Mixpanel vs. Tableau Server

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.

Incentivized

Whole funnel and specific channel performance from upper to lower funnel metrics. The ability to view full channel performance for some time, such as weekly, monthly, or quarterly, has truly been monumental in how my team optimizes specific channels and campaigns. Daily performance tracking is a bit overwhelming, with load times and having to refresh specific live views over time. It can be challenging to do so at times, as extensive dashboards take much longer to load.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• It's good at doing what it is designed for: accessing visualizations without having to download and open a workbook in Tableau Desktop. The latter would be a very inefficient method for sharing our metrics, so I am glad that we have Tableau Server to serve this function.
• Publishing to Tableau Server is quick and easy. Just a few clicks from Tableau Desktop and a few seconds of publishing through an average speed network, and the new visualizations are live!
• Seeing details on who has viewed the visualization and when. This is something particularly useful to me for trying to drive adoption of some new pages, so I really appreciate the granularity provided in Tableau Server

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• Tableau Server has had some issue handling some of our larger data sets. Our extract refreshes fail intermittently with no obvious error that we can fix
• Tableau Server has been hard to work with before they launched their new Rest API, which is also a little tricky to work with

Incentivized

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.

It simply is used all the time by more and more people. Migrating to something else would involve lots of work and lots of training. The renewal fee being fair, it simply isn't worth migrating to a different tool for now.

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

Tableau Server takes training and experience in order to unlock the application's full potential. This is best handled by a qualified data scientist or data analytics manager. Tableau user interface layout, nomenclature, and command structure take time and training to become proficient with. Integration and connectivity require proper IT developer support.

Incentivized

Our instance of Tableau Server was hosted on premises (I believe all instances are) so if there were any outages it was normally due to scheduled maintenance on our end. If the Tableau server ever went down, a quick restart solved most issues

While there are definitely cases where a user can do things that will make a particular worksheet or dashboard run slowly, overall the performance is extremely fast. The user experience of exploratory analysis particularly shines, there's nothing out there with the polish of Tableau.

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.

Incentivized

We have consistently had highly satisfactory results every time we've reached out for help. Our contractor, used for Tableau server maintenance and dashboard development is very technically skilled. When he hits a roadblock on how to do something with Tableau, the support staff have provided timely and useful guidance. He frequently compares it to Cognos and says that while Cognos has capabilities Tableau doesn't, the bottom line value for us is a no-brainer

Incentivized

In our case, they hired a private third party consultant to train our dept. It was extremely boring and felt like it dragged on. Everything I learned was self taught so I was not really paying attention. But I do think that you can easily spend a week on the tool and go over every nook and cranny. We only had the consultant in for a day or two.

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 Tableau website is full of videos that you can follow at your own pace. As a very small company with a Tableau install, access to these free resources was incredibly useful to allowing me to implement Tableau to its potential in a reasonable and proportionate manner.

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.

Implementation was over the phone with the vendor, and did not go particularly well. Again, think this was our fault as our integration and IT oversight was poor, and we made errors. Would they have happened had a vendor been onsite? Not sure, probably not, but we probably wouldn't have paid for that either

• 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

Incentivized

Today, if my shop is largely Microsoft-centric, I would be hard pressed to choose a product other than Power BI. Tableau was the visualization leader for years, but Microsoft has caught up with them in many areas, and surpassed them in some. Its ability to source, transform, and model data is superior to Tableau. Tableau still has the lead in some visualizations, but Power BI's rise is evidenced by its ever-increasing position in the leadership section of the Gartner Magic Quadrant.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• Tableau does take dedicated FTE to create and analyze the data. It's too complex (and powerful) a product not to have someone dedicated to developing with it.
• There are some significant setup for the server product.
• Once sever setup is complete, it's largely "fire and forget" until an update is necessary. The server update process is cumbersome.

Incentivized