Google offers the Firebase suite of application development tools, available free or at cost for higher degree of usages, priced flexibly accorded to features needed. The suite includes A/B testing and Crashlytics, Cloud Messaging (FCM) and in-app messaging, cloud storage and NoSQL storage (Cloud Firestore and Firestore Realtime Database), and other features supporting developers with flexible mobile application development.
$0.01
Per Verification
Mixpanel
Score 8.3 out of 10
N/A
Mixpanel helps companies measure what matters, make decisions fast, and build better products through data. With self-serve product analytics solution, teams can analyze how and why people engage, convert, and retain—in real-time, across devices—to improve their user experience. Mixpanel serves over 26,000 companies from different industries around the world, including Expedia, Uber, Ancestry, DocuSign, and Lemonade. Headquartered in San Francisco, Mixpanel has offices in New York,…
$0
per month
Pendo.io
Score 8.4 out of 10
N/A
Pendo.io is a product engagement platform with features for in-app analytics, surveys and feedback, and guidance.
N/A
Pricing
Firebase
Mixpanel
Pendo.io
Editions & Modules
Phone Authentication
$0.01
Per Verification
Stored Data
$0.18
Per GiB
Free
$0
per month
Growth
$17
per month
Enterprise
Contact sales
*Free
Free
Base
Contact sales team
Core
Contact sales team
Pulse
Contact sales team
Ultimate
Contact sales team
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Firebase
Mixpanel
Pendo.io
Free Trial
No
No
Yes
Free/Freemium Version
No
Yes
Yes
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
No
No
Yes
Entry-level Setup Fee
No setup fee
No setup fee
No setup fee
Additional Details
—
Mixpanel uses MTU (Monthly Tracked User) pricing, which is designed to scale with your company. MTUs are roughly equivalent to the number of unique visitors on your product and each user is counted once per month, even if they use multiple devices. If Events based pricing makes more sense for your business, reach out to us and we can work with you!
It's tough to pick out competitors against Firebase as I'm really unsure and doubt there's another product exactly like it. As mentioned before Firebase literally does everything you can imagine for a mobile application but doesn't get insanely deep in one feature or action. It …
Mixpanel was a more labor intensive to setup and use. We had to divert developer resources to tag each feature and deploy code. With Pendo a non-technical/non-developer can tag elements on the webpage and it is a huge time saver to get information back faster and cheaper.
Pendo.io has better brand value, brand recall, brand recognition and better trust factor compared to its competitors. Also, the leadership as well as product team has hands-on previous relevant experience using this tool which helped us make the decision. The customer support …
Pendo.io doesn't try to fit every possible product management feature inside the application, rather it focuses on the user experience and analytics part. And they do that beautifully. Because they are focused on their strength so they are best in that, also their pricing is …
It's infinitely easier to tag features in Pendo than other tools - the designer makes feature tagging and guide creation really, really simple and fast.
Intelligent segmentation and Pendo's in-app messaging capabilities
Verified User
Project Manager
Chose Pendo.io
Pendo is more visual and offers better native user tracking, without the need to be a data scientist or master the tool. It plugs into your existing software and lets you overlay surveys, NPS, click, page, or even flow tracking with any developer interaction. Like others, Pendo …
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.
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.
Pendo.io is useful in generating great dashboards that present user analytics in the best possible view that could be used for analysis & derive key insights on what could be done if there's a feature that's not being recognized by end users or if there are any pain points where users are struggling more around a workflow which is technically not that difficult. Pendo.io also can be used to create impactful guides where intercatoin of a user with the Guide can be created in less steps & have relevant information about that workflow that the user is completing. Pendo.io's resource center can act as a one stop hub to present any sidewide updates which could be information of Prod releases, New KB Articles, Register to any event, & much more. Segments can be created in as many variation as one can. In fact, Segments are the ruling property or feature that works so handy, which reduces a lot of iterative work.
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).
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.
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.
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.
Preview is problematic if the Pendo.io user doesn't have access to the target environment or application where the guide is going to display
It would be ideal to have a gallery of thumbnail images of previously used guides to select from, either to pull a screen capture or to use as a template. It's cumbersome to go to the guides, find the one you want, click on Preview, etc.
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.
We have had an excellent experience with Pendo. When we've had questions or concerns, Pendo is very quick to respond and communicate with us. We have experienced top-notch customer support and customer engagement. We have actually modeled some of our implementation and product processes after Pendo's examples.
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.
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
It is intuitive for core tasks like tracking feature usage, building Guides, and viewing dashboards. The interface is clean and well structured, making it easy for product managers and operational teams to get value quickly without heavy technical support. However, there is a noticeable learning curve when setting up advanced custom events, reports, or integrations, which can take some time and internal knowledge-sharing to master.
Every time I have logged into Pendo, the service has been available for me to use. The page has never been down when I am trying to get info from there.
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.
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.
They've been great anytime that we have needed help with something. They also have some really great help articles. We're able to figure most things out through their articles, but when we've had to call in they've been very helpful and we haven't had any problems. I'd highly recommend working with them.
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.
The training schedule was well thought out and tailored to meet our needs. Chantelle stayed with us through the whole implementation and made sure that we were good to go.
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.
I have just very superficial experience with Google Analytics but I do believe that Pendo.io is a much much better tool in pretty much all aspects of it. It has a ton more features and capabilities and even for the capabilities where there is overlap, Pendo seems to come out ahead easily. There are aspects that Pendo could improve for sure such as what metadata it captures from the users; an example of this is screen resolution which Google Analytics captures but Pendo does not.
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.
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.
Reducing development time with in-app guides and resource center, with product management being able to agilely create guides in real time, this could be as much as 1 full time developer in savings.
Reducing business time scoping "rock fetches" than are proven to be invaluable based on analytics, each time 1 single piece of analtical data saves around ~20 hours across multiple resources.
Increasing user satisfaction with in-app guides and resource center
Increasing usage of key features through targetted messaging, those key features either drive costs ou of our business or add value to customers business.
