Mixpanel vs. Kissmetrics?

Anonymous

March 6th, 2015

We are evaluating analytics solutions that have easy to use funnel tools. Curious to hear other entrepreneurs which solution they use and why they chose it. Doesn’t have to be mixpanel or kissmetrics but those are the two on the short list based on our needs.

Chad Supers

March 6th, 2015

[Before you dive into this, I used to work at KISSmetrics]

It depends on what you are looking for Lucas -- KISSmetrics is geared for SaaS businesses that want to optimize their marketing. Mixpanel is an analytics solution geared around events and mobile and liked by developers. If you are wanting basic funnel tracking by events, then Mixpanel will work. If you are wanting insights on who your customers are, you may want to go with KISSmetrics. If you want bare bone tracking, try out Heap.

Either one you go with, my suggestion would be to use Segment so that you only have to use 1 API to implement your analytics. If you don't like the solution you go with, you can easily switch to the other.

Audrey Melnik Founder and Partner at Funnel Ventures

March 6th, 2015

I like HeapAnalytics

Katie McCann Product & Engineering executive, startup advisor, angel investor

March 6th, 2015

As of a year ago (haven't used it since), Mixpanel had a huge limitation with its funnels. Funnels were exclusively "loose" funnels - meaning that the events in the funnel didn't have to occur 1 right after another in order. Example: you have a funnel for someone visiting your homepage then viewing a product page - in a Mixpanel funnel, the user could do any number of things in between viewing the homepage and a product page and be considered a funnel completion. That probably isn't a great example, but there are cases when this can be problematic, if you need to measure users doing A then directly B, with nothing in between. When I was a Mixpanel user at a previous company, this was a big issue for us - so just be aware of it in case it might impact your decision.

Alasdair Clements Co-Founder, GoCAR GPS-Guided Tours

March 6th, 2015

I am tinkering with Geckoboard right now. Its very easy to set up and manipulate. Tons on integrations

Freeman Fan Entrepreneur

March 6th, 2015

We use both. Mixpanel's real-time analytics is amazing. It also has beautiful graphs and reports that are a joy to use. On the other hand, Kissmetrics can do pretty much everything Mixpanel can and is a lot more affordable. However, both services are expensive.

If real-time analytics is not that important to you, and you do not need more than 10 million events per month, then the free version of Google Analytics may be the best solution for you.

Gil Allouche Founder @ Metadata

March 6th, 2015

Is consider intercom.io and hubspot events as well Sent from my iPhone

Jitender Aswani Entrepreneur & Geek; Product, GTM, Customer Focused Executive and Engineer

March 6th, 2015

I +1 Chad's answer above. For our B2B marketing, I use all three. Heap is barebone. MixPanel's Funnel Analysis around events is very good. They could do few things better there around segmentation and filters. KissMetrics has lot of functionality beyond Funnel Analysis.

Chris Bechtel Digital Marketing Executive, Customer Acquisition, SaaS Sales Coach, Start-Up Advisor and Growth Hacker

March 6th, 2015

Hi Lucas, There is some overlap but also some key differences with both. KISS metrics strengths are in the shear number of events you can track and the ability to dive deep into Cohort analysis. But there is no ability to trigger actions based on the data. Mix Panel came from a mobile analytics POV and is strong there but also has the ability to trigger actions based on the data (e.g. send email to users based on a certain event). Often, startups will use both platforms as part of their marketing stack. The key questions you want to ask at this stage are: what data do I need to track (i.e KPIs) and what data will I want to fire actions (ideally automated) from and what will those actions be (send email, send SMS, trigger a product or app. function, etc.). Hope that helps. - Chris Chris Bechtel 310-963-5692 bechtel.chris@gmail.com http://about.me/chrisbechtel

Aliisa Hodges Sales Leader at Mixpanel

March 19th, 2015

Funnel analysis is Mixpanel's bread and butter: we offer instant, retroactive funnels. You can create funnels on the fly, control the time window to completion (1 session v 1 week v 1 month), and understand how your conversion rates are changing over time.

You can also cohortize your funnels to ask questions like, "Did users from campaign A convert better than campaign B?"

Finally, you can create "OR" funnels in case you have, say, two ways to browse items, or two ways to move from viewing items to adding to cart.

KISSmetrics restricts your ability to dig deeply into user cohorts, has no engagement platform to act on your insights (we offer email, push, mobile in-app, web in-app, and surveys), and is web only.

Ever planning on launching a mobile app? You'll probably want to understand your users' cross-platform experience :)

Nurkan Kirkan co-founder | rakam (500 startups b21)

June 9th, 2017

instead a regular answer on this matter, we should consider both would be enough for my business..

Mixpanel stores the data as you sent in their data warehouse and provides you a set of features to analye your data but we enrich your data, sanitize it depending on what you need and store it in your data warehouse for you and allow you to run both high level features similar to Mixpanel and also any kind of complex analytic queries on your event dataset.You have the full control over your data. Because it's valauble that's why questions should be different here. Do I need to share my data with 3th party?

Why I have to use a blackbox?

That's why we have been building rakam. It's a full-stack custom analytics platform

Also that Mixpanel doesn’t do ETL, it stores the events you sent. Instead, we have event mapper mechanism which allow you to enrich and sanitise the events you want to collect.

Also rakam could into your own analytics tool based on your needs. Because it allows you to do ETL + Datawarehoues + BI + Dashboard - Reporting sharing in one place. Question is here do you really need to use 3-4 different tools for an analytics stack instead?

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