Looking for an effective retention analytics tool and wondering if Mixpanel is the best option for your SaaS company?

With numerous Mixpanel alternatives, it can be challenging to make a final decision.

In this article, we’ll delve into precisely that – helping you determine whether Mixpanel is the ideal choice for your retention analytics needs. We’ll explore its features, pricing, and offer a comprehensive review to aid in your decision-making process.

Let’s get started!

Overview of Mixpanel for retention analytics

• Mixpanel is a good choice for retention analytics and it comes with features such as funnels, paths, user segmentation analysis, and behavioral analytics.
• Let’s look at the most common scenarios where Mixpanel is NOT the right tool for your user onboarding needs and you should be looking into using a different one:
  • You need better customer support: Mixpanel has been criticized for its poor customer service. You can have a hard time getting the software problems fixed quickly since you might rarely get an instant response from the support team.
  • You want behavior-driven product tours: You are seeking to guide users through their product’s features using behavior-driven triggers, a solution like Userpilot is more appropriate.
  • You want advanced segmentation: You can create targeted user segments based on specific parameters such as pricing plans, company, location, required actions, NPS score, and more on Userpilot.
• If you’re looking for a better option for retention analytics, Userpilot exceeds both functionality and value for money compared to Mixpanel.
• Ready to see Userpilot in action? Schedule a demo today to explore its powerful retention analytics capabilities firsthand.

What is Mixpanel?

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.

In addition, it lets you explore data freely without using SQL. Set up your metrics to measure growth and retention. Slice and dice data to uncover trends and see live updates on how people use your app.

Must have features of retention analytics tools

Here’s what to look for to maximize your company’s potential by leveraging advanced retention analytics tools:

• User segmentation: So you can slice and dice users based on behavior and demographics to develop laser-focused retention strategies.
• Churn prediction: To identify potential churn risks, aggressively re-engage customers, and keep them from leaving.
• Cohort analysis: So you can compare different user groups over time and figure out patterns that make them loyal or churn users.
• Engagement tracking: To track user behaviors and use trends to optimize engagement techniques.
• Retention funnel analysis: To visualize drop-offs, redesign the user path, and turbocharge retention for long-term success.

Mixpanel features 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’s funnels

Conversion funnel analysis is the key for SaaS businesses to increase conversions and generate more revenue.

Mixpanel’s funnels make it easy to track user progress throughout the customer journey. It does not simply provide a cluster of data but instead breaks down a user’s journey into sequential steps that are easy to track and analyze.

Here are features on MixPanel for tracking user funnels:

• Backfilling: Mixpanel’s default “backfilling” feature adds missing event properties. When a property appears in later funnel steps but not earlier ones, it is seamlessly integrated.
• Custom events: Mixpanel enables the creation of custom events by combining multiple events into one. This flexibility allows you to design funnels with multiple pathways leading to the same goal.
• Intuitive reporting: With Mixpanel, funnel reporting is user-friendly. The platform automatically generates graphs and charts as data flows in, providing instant visual insights.

Mixpanel has its own event tracking SDK, but it is much more limited in scope than Segment. It only tracks first-party data generated when customers use an app, website, or other digital channels.

Unlike Userpilot, you can’t analyze user paths up to 4 pages at a time at a glance on Mixpanel. In addition, Userpilot can track feature usage by user segments with heatmaps directly on the different pages of your product.

Mixpanel’s paths

Product managers use path analysis to determine how users navigate through websites and apps. It involves tracing the user’s path from any entry point and dissecting each step.

Below are the features available for path analysis on Mixpanel.

• Journey mapping: Choose where user journeys begin and end within a product or website. For example, track user actions post-app launch or video viewing. If the goal is a specific action, like completing a purchase, anchor the “end step” to uncover common paths leading to that outcome.
• Flow analysis: Identify and remove obstacles for a smoother customer journey.

Mixpanel works great for products with straightforward user paths and repeat-use features. But it’s less useful when your users’ journeys aren’t linear. Hotjar is a better alternative for nonlinear and more complex customer journeys.

Mixpanel’s user segmentation analysis

User segmentation is the process of separating users into distinct groups or segments.

What features serve as a bedrock for Mixpanel’s functionality on segmentation analysis:

• Custom properties: By using custom properties, you can create more refined segments that align with your business goals and user characteristics. Custom properties let you combine existing properties into new properties on the fly, using a simple Excel-like formula language.
• Segmentation logic: An expression or logic consists of a property combined with one or more operators that can perform mathematical operations, logical operations, or typecasts. Mixpanel provides segmentation logic that allows you to create complex user segments using a combination of attributes, events, and properties.

Mixpanel’s behavioral analytics

Mixpanel has features for behavioral analytics that help product teams and developers understand users’ actions.

Below are features that are accessible for use when analyzing user behavior on Mixpanel:

• Funnels: To track users’ progress toward outcomes such as purchases or signups, Mixpanel’s funnel feature can help you with funnel reports. Funnels display a series of stages in a user journey and how many users progress from one stage to the next—for example, from download to sign up and purchase. If one stage has a low conversion rate, it’s a signal that that stage needs attention.
• A/B test segmentation: Mixpanel’s segmentation helps teams build more complete customer profiles and create cohorts (defined segments of users based on common important characteristics or experiences). Armed with this information, you can adjust your product and marketing to better address the specific needs of each segment or of the business.
• Data association: Each data point corresponds to a unique user ID, connecting events like sign-ups, cart additions, and interactions.
• Data customization: Mixpanel’s customizable data parameters allow precise user behavior insights, enabling behavioral segmentation for targeted campaigns.
• User activity tracking: Daily, weekly, and monthly active user reports (DAU, WAU, MAU) provide insights into user engagement trends.
• Integration flexibility: Mixpanel seamlessly integrates with tools like Segment, streamlining data sharing. SDKs and an import API further enhance data management.

What are the pros and cons of Mixpanel?

Mixpanel’s 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’s 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.

Looking for a Better Alternative for Retention Analytics? Try Userpilot!

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• 14 Day Trial
• No Credit Card Required

What do users say about Mixpanel?

Mixpanel is consistently termed an excellent, powerful, and result-oriented tool by its loyal customers. Generally, customers say it’s easy to use, easy to customize, and how easily it tracks analytics.

Here are the great stories customers are telling about Mixpanel:

These are some of the aspects that I appreciate about Mixpanel. It’s important to note that my preferences may vary depending on individual needs and requirements. I highlight some of the features and benefits that I appreciate about Mixpanel: Mixpanel focuses on individual user behavior and allows me to track and analyze user interactions at a granular level. This user-centric approach provides deeper insights into how users engage with my app and helps me understand their preferences and needs. This flexible platform allows me to tailor the analytics to my needs. I can define custom events and properties based on my app’s unique features and track the metrics that matter most to my business…

While Mixpanel has some great reviews, there are still some little downsides and quirks (same as every other SaaS tool). Here are some bad reviews of Mixpanel:

UI is not very intuitive and there is no live chat support to get quick answers so you have to break your workflow to figure things out. Also, I’m not sure if this is due to our data structure, but null values do not show in mixpanel, which greatly limits what can be done with the tool.

Mixpanel’s 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 & iterate on KPIs, Mixpanel modeling layer, and group analytics & data pipeline add-ons.
• Enterprise plan: This plan empowers your team, especially if you have a large organization. You’ll have to contact their sales representatives for the cost. This plan features all the benefits of the growth plan plus advanced access controls, shared data views for collaboration, automated provisioning & SSO, and prioritized support.

3 Reasons why you might need a Mixpanel alternative

Let’s look at the most common scenarios where Mixpanel is NOT the right tool for your user onboarding needs and you should be looking into using a different one:

• You need better customer support: Mixpanel has been criticized for its poor customer service. You can have a hard time getting the software problems fixed quickly since you might rarely get an instant response from the support team.
• You want behavior-driven product tours: you are seeking to guide users through their product’s features using behavior-driven triggers, a solution like Userpilot is more appropriate.
• You want advanced segmentation: You can create targeted user segments based on specific parameters such as pricing plans, company, location, required actions, NPS score, and more on Userpilot.

Userpilot – a better alternative 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.

Userpilot’s funnels

Tracking user funnels is essential to getting a deeper understanding of the customer journey and reducing friction points. Userpilot helps you track user funnels by creating funnel reports, reviewing saved reports in bulk, and seeing key metrics like the average time it takes to complete a funnel.

Here’s how you can use Userpilot to generate funnel charts:

• Funnels: Userpilot’s funnel reports can show you the percentage of users that progress from one stage to another. Stages could consist of pages, actions, or other activation points. You can also set a specific order that these steps need to be completed or adjust the time period.

• Reports: The saved reports area of your Userpilot account lets you view, edit, duplicate, delete, or export (as a CSV file) all the analytics reports that you (or your teammates) have generated. You can also filter results by the teammate who created the report or the type of report.
• Duration: The granular funnel analytics can offer more insights into each stage of a particular user funnel, such as how long it took the majority of your users to complete it from start to finish. You can filter by time period and set minimum/maximum parameters to remove outliers.

Userpilot’s paths

Path reports are essential for understanding user flows and journeys, offering invaluable insights into their interactions with our platform or application. Within the Paths chart(s) visualization in Userpilot, you can:

• See the different flows/links users take from one step/event to another.

• Choose how many steps after or before the starting/ending event you want to report Users’ flows for.
• Choose whether you want to include Pages (i.e. Both User-Tagged and Untagged) in the visualization.

• Change the period of the analysis.
• Change the way you want to view the analysis: All Paths vs. Top Path (i.e. most common).

• Narrow down the targeted end-users by applying global or inline (event-specific) filters.
• View a breakdown of the end-users (or their associated companies) upon clicking on a specific node/step in the visualization chart.

You also have automatic path analysis in Userpilot’s core feature engagement analytics dashboards without having to set up anything. This will give you an overview of user navigation and engagement with your product so you have insights to work on improving their experience.

Userpilot’s user segmentation analysis

User segmentation is a key part of building a contextual onboarding experience for new customers. Userpilot lets you segment your customers when they meet specific conditions, filter through analytics using user attributes, and trigger flows for users in different segments.

Here are some of Userpilot’s customer segmentation capabilities:

• Conditional Segments: Userpilot lets you build segments for users who match conditions on what device/browser/OS they’re using, which country they live in, what their NPS score is, and any custom events they’ve performed. You can then use these segments as filters/triggers.

• Analytics Filters: The product analytics and user insights dashboards on Userpilot can be set to only show data from certain user segments or companies. This makes it possible to identify actionable insights from specific user cohorts and benchmark performance between segments.
• Flow Triggers: Userpilot audience settings make it possible to target in-app flows to certain user segments or only show flows to users who meet specific conditions. You could also add event-based or page-specific triggers to show relevant flows with contextual timing.

Userpilot’s behavioral analytics

Behavioral analytics make it possible to monitor user activity, group data into cohorts, and extract relevant metrics/insights. Userpilot lets you tag features to see how users interact with them, compare goals by cohort, and create trend reports that track behavioral patterns over time.

Here are some Userpilot features you can use for user behavior tracking:

• No-Code Feature Tagging: Userpilot’s click-to-track feature tagger lets you mark features, buttons, and elements with the Chrome extension. You’ll be able to track user interactions such as clicks, hovers, or inputs to get an accurate behavioral view for specific features.

• Funnel Reports: Funnel reports show you the total number of users that enter a funnel and the percentage of users that complete each step. This can help you track behavioral paths and see which stages most users get stuck on.

• Trends Reports: Generating trends reports will help you visualize the occurrence of key events over time and break down these analytics by device, browser, operating system, country, signup date, or even individual user IDs and email addresses to see granular behavioral analytics.
• Path Reports: Path analysis is useful for understanding common user behavior patterns, gauging user interactions with UI, monitoring if users follow recommended workflows, and identifying points of drop-offs and areas for improvement. With collected events, you can easily set up Path analysis in Userpilot without coding.

What are the pros and cons of Userpilot?

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’s 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.

What do users say about Userpilot?

Most users laud Userpilot for its versatile feature set, ease of use, and responsive support team:

I recently had the pleasure of using Userpilot, and I must say it exceeded all my expectations. As a product manager, I’m always on the lookout for tools that can enhance user onboarding and improve overall user experience. Userpilot not only delivered on these fronts but also went above and beyond with its impressive new features, unparalleled ease of use, and truly exceptional customer support.

What truly sets Userpilot apart is its outstanding customer support. Throughout my journey with Userpilot, the support team has been responsive, knowledgeable, and genuinely dedicated to helping me succeed. Whenever I had a question or encountered an issue, their support team was always there to assist promptly, going above and beyond to ensure my concerns were addressed effectively.

Source: G2.

Of course, other users are also kind enough to share constructive criticism regarding specific features like event tracking filters:

“The filtration while analyzing specific events is a little confusing. Understanding of custom properties and data management configuration could have been more organised.”

Source: G2.

Userpilot’s 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

There you have it.

It should be easier now to make an informed decision whether Mixpanel is your go-to option for retention analytics. Ultimately, the best choice will depend on your product and current needs.

If you’re looking for a better alternative to Mixpanel for retention analytics, book a Userpilot demo today to experience firsthand how it can enhance your user experience and drive product growth!

Looking for a Better Alternative for Retention Analytics? Try Userpilot!

Get a Demo

• 14 Day Trial
• No Credit Card Required