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Mixpanel - Don't Build an app without it.
March 05, 2018

Mixpanel - Don't Build an app without it.

Michael Ball-Marian | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Software Version

Startup

Modules Used

  • Engagement Plans

Overall Satisfaction with Mixpanel

We are using it in our six-person startup team. I know several other startup products are using it, and some of our established products are also looking at it. My team uses it to understand how our users are using our system. We instrument all major features. We also use it to measure our activation process. We are not using it for messaging of any sort (there are modules to send in-app and email messages).
  • Great for behavioral analytics. It helps answer questions like: "how many unique users did X last week?" or "what percentage of users chose options A, B, or C for this process.
  • The "live" view is awesome for keeping an eye on certain things. For example - release a new feature? Set up a live view filter to watch your users engage with that new feature. You can sometimes notice problems very quickly this way.
  • Good visuals / graphs. Many options for choosing how you want to display or segment your data. Examples: linear, rolling log, etc. Can easily specify that you want Total, Avg, Unique or other counts.
  • Very good, detailed support. I've never been disappointed by a response.
  • The trigger based messaging system is sub-par and we don't use it. It may have improved in the last year, but we do all our messaging with Intercom and haven't looked back. The UI was clunky, and I recall that it was very difficult to create certain triggers. What you want is "when user does X+Y, but hasn't done Z, then send them a message". I recall that being very hard to set up and test.
  • You can't create segments or tagged groups of users which you then use in analytic reports. This may be possible using their new Cohorts feature, but that is only available with Enterprise. What I want to be able to do is define a user segment who has done XYZ as "XYZ Group" and then filter my analytic and behavior reports by those segments. Huge gap (that may be solved by the Enterprise version, but this is way beyond our means).
  • Huge impact! We'd be blind without it.
  • It has allowed us to run many small, inexpensive experiments and quickly learn how our users patterns changed. For example: we added a new feature that we thought would dramatically increase engagement and lead to new activity. Turns out, very few users used it. We were able to create, test and learn within a week or two. Without Mixpanel, we might have built that feature out in far more detail and continued to expand it over time, spending lots of money. Our users TOLD US they wanted it...but in reality they didn't use it much. It's great to listen to your users - but it's even more valuable to TEST that with data. This story has been repeated dozens of times, saving us months of work.
Mixpanel got lots of praise from trusted colleagues. And they were right. It is powerful, affordable, and easy to use. It integrates with Segment which made it very easy for us to implement multiple metrics tools. It has great visuals and powerful
I think I covered this pretty well in my pros and cons. But Mixpanel is great for creating overall behavior analytics and understanding usage patterns. It is also very powerful and easy to do "exploratory" work to answer a question. Great for hypothesis testing. For example: "If we add feature X, will that result in increased usage/interaction frequency?"

Of course all of this depends on instrumenting your code well - you have to know what to track and how. There is a learning curve there initially, but once you get it, it is easy.