Firebase vs. Hotjar vs. Mixpanel

Firebase should be your first choice if your platform is mobile first. Firebase's mobile platform support for client-side applications is second to none, and I cannot think of a comparable cross-platform toolkit. Firebase also integrates well with your server-side solution, meaning that you can plug Firebase into your existing app architecture with minimal effort.

Firebase lags behind on the desktop, however. Although macOS support is rapidly catching up, full Windows support is a glaring omission for most Firebase features. This means that if your platform targets Windows, you will need to implement the client functionality manually using Firebase's web APIs and wrappers, or look for another solution.

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Hotjar is good for a first pass at understanding user sentiment or locating potential usability issues. There are features such as "rage clicked" which shows recordings or instances when a user rage clicked or had an issue with your site. Hotjar has also been helpful to launch intercept surveys on mobile, desktop, and app, which not all competitor software allow. Hotjar recordings are fun to watch. "Watching Hotjar like Netflix" is a favorite pastime at work.

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As a worker in the sales area, I see closely how complex it can be to evaluate the commercial funnel and Mixpanel has been an indispensable guide to prioritize above all what customers expect to receive from our company, and thus be able to determine the main service we offer. Without a doubt, Mixpanel has special functions to be the one that guides the route and marks the objectives much more clearly.

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• Analytics wise, retention is extremely important to our app, therefore we take advantage of the cohort analysis to see the impact of our middle funnel (retargeting, push, email) efforts affect the percent of users that come back into the app. Firebase allows us to easily segment these this data and look at a running average based on certain dates.
• When it comes to any mobile app, a deep linking strategy is essential to any apps success. With Firebase's Dynamic Links, we are able to share dynamic links (recognize user device) that are able to redirect to in-app content. These deep links allow users to share other deep-linked content with friends, that also have link preview assets.
• Firebase allows users to effectively track events, funnels, and MAUs. With this simple event tracking feature, users can put organize these events into funnels of their main user flows (e.g., checkout flows, onboarding flows, etc.), and subsequently be able to understand where the drop-off is in the funnel and then prioritize areas of the funnel to fix. Also, MAU is important to be able to tell if you are bringing in new users and what's the active volume for each platform (Android, iOS).

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• Heat mapping is great on Hotjar. It is a good place to start when you are looking at the UX & CRO on your website. You can see the % of people clicking on elements on a page, how far they scroll, and mouse movements.
• Hotjar is great for session recordings. These record the mouse movements, clicks, pages and scrolls of a user in video format. You can watch these to investigate what works well on a site and identify potential roadblocks and bugs.
• Hotjar is great as it ensures that users details are anonymous; for instance, if you are watching a session recording, you cannot see what a user types in a form field, as Hotjar blanks this out.
• Hotjar has a poll function, so you can have polls on your website.

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• Mixpanel is a daily use application for everyone in my organization; it helps us have a better flow of information and interaction between work teams.
• The user interface of this platform is simple and has a wide variety of functions and resources to help us work in the most organized way, have better team coordination, and keep efficiency high.
• I love that it is so easy to program our calendar to our liking, so we can prioritize our activities and know what is pending, and the best thing is that I can update the calendar if necessary.
• The chat function is great to improve the interaction between colleagues and share work schedules and any information with third parties.

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• Attribution and specifically multi-touch attribution could be more robust such as Branch or Appsflyer but understand this isn't Firebases bread and butter.
• More parameters. Firebase allows you to track tons of events (believe it's up to 50 or so) but the parameters of the events it only allows you to track 5 which is so messily and unbelievable. So you're able to get good high-level data but if you want to get granular with the events and actions are taken on your app to get real data insight you either have to go with a paid data analytics platform or bring on someone that's an expert in SQL to go through Big Query.
• City-specific data instead of just country-specific data would have been a huge plus as well.

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• Hotjar is primarily used for web-based experiences. Not that easy to use on mobile apps.
• I'd love to see Hotjar integrated with Google Analytics for an even deeper view.
• Hotjar is primarily used by smaller organizations...pricing can get steep quickly for larger organizations.

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• Mixpanel requires an explicit setting of events from your app. This means you need to be very thoughtful in the design of your events because missing one means you aren't collecting any data from it. Inserting it into the process later on then brings challenges in tracking when certain events came online.
• A tool like Mixpanel comes packed with features that sometimes are harder to discover. It's very easy to get sucked into one part of its toolset and not be aware of other tools which may be very useful.

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Even though the heat maps and user recordings were useful, our website was significantly slowed down after we installed Hotjar, so much so, that it took over a minute for our blog to load. The data that we gathered was not worth the length that it took our website to load.

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It's not an all encompassing solution like Google Analytics tries to be, but MixPanel offers much easier to use and understandable data insights. That's valuable when juggling many responsibilities as startup life demands, so a renewal would be easily justified.

I don't use the Firebase UI much, but rather connect it to GA4. GA4 has a great event model but the GA4 UI and analysis capabilities are limited. It's harder to measure product usage type of engagement but if you have the time and resources to leverage the GA4 to BiqQuery export you'll have all the raw event data you'll need for deep analysis, segmentation, and audience activation.

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So easy and simple to use! Straightforward anyone in the team is able to easily go in and set up anything in Hotjar. The UI is really simple. Whenever you give feedback to Hotjar they continously take on board the feedback and improve the tool.

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Relativity easy to use. Once you get the hang of it, very easy to create dashboards for different use cases. I split my dashboards between customers or use cases

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Our analytics folks handled the majority of the communication when it came to customer service, but as far as I was aware, the support we got was pretty good. When we had an issue, we were able to reach out and get support in a timely fashion. Firebase was easy to reach and reasonably available to assist when needed.

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Hotjar is a SaaS-based company, and as such has a good support service. Users can quickly submit support tickets through Hotjar's online portal. Enterprise customers get access to additional support members and have SLAs to support their larger, more complex needs. Overall, Hotjar is extremely reliable and I've never had to reach out to customer support.

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We have only ever had to use their support once, when we were setting up the account, but their responses were prompt and the solutions were well documented. The people who solved our issues were helpful, even to non-tech people.

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Mixpanel has a great resource about their product, with videos on how to use it and real world examples from other companies on how they integrate Mixpanel into their business processes.

Again, somewhat annoying to be charged based on data points when many other analytics providers have one flat fee. Implementation was good, but I might have tracked a few more detailed points if I had the option.

Before using Firebase, we exclusively used self hosted database services. Using Firebase has allowed us to reduce reliance on single points of failure and systems that are difficult to scale. Additionally, Firebase is much easier to set up and use than any sort of self hosted database. This simplicity has allowed us to try features that we might not have based on the amount of work they required in the past.

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HotJar was selected for a few reasons:

• Video Capture - HotJars video capture of user sessions is nothing short of amazing. It is so useful (not to mention cool) to see, in real time, how users interact with our software. It makes our jobs so much easier and more enjoyable to get this type of d
• User Surveys - The ease and flexibility of surveys we can make available on our website are an awesome tool to get additional data.
• Simple implementation - Adding a very small amount of code to our website gives us the ability to use all of HotJars features without having to touch our code again.

Incentivized

• There was not really any other competitors for this specific use case that had a chance
• We used Google Analytics for some things but obviously, GA is anonymous data so not useful for product teams with users
• Other solutions out there seemed to be too expensive and this was the most recommended
• Heap seemed to be the best OTHER option but didn't take the time to evaluate

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• Makes building real-time interfaces easy to do at scale with no backend involvement.
• Very low pricing for small companies and green-fields projects.
• Lack of support for more complicated queries needs to be managed by users and often forces strange architecture choices for data to enable it to be easily accessed.

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• We have fixed many issues, for example, checkout usability problems with the video recording feature. You can catch bugs and get an overall idea of how a particular page is working.
• Polls have helped us pair intent with the video sessions, so we can understand better why certain users answered different things. You get greedy and try to ask everything but that won't work. Keep it simple and it will give you small but important insights.

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• We've been able to increase the funnel conversions of one of our new product funnels from a 1% conversion rate to a 5% conversion rate.
• We've been able to increase the CTR on another of our main product pages from ~3% to ~10% (so far)
• We've been able to segment out how users from different traffic sources behave, allowing us to eliminate thousands of dollars of wasteful spending on advertising campaigns that weren't working.

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