Pendo vs Mixpanel? Which of the two is better for your SaaS product team?

If you’re after the answer to this question, we’ve got you covered!

Let’s dive into our comparison of the two analytics tools, their key features, strengths, and weaknesses, along with their pricing plans.

What is the difference between Pendo and Mixpanel?

The key difference between Pendo and Mixpanel is in their purpose.

Mixpanel is a dedicated analytics tool, so that’s all it does. Pendo, on the other hand, is a product adoption platform.

This means that apart from analytics, it also allows you to gather feedback and drive product engagement and adoption with in-app experiences. Mixpanel can’t help you with any of that, so you need other tools in your stack.

Must-have features to look for in a product analytics solution

When looking for a product analytics tool for your SaaS, there are a few features to pay particular attention to:

• Event and goal tracking.
• User journey tracking.
• Product usage tracking.
• User segmentation based on product usage and survey responses, instead of just demographics.
• Data processing in real-time so that you can trigger messages in response to current events.
• Integrations with other analytics and adoption tools, and webhooks.

Pendo for product analytics

Pendo is one of the key players when it comes to product adoption tools. It’s renowned for its state-of-the-art analytics. It allows you to design user onboarding experiences to drive customer success in both web and mobile apps.

While it’s been trying to lure early-stage companies with its lower plans, Pendo is really a tool for Enterprise clients.

The analytics features it offers include:

• Event tracking
• Paths
• Reports
• NPS tracking and analytics
• Product Engagement Score (PES) analytics

The three features we will be having a closer look at are:

• User segmentation
• Funnel analysis
• Retention analysis

Pendo dashboard.

Pendo segmentation

With Pendo segmentation, you can group your users by a number of criteria:

• Product usage and user behavior data, like tagged feature clicks or guide views.
• Visitor and account data, for example, systems data or demographics data.
• Mobile-specific data, e.g., the OS version.

What are the benefits of detailed user segmentation?

You can use it for targeting different user cohorts with Pendo Guides.

For example, you could trigger them to drive engagement with a feature that a particular segment would find valuable considering their use case. Or to target them with a survey about their experience.

Pendo segmentation.

Pendo funnel analysis

A user funnel is a succession of steps that a user takes inside the product to achieve a goal.

User funnel analysis is a great feature for identifying friction points in the user journey and making the user experience more intuitive so that your users can achieve their objectives more quickly and easily.

You can customize Pendo funnels by:

• Funnel steps
• Date Range
• Segments
• Time out period

A Pendo funnel looks like this:

Pendo funnel analysis.

The dark bars represent users who advanced to the next step, while the pale ones are those who dropped off. Clicking on each of them gives you a detailed breakdown of who the users are so that you can reach out to them, for example, with a survey or interview invite.

Pendo retention analysis

Retention analysis gives you insights into which customers stay with your product and use it regularly over a period of time. Based on that, you can determine how valuable your product is and forecast future growth and revenue.

Pendo presents the retention data in an interactive chart. You can filter it by:

• Activity type
• Apps
• Cohort type and size
• Segment
• Date Range

Just like in the funnel charts, you can click on each of the bars for more detailed insights into the retained and dropped users.

Thanks to that, you can:

• Target each of them with a Pendo Guide, for example, to help them discover more advanced features.
• Reach out to the dropped users with emails to try to win them back.
• Launch surveys to collect feedback about customer experience.

Pendo retention analysis.

Pros and cons of using Pendo for product analytics

Pendo has managed to nail quite a few aspects of its functionality:

• ✅ Works on both mobile and web apps.
• ✅ In-depth analytics, including retroactive data collection.
• ✅ Easy to set up and use.
• ✅ Product Engagement Score (PES).
• ✅ User feedback and NPS tools.
• ✅ Engagement layer that allows you to act on the feedback and data.

However, there are still some areas for improvement:

• ❌ User behavior data is displayed with a 1-hour delay, so no way to trigger contextual in-app guidance in response to real-time user actions.
• ❌ The pricing structure is not very transparent.
• ❌ Reportedly, the higher plans are not affordable for bootstrapped SaaS startups.

Pendo pricing

Pendo offers 4 pricing plans along with a 14-day free trial and demo.

• Pendo Free
• Starter: $7,000/year
• Growth
• Portfolio

The more advanced features like NPS tools or PES are available only in the paid plans, which work out to be quite pricey compared to alternatives.

Pendo pricing.

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Mixpanel for product analytics

Mixpanel is a powerful self-serve product analytics platform that enables companies to track and increase user engagement. 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.

Given that it’s an analytics tool, Mixpanel offers a whole host of features:

• Flows
• A/B testing
• Impact analysis
• Query-time data modeling, including custom events
• Custom dashboards
• Life events
• User segmentation
• Funnel analysis
• Retention analysis

For consistency, we’re looking closely at segmentation, funnels, and retention analysis, just like we did with Pendo.

Dashboard in Mixpanel.

Mixpanel segmentation

Mixpanel Analytics offers potent user segmentation functionality.

You can create an unlimited number of segments based on user attributes, properties, or cohorts.

For a more granular view, you can break down the analysis by event or user property and add further breakdowns. This means you can easily analyze how people engage with your product in more detail. This feature isn’t available in Pendo.

Mixpanel segmentation.

Mixpanel funnel reports

Mixpanel’s funnel reports are very similar to Pendo’s.

In the chart, each step is represented as a bar annotated with the conversion rate. Clicking on the bar gives you more details. However, in addition to the default chart, you can also visualize the funnel as:

• Funnel Trend
• Time to Convert
• Frequency

Apart from filtering the data using a range of criteria, like the platform, Mixpanel allows you to customize your funnels with breakdowns. This means you can compare conversions across different products that share a similar funnel or of various user segments.

For example, you could compare how users from different sources progress down the funnel.

Mixpanel funnel analysis.

Mixpanel retention reports

The breakdown customization option is also available in the retention reports. In this way, you can compare the user engagement with different features, on different app versions, or based on whether they completed an event or not. In Pendo, this is limited to cohorts only.

At the bottom of the report, we can see a heatmap-like visualization of retention for each of the samples we’ve chosen in the breakdowns. This looks very similar to Pendo’s retention chart.

However, Mixpanel gives us also a curve graph showing user retention over time.

Mixpanel retention analysis.

Pros and cons of using Mixpanel for product analytics

Mixpanel has a number of strengths:

• ✅ Sophisticated features enabling granular data analysis.
• ✅ Real-time data display.
• ✅ Powerful interactive and easily accessible visuals for quicker decision-making to beat analysis paralysis.
• ✅ High levels of customization.
• ✅ A free plan that is sufficient for small SaaS companies.

What lets it down is:

• ❌ Expensive enterprise-grade features.
• ❌ Complex setup, so you’ll probably need help from the engineering team.
• ❌ No user feedback or engagement functionality, so you need 3rd party tools.

Mixpanel pricing

As mentioned, Mixpanel offers a free plan that gives you access to most of its user journey reports and unlimited integrations. If you’re after analytics only, this trumps what Pendo has to offer in its free or Starter plan.

The other two plans are:

Growth – up to 300M events/month, custom pricing starting at $20/month, depending on the features needed.

Enterprise – 5M-1B+ events/month, custom pricing starting at $1,667/month.

Mixpanel’s pricing plans.

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Mixpanel vs Pendo: Userpilot is a better alternative.

Mixpanel offers a free plan with very advanced analytics functionality but no engagement layer or feedback features. Pendo offers these two and decent analytics but they’re fairly basic and come with a high price tag.

All this considered, is there a better product that ticks all the boxes?

Drumbeat.

Enter Userpilot.

In short, Userpilot may not support such advanced analytics as Mixpanel but still offers enough to enable product managers to make data-driven decisions.

It also allows you to collect and analyze user feedback and drive product engagement with features that are more advanced than anything Pendo can offer. And that too, at a fraction of the price.

Userpilot analytics features include:

• Trend Analysis
• Funnel Analysis
• Flow analytics
• Retention tables
• Real-time product usage data display
• Feature tagging (tracks clicks, hovers, and text input)
• Goal tracking
• Custom events
• Heatmaps
• A/B testing and multivariate testing
• Advanced user segmentation
• Integrations with analytics tools

Feature & Events dashboard in Userpilot.

Trend analysis

Trend analysis allows you to visualize event data at the user and company levels.

For example, you could visualize the total number of users who completed a particular event (including custom events), unique users, active users (DAUs, WAUs, and MAUs), as well as the count per user.

This is not limited to a single event either. You can use the feature to visualize multiple trends in one graph. For example, you could use it to track main activation events like ‘created a flow’ and feature usage.

Of course, the feature enables product managers to filter the event analytics data for more granular analysis. For example, you could filter data by company name or device type. You can also add custom formulas, and export the data into a CSV file.

The visualizations are easy to customize, and you can choose different graph and chart styles to display your product usage data:

• Time Series – Line, Stacked Line, Stacked Bar
• Total Value – Pie, Bar, Metric

Funnel analysis

Funnel analysis is a tool that allows you to track conversion rates at key stages of the user journey. The feature also allows you to view the average conversion time.

Thanks to that, you will be able to easily identify friction points and drop-offs. If lots of users fail to progress from one stage to another, that’s the spot that needs optimizing.

Of course, identifying the exact source of friction will require further investigation. You could target the users who have dropped off with surveys or watch their session recordings.

Introducing Userpilot Analytics: Funnel analysis.

Funnels in Userpilot will allow you to break down the data for detailed analysis of the conversion rates. For example, you could display conversion data across different price plans or user segments next to each other in one funnel chart.

Introducing Userpilot Analytics: Funnel analysis.

A/B testing and multivariate testing

We’re expanding the A/B testing feature to allow you to conduct different experiments on your in-app flows. These are:

• Controlled A/B Test – to assess the effectiveness of a single flow by comparing its performance against a control group that doesn’t see the flow.
• Head-to-Head A/B Test – to compare the effectiveness of two different flows.
• Controlled Multivariate Test – to compare the performance of various flows against a control group.

Userpilot segmentation

Userpilot offers advanced user segmentation features, which enable users to get more granular insights and trigger personalized onboarding experiences to guide user groups toward their goals.

With Userpilot, you can segment users based on:

• User attributes, like their pricing plan
• Company data
• Tagged features they have engaged/not engaged with
• Completed custom events
• In-app experiences they have engaged with, for example, a checklist
• User feedback – quantitative data, like NPS scores, and qualitative insights, like NPS responses

Userpilot custom event analysis

Custom events consist of distinct actions performed by users in the product which you can track as if they were one event.

What’s the use of that?

Let’s imagine your users need to complete a few actions to activate. Tracking each of them individually could be tedious and would only show a partial picture – partial activation. However, it wouldn’t show you the bit that matters most – how many users have completed all of them.

You create Custom Events from the Features & Events dashboard code-free unless you want to create a custom event triggered by API.

In addition to the above features to launch in September, there are more features coming by the end of this year.

• Retention analysis – to effortlessly track and analyze user retention trends over time. You will be able to view the retention rate for the last 7 days, 30 days, and 180 days, as well as custom data ranges via cohort analysis.

• Customizable dashboards – to easily spot user insights by tracking chosen metrics added to the dashboard as individual widgets.
• User profile analytics – for granular user behavior analysis of individual customers. Clicking on a specific user will display their profile with all the events and actions performed by them in a specific timeframe.

Introducing Userpilot Analytics: User Profile Analysis.

• AI-powered analytics – to supercharge qualitative user feedback analysis and leverage quantitative data for predictive analysis.

Pros and cons of using Userpilot for product analytics

Userpilot pros include:

• ✅ An easy-to-use Chrome extension.
• ✅ Code-free feature tagging and heatmaps.
• ✅ Integrations with analytics tools and webhooks.
• ✅ A/B testing for in-app experiences you build.
• ✅ Detailed analytics for checklists and resource center modules.
• ✅ Feedback features, including NPS surveys and analytics.

How about the downsides?

• ❌ No mobile app support, just web apps.
• ❌ Too expensive for really small startups.

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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

There’s no clear winner in the Pendo vs Mixpanel duel. Mixpanel’s analytics are more advanced than Pendo’s but you need other tools to act on the insights. Pendo gives you tools to act on the data, but they are fairly limited.

Userpilot’s analytics features, engagement layer, feedback functionality, and attractive pricing plans make it a strong alternative to both.

If you want to see Userpilot analytics in action, book the demo!

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