BaseDash

Functionally, Amplitude and Mixpanel are incredibly similar. They both offer almost all the same functionality around tracking and visualizing user actions for analytics. You can track A/B test results in both. We ended up going with Amplitude at BaseDash because it has a more generous free tier for our uses (10 million actions per month, versus Mixpanel's 1000 monthly tracked users).

Segment isn't meant to compete with these tools, but instead acts as an API to send actions to them, and other analytics tools. If you're just sending event data to one of these tools, you probably don't need Segment. If you're using other analytics tools like Google Analytics and FullStory, Segment makes it easy to send events to all your tools at once.

This should be pretty doable in any language. Go with whatever you're most familiar with.

That being said, there's a case to be made for using Node.js since it's trivial to convert an object to JSON and vice versa.

From my experience of the early startup world, a majority of companies these days use Node.js. Python and Go are the next biggest languages, but significantly smaller than Node.

However, if you're having trouble with the front end aspect of Django, using Node probably won't make that easier for you. You'll have a lot more options between front end frameworks (React, Vue.js, Angular 2) , but they'll definitely take more time to learn than Django's templating system.

Think about whether you want to focus on front end or back end for now, and make a decision from there.

Most front end frameworks these days are built around the concept of "reactivity" (not exclusive to React). This means that you describe the content of your UI in a declarative way, rather than imperative, as you would with plain JavaScript or something like jQuery.

For example, say you have a counter app, where clicking a button increases the count. With a traditional imperative coding style, clicking the button would trigger code to increment a variable, then update the value of the counter text with that variable. On the other hand, in a declarative style, clicking the button would trigger code only to increment the variable. Your framework would automatically detect that the value changed and update the counter text accordingly.

This makes your life much easier. You no longer have to worry about keeping the DOM in sync with your application state. Your framework does it for you.

Most web applications these days use a declarative framework, like Angular 2, React, or Vue.js. At BaseDash we use React — it's got a big community with wide support and lots of useful libraries. I've heard good things about Vue too.