experts. Moreover, you get easy access to a chatbot and help center from your dashboard.

Amplitude cons

Despite its impressive suite of features, Amplitude comes with a few drawbacks. These include:

• Steep learning curve – Amplitude’s fully customizable dashboards can be intimidating for new users. You’ll need basic technical knowledge to set up and track events using Amplitude. It may not be particularly suitable for teams without in-house analysts.
• No user engagement functionalities While Amplitude offers a ton of user behavior data, it doesn’t provide any tools to act on these insights. In contrast, a product adoption platform like Userpilot lets you harness usage and behavior data to optimize in-app experiences.
• Lack of automated event tracking – Amplitude doesn’t automatically track events like clicks, page views, and swipes. You have to define the events you want to track before getting started.

Amplitude pricing

Amplitude offers three distinct pricing tiers:

• Starter – A free plan suitable for small teams.
• Growth – Suitable for teams that need to scale fast; pricing is available on request and depends on your requirements.
• Enterprise – Includes advanced governance and security features; pricing is available on request.

Amplitude pricing plans.

Both Growth and Enterprise plans come with a 14-day free trial. Amplitude also offers a free annual subscription to the Growth plan under the following programs:

• Scholarship Program for startups with under $5 million in funding and fewer than 20 employees.
• Black Founders Program for US startups with a Black co-founder, fewer than 150 employees, and under $30 million funding.

However, it’s worth noting that Amplitude’s pricing plans are complex because they’re based on the number of monthly events or features. Other tools like Mixpanel and Userpilot offer more transparent pricing based on the number of monthly active users.

Mixpanel for Product analytics

Product analytics is the art of collecting, analyzing, and leveraging data to optimize products, explore user behavior, and drive business growth.

It supports both mobile and web apps, and it’s an analytics tool of choice for product teams across the globe, regardless of the company size.

Mixpanel product analytics functionalities work based on:

• User segmentation: User segmentation is the bedrock of effective product analytics in Mixpanel. You can divide your user base into distinct groups based on attributes, behaviors, or properties and uncover meaningful trends and preferences among various user groups.
• Funnel analysis: Mixpanel’s funnel analysis feature allows you to create sequences of events that users should ideally complete. This helps you gain insights into where users drop off and where they progress.
• Retention analysis: With the retention analysis feature, you are able to track how often users return to your application after their initial interaction.

Mixpanel offers a free plan with very advanced product analytics functionality but no engagement layer or feedback features like that of Userpilot. Even though Userpilot may not support such advanced analytics as Mixpanel, it still offers enough to enable product managers to make data-driven decisions.

Mixpanel pros

Let’s have a look at the pros of using Mixpanel:

• Sophisticated features that enable granular data analysis are a significant advantage of using Mixpanel because they allow you to gain deeper insights into user behavior, interactions, and trends. For example, with the event tracking feature, you can track user sign-ups, product purchases, clicks on specific buttons, and more.
• Unlimited segmentation capabilities: It offers unlimited segmentation capabilities on attributes, user properties, and cohorts. This level of segmentation gives you a more detailed view of your consumers and their engagement level.
• Easy-to-navigate UI patterns: The user interface of this platform is simple and has a wide variety of functions and resources to help you work in the most organized way, have better team coordination, and keep efficiency high.
• Seamless onboarding for your product team: Getting started on Mixpanel is easy and without stress. Register, choose a plan, or hop on for a free trial.
• A free plan that is sufficient for small SaaS companies: This free plan offers valuable features and resources — unlimited integrations, unlimited collaborators, templates, and essentials to get started quickly — that can help you gain insights into user behavior and make data-driven decisions, even when operating with limited budgets.
• Powerful interactive and easily accessible visuals: For quicker decision-making to beat analysis paralysis.

Mixpanel cons

While Mixpanel is a powerful product analytics tool with many great features, there are still some downsides. Here are the main cons of the tool:

• The free plan works well for small SaaS businesses, but enterprise-grade features can be expensive depending on your needs.
• You will need the help of your engineering team to set up and configure the tool — The platform’s advanced functionalities, custom event tracking and segmentation, might require a steeper learning curve, especially for those without a strong background in data analysis.
• Limited Attribution Models: While Mixpanel offers various analytics features, its attribution modeling capabilities might be more limited.
• There is no user feedback or engagement functionality, so you need third-party tools.

Mixpanel pricing

Mixpanel’s pricing plan is divided into 3 plans; the starter plan, the enterprise plan, and the growth plan.

Here’s an overview of the pricing plans and features of each plan:

• Starter plan: This plan features essentials to find product-market fit. It is free and allows up to 20M monthly events. In addition, you get access to all core reports for user journey analysis, templates to get started easily, unlimited integrations, and unlimited collaborators.
• Growth plan: This plan costs $20+ per month for up to 100M monthly events. You get all features in the starter plan plus unlimited saved reports to monitor, update, and iterate on KPIs, Mixpanel modeling layer, and group analytics and data pipeline add-ons.
• Enterprise plan: This plan empowers your team, especially if you have a large organization. It costs $833+ per month for up to 5M-100M+ monthly events. This plan features all the benefits of the growth plan plus advanced access controls, shared data views for collaboration, automated provisioning and SSO, and prioritized support.

Better alternative to Heap, Amplitude, and Mixpanel

We have discussed Heap, Amplitude, and Mixpanel for product analytics with their pros, cons, and pricing. Let’s take a look at a better alternative – Userpilot.

Userpilot for product analytics

Product analytics lets you collect and analyze data about how users interact with your product so you can extract actionable insights. Userpilot lets you look at granular product analytics, such as which features have the highest adoption rates, and big-picture insights like trend reports.

Here are Userpilot’s top product analytics features:

• Feature tagging: Userpilot’s click-to-track feature tagger lets you view how many times a feature has been used and by how many users to measure its adoption. Users on the Starter plan can add up to 15 feature tags while those on the Growth or Enterprise tier can create unlimited tags.

• Trends and funnels: Userpilot’s trends and funnels report lets you extract actionable insights from big data. You’ll be able to see which stage of an onboarding/conversion funnel most users drop out on and create trend reports with detailed breakdowns by user or time period.

• Saved reports: The saved reports analytics dashboard shows you all the reports you’ve created and lets you filter, export, or delete any reports in a single click. In addition to adding filters or sorting by report type, you can also edit or duplicate reports to help you review analytics.

• Analytics integrations: Userpilot integrates with some of the most popular analytics tools like Amplitude, Mixpanel, Segment, Google Analytics, and more. This makes it possible to sync product analytics both ways between the tools in your tech stack (two-way integration is only available for Hubspot at the time of writing, more to come).

Userpilot pros

As a full-suite digital adoption platform, Userpilot has all the features you need to onboard users, track analytics, and gather feedback from customers without writing a single line of code. Here are a few pros of using Userpilot as your product growth solution:

• No-code builder: Userpilot’s Chrome extension lets you build flows, add UI elements, and tag features without writing a single line of code.
• UI patterns: There are plenty of UI patterns to choose from when using Userpilot, such as hotspots, tooltips, banners, slideouts, modals, and more!
• Startup-friendly: Userpilot’s entry-level plan gives you access to all available UI patterns so you can hit the ground running.
• Walkthroughs and flows: Build engaging interactive walkthroughs and personalized onboarding flows that target specific segments of your user base.
• Self-service support: Build an in-app resource center to help users solve problems, customize its appearance to align it with your brand, and insert various types of content (videos, flows, or chatbots) to keep your customers satisfied.
• A/B testing: Userpilot’s built-in A/B testing capabilities will help you split-test flows, iterate on the best-performing variants, and continually optimize based on user behavior.
• Feedback collection: Userpilot has built-in NPS surveys with its own unified analytics dashboard and response tagging to help you retarget users. There are other survey types to choose from and you can even create your own custom survey.
• Survey templates: There are 14 survey templates to choose from so you can gather feedback on specific features or run customer satisfaction benchmarking surveys like CSAT and CES.
• Advanced analytics: Userpilot lets you analyze product usage data, monitor engagement on all in-app flows, and use the data to create user segments that are based on behaviors instead of demographics.
• Event tracking: Userpilot’s no-code event tracking lets you tag UI interactions (hovers, clicks, or form fills) and group them into a custom event that reflects feature usage.
• Third-party integrations: Userpilot has built-in integrations with tools like Amplitude, Mixpanel, Kissmetrics, Segment, Heap, HubSpot, Intercom, Google Analytics, and Google Tag Manager so you can share data between all the solutions in your tech stack.

Userpilot cons

Of course, no tool is perfect and there are a few cons to consider before choosing Userpilot as your user onboarding or product growth solution:

• Employee onboarding: Currently, Userpilot only supports in-app customer onboarding.
• Mobile apps: Userpilot doesn’t have any mobile compatibility which could make it difficult for developers with cross-platform applications to create a consistent user experience for both versions of their product.
• Freemium plan: There’s no freemium Userpilot plan so those bootstrapping their startup and need sub-$100 solutions should consider more affordable onboarding platforms like UserGuiding or Product Fruits.

Userpilot pricing

Userpilot’s transparent pricing ranges from $249/month on the entry-level end to an Enterprise tier for larger companies.

Furthermore, Userpilot’s entry-level plan includes access to all UI patterns and should include everything that most mid-market SaaS businesses need to get started.

Userpilot has three paid plans to choose from:

• Starter: The entry-level Starter plan starts at $249/month and includes features like segmentation, product analytics, reporting, user engagement, NPS feedback, and customization.
• Growth: The Growth plan starts at $749/month and includes features like resource centers, advanced event-based triggers, unlimited feature tagging, AI-powered content localization, EU hosting options, and a dedicated customer success manager.
• Enterprise: The Enterprise plan uses custom pricing and includes all the features from Starter + Growth plus custom roles/permissions, access to premium integrations, priority support, custom contract, SLA, SAML SSO, activity logs, security audit, and compliance (SOC 2/GDPR).

Conclusion

In conclusion, as we’ve explored Heap, Amplitude, and Mixpanel for product analytics, it becomes evident that there is a diverse landscape of solutions available to cater to your specific needs. Each of these tools brings its own set of features, advantages, and unique capabilities to the table. Whether you’re seeking enhanced functionality, cost-effectiveness, or a different approach to tackling your tasks, our guide has showcased a range of options.

Ultimately, the choice of the best alternative depends on your individual requirements and preferences. We hope that our exploration of these tools has provided you with valuable insights to help you make an informed decision.

There is a better tool for your SaaS than Heap!

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