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In-depth: PostHog vs Mixpanel

Jan 08, 2024

Want to know how PostHog and Mixpanel compare? If you remember nothing else, remember these two points:

  1. Mixpanel is a product analytics tool only.

  2. PostHog is an all-in-one platform that includes product analytics and much more.

How is PostHog different?

1. It's more than product analytics

PostHog is the only product analytics platform built to natively work with session replay, feature flags, A/B testing, and surveys. This means you get all the tools you need to deploy new features, test their performance, observe and analyze how users interact with them, and gather feedback. Everything you need to truly understand user behavior, perfectly integrated.

2. It's built for engineers

We support all popular (and some unpopular) SDKs, have extensively documented APIs, and a powerful SQL query builder, so you can analyze data how you want. We make it easy to test in production, conduct phased rollouts, run beta programs, and so much more.

3. We're open source and transparent

PostHog is built on transparency. Our product is open source and released under an MIT License. You can read our source code, raise issues and PRs, build your own integrations, and vote on our public roadmap. Got a question? Ask it in our community forum.

Comparison PostHog and Mixpanel

Platform

Entering a credit card unlocks almost all our features and you only pay for what you use. You get a generous free allowance every month and you can set billing limits to prevent surprise bills.

PostHogMixpanel

Product analytics

Track events and conversion, analyze user behavior

Web analytics

Easy to use analytics for marketing websites

Session replay

Watch real users use your product, diagnose bugs

Feature flags

Roll out features safely, toggle features for cohorts or individuals

A/B testing

Run tests on new features, optimize conversion funnels

Analysis only*

User surveys

Collect and analyze feedback, run NPS and PMF surveys

Data pipelines

Export event data to data warehouses

Customer data platform

Sync cusomter data between third-party tools

Beta

Data warehouse

Centralized data storage for business intelligence

Beta

Heatmaps

Visualize where users click in your app or website

Notebooks

Ad-hoc analysis and collaboration

Dark mode

Choose between light and dark UI

Open source

Build your own apps and contribute code

Libraries only

*You can't run A/B tests using Mixpanel, only analyse the results of tests created using third-party integrations.

Product analytics

There are two key differences here:

  1. PostHog supports autocapture, which makes it much faster to implement as you don't have to manually instrument every event. Don't want autocapture? Just turn it off and rely on one of our many SDKs – we offer the best of both worlds.

  2. PostHog has a SQL-based query builder for power users, which enables you to generate custom data analyses using PostHog event data. In future, our query builder will let you analyze data as you would in a business intelligence tool, like Metabase, inside PostHog.

PostHogMixpanel

Autocapture

Capture frontend clicks and events automatically

Query editor

Write your own queries in SQL

Dashboards

Combine insights into shareable dashboards

Graphs and trends

Build custom insights and visualizations

Funnels

Track users through a sequence of events

Retention

Visualize which users stay, for how long

User paths

Track user flows and where they drop-off

Cohorts

Combine users based on properties and events for group analysis

Group analytics

Track metrics at a company and account level

Lifecycle analysis

Understand who is dormant, churning, and thriving

Stickiness insights

See how many times users perform an event in a period of time.

Custom formulas

Use formulas to calculate unique insights

Correlation analysis

Suggested events and properties that lead to success or failure

Feature flags

Feature flags make it easy to roll out features to specific users or groups, and safely test in production. Our feature flags are also tightly integrated with other tools, meaning you can target session replays, surveys and other features using existing feature flags. See benefits of feature flags for more.

PostHogMixpanel

Boolean flags

Simple flags returning true or flag

Multivariate flags

Flags with multiple customizable values

Payloads

Flags with string, number, or JSON payloads

Local evaluation

Store flag definitions locally

Percentage rollouts

Target percentages of a group

Custom targeting

Target users based on user properties, custom contexts

Scheduling

Schedule flags to turn on or off

Environments

Manage flags for dev, stage, prod

Partial

Bootstrapping

Flags available on frontend application load

Early access

Manage betas, test features

A/B testing

PostHog's A/B testing features are free when you enter card details. You can't run A/B tests using Mixpanel, but you can analyze the results of experiments created using third-party A/B testing tools.

PostHogMixpanel

Built-in A/B testing

Setup and run A/B tests using feature flags

Experiment analysis

Analyze results of A/B tests

Custom goals

Customize metrics that a test tracks

Secondary metrics

Monitor impact on unrelated metrics

Statistical significance

Automatically checks for statistical significance

Split testing

Split participants into groups

Multivariate (A/B/n) testing

Test multiple variants of a change

Recommended run time

Automatically calculate the recommended run time and sample size

Dynamic cohorts

Add new users to an experiment automatically by setting a user property

Holdout testing

Withhold multiple features to measure cumulative impact

Partial

Statistics engine

How the results of an experiment are calculated

BayesianFrequentist

Session replay

Replays enable you watch how users experience your app, diagnose issues, improve support, and understand real user behavior in a way raw data can't. You get 5,000 recordings for free every month, so you'll pay nothing if you remain below this limit.

PostHogMixpanel

Web app recordings

Capture recordings from single-page apps

Mobile app recordings

Capture recordings in iOS and Android apps

Beta

Identity detection

Link recordings to user IDs

Console logs

Capture extra content from a users' browser environment

Playlists

Sort recordings into static and dynamic playlists

Performance monitoring

Track network events within a session

Privacy masking

Censor personal information from playback

Conditional recording

Only capture the sessions you want

DOM explorer

Explore an interactive snapshot of replays

Export recordings

Save important recordings offline

Minimum duration

Only record sessions longer than the minimum duration

Sample recorded sessions

Restrict the percentage of sessions that will be recorded

Record via feature flag

Only record sessions for users that have the flag enabled

Surveys

Surveys are great for tracking customer satisfaction scores like Net Promoter Score (NPS), customer satisfaction (CSAT), and customer effort score (CES). We include survey templates for all these and more. Read our guide comparing NPS, CSAT, and CES to see which survey type you should use and when.

PostHogMixpanel

Open text

Free text answers and feedback

Product rating

Rank using emojis or number

Single choice

Select one answer from multiple

Multiple choice

Select more than one answer from multiple

NPS surveys

Net Promoter Score survey template

PMF surveys

Product-market fit survey template

User property targeting

Target users based on any of their user properties

Custom colors & positioning

Customize the colors of your surveys to match your brand

Custom HTML

Add custom HTML to your survey text

API mode

Create surveys via the API

Integrations

PostHog and Mixpanel both offer a wide range of integrations, sources and destinations. Mixpanel offers more overall, though many of its integrations cover features like A/B testing and surveys that are built into PostHog already. See our data pipeline docs for a full list.

PostHogMixpanel

Imports

Import data from data warehouses and other sources

Exports

Export data to data warehouses other destinations

Segment

Send events via Segment

Rudderstack

Send events via Rudderstack

Zapier

Trigger Zapier automations

Sentry

Connect to Sentry data

Zendesk

Two-way integration for customer support

Customer.io

Messaging and marketing automation

Slack

Alerts for Slack

Microsoft Teams

Alerts for Microsoft Teams

Community integrations

Build your own integration

Cohorts Sync only

Google Ads

Import ROI data from Google Ads

Security and compliance

PostHogMixpanel

User privacy options

Anonymize users, drop personal data

History, audit logs

Manage and view flag edits and related users

GDPR-ready

Can be compliant with GDPR

HIPAA-ready

Can be compliant with HIPAA

SOC 2

SOC 2 security certification

2FA

Enforce login with two-factor authentication

SAML/SSO

Use SAML or single sign-on authentication

EnterpriseEnterprise

Frequently asked questions

Can PostHog also replace Google Analytics?

Yes. PostHog can replace Google Analytics for many use cases – our marketing team uses PostHog, for example. You can integrate PostHog into your website using Google Tag Manager. See our comparison of PostHog and Google Analytics 4 and An intro to PostHog for Google Analytics users for more.

Is PostHog easy to deploy?

Yes. Just paste our JS snippet within the <head> tags your product or website and you're good to go in just a few minutes. See our installation documentation for more options. We support dozens of client-side and server-side SDKs.

How much does PostHog cost?

You only pay for what you use and every PostHog users gets a generous amount of free usage each month:

Free usage per month
Product analytics1 million events
Session replay5,000 recordings
Feature flags1 million API requests
A/B testing1 million API requests
Surveys250 responses

You'll never pay anything if you stay within these limits and you can set billing limits to avoid surprise bills.

We charge progressively less the more you use – e.g. we charge $0.000100 per event up to 2 million events, but all events after 10 million a month only cost $0.000025, 75% less per event.

A full breakdown and pricing calculator is on our pricing page.

How can I estimate my usage?

The easiest way is to sign up to PostHog, integrate our snippet, then check the projection on your billing page after a few days. Alternatively, you can guesstimate by multiplying your current monthly active users by an estimate of events generated per user – 50 to 100 per user is a good starting point. See Estimating usage & costs in our docs for more.

Does PostHog block bots by default?

Yes. See the full blocklist in our docs.

Can I use PostHog with a CDP? (Segment, Rudderstack, etc.)

Yes. See Using PostHog with a CDP in our docs.

What about ad blockers?

We recommend all users deploy a reverse proxy, which enables you send events to PostHog Cloud using your own domain. Events sent from your own domain and are less likely to be intercepted by tracking blockers, ensuring you capture the best data possible. We have reverse proxy setup guides for AWS Cloudfront, Caddy, Cloudflare, Netlify, Vercel, and more, in our docs.

How do PostHog and Mixpanel compare to Amplitude?

Amplitude is closer to Mixpanel than PostHog – it doesn't support features session replays or surveys, and doesn't offer autocapture, but it does offer feature flags and A/B testing on some paid tiers. Read our PostHog vs Amplitude comparison for information.


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