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Mixpanel vs Segment: What are the differences?
What is Mixpanel? Actions speak louder than page views. Mixpanel is an advanced analytics service that helps improve web and mobile applications by tracking how users interact & engage with them.
What is Segment? A single hub to collect, translate and send your data with the flip of a switch. Segment is a single hub for customer data. Collect your data in one place, then send it to more than 100 third-party tools, internal systems, or Amazon Redshift with the flip of a switch.
Mixpanel belongs to "Funnel Analysis Analytics" category of the tech stack, while Segment can be primarily classified under "Analytics Integrator".
Some of the features offered by Mixpanel are:
- Build complex queries without writing SQL.- Segmentation allows you to do incredibly powerful data analysis. Answer complex questions such as “Show me the age breakdown of people who are male, from the United States, and viewed the pricing page” with just a few mouse clicks.
- Segmentation actually understands your data. When you send a number, date, or list of items our interface will automatically figure out how to use it.
- Instead of just a simple average, which only gives you a small part of the information you need, Segmentation automatically determines the perfect bucket size to give you a powerful visualization of the numeric distribution.
On the other hand, Segment provides the following key features:
- A single API to integrate third-party tools
- Data replay that backfills new tools with historical data
- SQL support to automatically transform and load behavioral data into Amazon Redshift
"Great visualization ui" is the primary reason why developers consider Mixpanel over the competitors, whereas "Easy to scale and maintain 3rd party services" was stated as the key factor in picking Segment.
Airbnb, Uber Technologies, and Stripe are some of the popular companies that use Mixpanel, whereas Segment is used by StackShare, Product Hunt, and Typeform. Mixpanel has a broader approval, being mentioned in 1841 company stacks & 196 developers stacks; compared to Segment, which is listed in 831 company stacks and 79 developer stacks.
I am trying to decide on a solution to better track our user data. We need to track which google ads are leading to signups, and which signups are performing various actions on the site. We then need to visualize this data in various ways. We also need to run A/B tests on features and content, to track which ones lead to the most paid conversions.
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.
Another option you might consider is Google Analytics App+Web.
It is a new type of Google Analytics property which is event-based (like Amplitude and Mixpanel). In App+Web you can collect exactly the same data and in the same format as the other 2 tools mentioned.
The great things about it are: - it is free - there is a free integration with BigQuery (though you'll need to pay for BigQuery, but for most SmB's it is peanuts - $5-30 a month)
Not so great: - reporting side is pretty buggy (App+Web is very new).
So if you are ok building your reporting in something like Google Data Studio, App+Web will be a great option. Your data analyst will especially be happy to have all the data in SQL format (BigQuery).
If you choose App+Web, then you can use Google Optimize (also free) as an A/B testing solution.
Hello Ben,
I have been using Mixpanel and Amplitude and both of them are good solutions in order to track events on your product; events, funnel analysis, retention and so on. The most important thing is that you set up properly the taxonomy and naming convention of your events' structure. I don't have anything against Segment I tried once but I didn't work with that tool but it for sure is a good one based on other workmates' opinions. ¡Important! When tracking distribution channels, take into consideration the attribution channel and all the touches that the users do in all the channels before your conversions. Some of them are good to open a path and other ones good to close.
Besides that, for A/B testing there are several options in the market but VWO is a good one that with a lot of features to get good insights into the A/B testing. Another one could be Optimizely or Google Optimize. ¡Important! Some teams instead run A/B testing because sometimes that could be a technological issue, they run cohort tests, where basically they change features on the product and they analyse this performance with the new users and compare. That could have another issue like seasonality but it is another option.
Overview, I recommend Amplitude and VWO but just to make simple the answer, because Mixpanel, Segment and the other options that the other users wrote here are good too.
All the best, and let me know how your experience was with all these tools. :)
Cheers,
Pros of Mixpanel
- Great visualization ui144
- Easy integration107
- Great funnel funcionality76
- Free58
- A wide range of tools22
- Powerful Graph Search15
- Responsive Customer Support11
- Nice reporting1
Pros of Segment
- Easy to scale and maintain 3rd party services86
- One API49
- Simple39
- Multiple integrations25
- Cleanest API19
- Easy10
- Free9
- Mixpanel Integration8
- Segment SQL7
- Flexible6
- Google Analytics Integration4
- Salesforce Integration2
- SQL Access2
- Clean Integration with Application2
- Own all your tracking data1
- Quick setup1
- Clearbit integration1
- Beautiful UI1
- Integrates with Apptimize1
- Escort1
- Woopra Integration1
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Cons of Mixpanel
- Messaging (notification, email) features are weak2
- Paid plans can get expensive2
- Limited dashboard capabilities1
Cons of Segment
- Not clear which events/options are integration-specific2
- Limitations with integration-specific configurations1
- Client-side events are separated from server-side1
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What is Mixpanel?
What is Segment?
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