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testcritic

Mixpanel vs Amplitude

Feature checklists rarely decide anything. What decides it is the pricing metric, who has to write the tests, and which limitation you can live with.

Entry price

Free tier available

Free tier

Free tier available

Free tier

What drives the bill

The metric that actually scales your invoice.

Growth now starts at $0 and scales with event volume up to 20M events a month, with the first million free; annual billing saves around $480 a year. Enterprise is quote-based. Event-volume pricing stays generous for early products but climbs with a chatty event schema.

Paid plans are quote-based on monthly tracked users and events; enterprise contracts are substantial.

Free tier

Free forever, up to 1M events a month.

Free plan with a monthly event allowance suitable for early-stage products.

Open source

Self-hostable

No-code authoring

Languages

JavaScriptTypeScriptPythonJavaSwiftKotlinPHP
JavaScriptTypeScriptPythonJavaSwiftKotlinGo

Platforms

WebAPIiOSAndroid
WebAPIiOSAndroid

Fits teams

StartupScale-up / mid-marketEnterprise
StartupScale-up / mid-marketEnterprise

Adoption

Category standard

Mixpanel · since 2009

Category standard

Amplitude · since 2012

Strengths

  • Genuinely self-serve — product managers build their own reports without help.
  • Large free tier that carries an early-stage product a long way.
  • Fast query performance on large event volumes.
  • The deepest retention and cohort analysis in mainstream product analytics.
  • Good free tier for early-stage products.
  • Strong data-governance tooling for event taxonomy.

Limitations

  • Requires disciplined event instrumentation and naming.
  • Weaker on user-level qualitative investigation than replay tools.
  • Costs scale with event volume, which grows faster than user count.
  • Requires deliberate event instrumentation — nothing works without it.
  • Enterprise pricing rises steeply with tracked users.
  • Replay and experimentation are newer and less mature than the analytics core.

Best for

Product teams that want fast, self-serve behavioural reporting.

Product teams that need rigorous behavioural analysis over time.

All of these integrate with: Segment, Snowflake, Slack, Braze.

Pricing last reviewed August 2026 and is indicative only — confirm on each vendor’s own page.