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 tierFrom $29 per month (Cloud, 50k hits; annual billing gives 2 months free)
Free tierWhat 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
Platforms
Fits teams
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.