Skip to content
testcritic

Mixpanel vs Matomo

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

From $29 per month (Cloud, 50k hits; annual billing gives 2 months free)

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.

Self-hosting is free but plugins such as heatmaps and A/B testing are paid add-ons. Cloud scales with hits.

Free tier

Free forever, up to 1M events a month.

Self-hosted Community edition is free forever with unlimited users and hits; premium plugins are paid.

Open source

GPL-3.0

Self-hostable

No-code authoring

Languages

JavaScriptTypeScriptPythonJavaSwiftKotlinPHP
PHPJavaScriptCodeless

Platforms

WebAPIiOSAndroid
WebiOSAndroid

Fits teams

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

Adoption

Category standard

Mixpanel · since 2009

Widely used

InnoCraft · since 2007

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.
  • Complete data ownership with no third-party processing — the strongest GDPR position available.
  • No sampling, unlike free tiers of hosted analytics.
  • Can be configured to run without cookies or consent banners.

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.
  • Self-hosting requires PHP and MySQL operations, including performance tuning at scale.
  • The interface is less refined than modern product analytics tools.
  • Advanced features are paid plugins even on the free self-hosted edition.

Best for

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

Public sector, healthcare and European organisations with strict data-residency requirements.

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