Pendo vs Appcues vs Mixpanel for Retention Analytics
Pendo vs Appcues vs Mixpanel: Which one is a good choice for retention analysis?
- Retention analytics, also known as survival analytics, identifies the causes of customer churn. This analytical process is crucial in obtaining insightful information for maintaining a lucrative consumer base — increasing user acquisition, and effectiveness, and improving customer retention rates. Continuous retention analysis helps you understand the reasons for customer churn, identify optimal turnover periods, measure the impact on your financial performance, and plan strategies to improve customer retention.
Let’s explore how Pendo, Appcues, and Mixpanel compare when it comes to retention analytics.
- Pendo is a product adoption platform that lets teams monitor product usage, analyze user behavior, and publish in-app guides. The no-code solution focuses on increasing user engagement and driving feature discovery.
- Appcues is a robust product adoption and user onboarding platform for web and mobile apps. It enables product teams to create, implement, and test personalized in-app onboarding experiences. The platform also helps you announce new product features and collect customer feedback.
- 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 retention analytics, Userpilot exceeds both functionality and value for money compared to other tools on the list. Get a Userpilot demo for retention analytics and drive your product growth code-free.
Pendo for retention analytics
Retention analysis is a crucial part of understanding the reasons why customers abandon your product so you can prevent further losses. Pendo has cohort dashboards, cross-app analytics, and retention reports that can help you get ahead of churn before it happens.
Here are the Pendo features you can use to conduct retention analysis:
- Cohort Analysis: Pendo’s analytics dashboard can be used to conduct cohort retention analysis by seeing what percentage of each cohort is retained on a month-to-month basis. You can also sort this retention data by segment, cohort size, segment, or date range to filter results.
- Cross-App Analytics: If you get Pendo’s Portfolio plan then you’ll be able to see retention analytics for all your products. Bear in mind that, like all of Pendo’s analytics dashboards, cross-app data is only refreshed once per hour, so you can’t track these metrics in real-time.
- At-Risk Reports: Pendo’s analytics and reporting capabilities let you generate weekly reports for users, segments, or cohorts that are at risk of churning. These at-risk reports help summarize insights, track usage trends, and offer opportunities to launch proactive retention efforts.
Pendo pros
Let’s take a look at some of the benefits of using Pendo:
- No-Code: Pendo lets you create surveys, in-app guides, and track metrics without needing to write your own code, which saves a lot of time (while making product experiments or split-testing a lot easier).
- Custom Themes: Pendo’s themes let you create multiple palettes and ensure that any in-app materials published align with your existing brand palette (however, you can only create/customize themes after you’ve installed the Pendo snippet).
- Flexible Dashboards: Pendo has plenty of widgets that you can add to your dashboard, including feature adoption, net promoter score, poll results, guide engagement, product stickiness, and MAUs — so you always have your most important metrics within reach.
- Integrations: Pendo has 50 different integrations to choose from including popular tools like Intercom, Jira, Okta, and HubSpot. Unfortunately, only four of these — Salesforce, Segment, Workato, and Zendesk — are two-way integrations that can share data both ways.
- Multi-Platform Analytics: Because Pendo is compatible with mobile applications, you’ll be able to track product analytics for both web apps and mobile apps. This gives you a more holistic view of how users (or specific segments) use your product on different platforms. Note: You’ll need to upgrade to Pendo Portfolio to add more than one product to your account.
Pendo cons
While Pendo certainly has quite a few benefits that make it an appealing solution, there are also a few notable drawbacks that you should be aware of before you choose the platform as your product adoption tool:
- Pricing Jumps: While Pendo does offer a free version, it has a limit of 500 MAUs. Upon reaching the MAU limit, you’ll need to upgrade to continue using most of Pendo’s features (and paid plans tend to cost thousands of dollars per month).
- Locked Features: Key features like the data explorer, resource center, and product engagement score are locked behind the Growth or Portfolio plan.
- Data Lag: Pendo’s analytics dashboards only update once per hour. In some cases, this data lag could lead product teams to make the wrong decisions or draw false conclusions from outdated insights.
Pendo pricing
Pricing for most paid Pendo plans (except Starter) is only provided on a quote basis and there are no listed price ranges on the solution’s website. That said, certain reviews have stated that prices start at upwards of $20,000 per year for a single product and more than twice that for higher plans.
Pendo has three paid plans and one free version that is limited to 500 MAUs which makes it accessible to startups but difficult to scale in the long run.
Here are the differences between each Pendo plan:
- Pendo Free: The free version of Pendo can accommodate 500 MAUs and has features like native analytics dashboards, feature tagging, event tracking, segmentation, NPS surveys (with Pendo branding), analytics reports, and in-app guides.
- Growth: Pendo’s Growth plan is designed to be used for a single web or mobile app but can accommodate a custom number of MAUs. It includes features like native analytics dashboards, in-app guides, NPS surveys and response tracking, and customer support.
- Starter: The Starter plan starts at $7,000 per year (or $2,000 per quarter) for 2,000 MAUs and is the cheapest upgrade option available for freemium users. Starter includes features like Product Areas, NPS surveys without Pendo branding, and (limited) NPS analytics. Note: You’ll need to upgrade to the Growth or Portfolio plan to get full NPS analytics.
- Portfolio: Pendo’s Portfolio plan is targeted towards customers who want to use the tool for multiple web and/or mobile apps. Features include guide experiment capabilities, cross-app executive dashboards, cross-app journey reporting, and access to product engagement scores.
Appcues for retention analytics
While Appcues offers various features to improve user retention, it isn’t specifically designed to perform retention analysis. Nevertheless, you can use its analytics functionalities to get an overview of retention rates.
The features that come in handy include:
- Flow performance metrics
- NPS survey analytics
- Event tracking and analytics
For a proper retention analysis using cohort tables, Appcues is not the tool for you.
Appcues pros
As a first-comer in the no-code product adoption landscape, Appcues offers several valuable features. It’s suitable for mid-market SaaS businesses looking for a simple, easy-to-use tool that enhances user onboarding, retention, and the overall customer experience.
Let’s take a closer look at the benefits of Appcues:
- Intuitive UI and UX: Appcues offers a straightforward interface that’s easy to navigate and use. Users with non-technical backgrounds can design captivating in-app flows and onboarding journeys with its simple drag-and-drop builder. You can tailor user journeys with various UI patterns, from modals and hotspots to tooltips, slideouts, and banners.
- Simple setup: You can get started with Appcues in minutes by adding the SDK to your app’s source code or integrating Appcues with Segment or Google Tag Manager. Then, add a Chrome extension to launch the Appcues Builder in a few quick clicks and start creating in-app flows.
- Feedback options: Create Net Promoter Score (NPS) surveys to collect actionable user feedback. You can even check and analyze NPS analytics on your Appcues dashboard.
- Mobile onboarding: Besides web apps, you can use Appcues to create end-to-end experiences for mobile apps. It supports various mobile environments, including Native Android, Native iOS, React Native, Flutter, and Iconic.
- Extensive integrations: Appcues integrates with 20+ email automation, CRM, and analytics tools, including Heap, Zapier, HubSpot, Google Analytics, and Google Tag Manager. Many of these include two-way integrations.
Appcues cons
Appcues comes with a ton of useful features you’d expect from a leading product adoption platform, but it does have a few shortcomings.
Let’s look at a few drawbacks of Appcues:
- Poor element detection: The Appcues algorithm occasionally struggles to detect in-app elements, unlike some of its competitors like Userpilot. It’s particularly limiting when you want to add tooltips to individual options in a dropdown menu.
- Limited customization capabilities: While Appcues lets you customize pre-designed templates, you’re limited to basic options like font style, size, color, and padding. Advanced customization requires working with CSS code, which can be challenging for non-technical teams.
- Basic analytics: Appcues provides insights into product usage and customer behavior. However, you can’t access in-depth analytics without connecting to a third-party tool like Amplitude or Google Analytics.
- Limited survey options: Appcues lacks variety in feedback collection and survey options and doesn’t offer integrations with other platforms like Google Forms and Typeform. You can only build NPS surveys. This is in contrast to some of its competitors, like Userpilot, which offers an extensive library of customizable survey templates.
- Higher pricing: Starting at $249 per month, the Appcues Essential tier has several constraints, such as limited UI patterns and no custom CSS support. Moreover, localization support is only available in the Enterprise tier. If your app is multilingual, you’ll have to shell out a ton of money to make the most of Appcues.
- No live chat: While Appcues offers educational resources and a help center (Help Docs), customer support is limited to email and phone.
Appcues comes with a ton of useful features you’d expect from a leading product adoption platform, but it does have a few shortcomings.
Let’s look at a few drawbacks of Appcues:
- Poor element detection: The Appcues algorithm occasionally struggles to detect in-app elements, unlike some of its competitors like Userpilot. It’s particularly limiting when you want to add tooltips to individual options in a dropdown menu.
- Limited customization capabilities: While Appcues lets you customize pre-designed templates, you’re limited to basic options like font style, size, color, and padding. Advanced customization requires working with CSS code, which can be challenging for non-technical teams.
- Basic analytics: Appcues provides insights into product usage and customer behavior. However, you can’t access in-depth analytics without connecting to a third-party tool like Amplitude or Google Analytics.
- Limited survey options: Appcues lacks variety in feedback collection and survey options and doesn’t offer integrations with other platforms like Google Forms and Typeform. You can only build NPS surveys. This is in contrast to some of its competitors, like Userpilot, which offers an extensive library of customizable survey templates.
- Higher pricing: Starting at $249 per month, the Appcues Essential tier has several constraints, such as limited UI patterns and no custom CSS support. Moreover, localization support is only available in the Enterprise tier. If your app is multilingual, you’ll have to shell out a ton of money to make the most of Appcues.
- No live chat: While Appcues offers educational resources and a help center (Help Docs), customer support is limited to email and phone.
Appcues pricing
Pricing for Appcues starts at $249 per month, with the platform offering three distinct tiers – Essentials, Growth, and Enterprise.
The total cost can vary depending on the number of monthly active users (MAU). For instance, the Essential plan starts at $249 per month for 2500 MAU but jumps to $299 for 5000 MAU.
Here’s a detailed glimpse of the different pricing tiers:
- Essentials: It’s the basic tier that starts at $249 per month. It includes 3 user licenses and lets you add up to 5 audience segments. Some UI patterns, such as checklists, launchpads, and custom CSS support, aren’t available. Customer support is only available through email.
- Growth: This tier starts at $879 per month (for 2500 monthly active users) and includes 10 user licenses. You can target unlimited audience segments and use the full spectrum of UI patterns. Additionally, you can access the Premium Integrations package, which includes integrations with Slack, Salesforce, Marketo, and Zendesk.
- Enterprise: This is the most feature-packed tier and includes robust security controls like role-based access and activity logs. It’s also the only tier that comes with multi-account and localization support. Besides email and phone support, you also get a dedicated Customer Success Manager and Technical Implementation Manager. Pricing is available on request.
All three plans come with a 14-day free trial, where you can test unlimited flows and track up to 5 events. You can extend the trial by another 14 days by installing the Appcues SDK in your app. Additionally, you don’t need a credit card to sign up for the free trial.
Keep in mind that the above pricing plans are applicable to web apps. Pricing for Appcues Mobile is available on request.
It’s also worth noting that Appcues is pricier than some of the other product adoption tools available in the market, including Userpilot. For instance, Userpilot’s basic tier (Starter) lets you add up to 10 audience segments and includes the complete set of UI patterns.
Mixpanel for retention analytics
User retention measures how successfully you keep hold of your customers over a given time frame. Product owners and managers study user metrics over time and across multiple sessions to understand how and why customers churn.
Here’s a closer look at some of Mixpanel’s retention analysis features:
- Flexible user segmentation: Mixpanel provides the flexibility to segment users based on criteria such as user properties, cohorts, attribution sources, locations, and behavior.
- Timeframe customization: The default retention reports cover up to 60 days, but you can extend this period by choosing the “Each Week/Month” option in the Retention Criteria settings.
- Comparison baseline: Setting a baseline for improvement and comparing retention rates over time is the best way to track progress. Mixpanel suggests using 7-day retention to predict 30 or 90-day retention rates. If your product’s natural usage cycle is longer than three months, you can use 90-day retention to predict the one-year rate. You can adjust this timeframe in Mixpanel’s Retention report.
Mixpanel takes a practical approach to calculating retention. It focuses on completed time intervals when determining average retention rates, avoiding skewing the results.
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 Pendo, Appcues, and Mixpanel
We have discussed Pendo, Appcues, and Mixpanel for retention analytics with their pros, cons, and pricing. Let’s take a look at a better alternative – Userpilot.
Userpilot for retention analytics
Customer retention helps you reduce acquisition costs and drive expansion over time. Userpilot makes it easy to analyze retention using funnel reports, trend reports, and built-in goal tracking that can be filtered by segment/company/time period to provide actionable insights.
Here are the Userpilot features you can use to analyze user retention:
- Funnels: Funnel reports show you the number of users who enter a funnel versus the percentage who complete it. Using Userpilot’s funnel reports to track activation points and adoption goals can help identify the stages where users drop off so you can patch these leaks.
- Trends: Trend reports let you see how specific product changes impact retention metrics and monitor changes in active user counts over certain time periods. You can also create custom metrics, track events, or use the breakdown tab to perform a correlative retention analysis.
- Cohort analysis: Analyze retention trends using cohort tables. This functionality will be available in Q4 of 2023.
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 Pendo, Appcues, and Mixpanel for retention 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 Pendo!
