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 8.7 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
Pricing
Firebase
Mixpanel
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
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Firebase
Mixpanel
Free Trial
No
No
Free/Freemium Version
No
Yes
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
No
No
Entry-level 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!
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.
Mixpanel is a versatile platform that integrates features to connect every work team and get the best out of them in productivity and results. Moreover, it will improve the flow of information and interaction between all your company staff; it will unify and help promote collaboration between the different work areas. Without a doubt, I highly recommend this software
Extremely robust. Has about any tool you can think of under one roof making it extremely useful as a backup platform for data analytics or small teams that need something quickly.
Intuitive and easy UI/UX. Being made and owned by Google, you expect nothing less. Very easy to use for anyone that has any marketing or analytical experience especially in Google Analytics (which I just assume all marketers do).
Safe, secure, and sturdy. Never need to worry about downtimes or misinformation as it's as clean and safe as it is being run by Google.
FREE! What else is there to say. Unless you're an extremely large application handling hundreds of thousands to millions of users, this pay as you go plan will stay free.
Mixpanel's ease of use is easily their best feature, allowing you to quickly create graphs with a few point and clicks. Their UI is also fairly snappy and well-designed.
Tying together events with user attributes allows you to properly segment users into cohorts which can then be tracked individually. Proper segmentation is where most analytics solutions earn their keep.
Live view is a nice perk that gives you a good feel for who's on your site and what they're doing at any single point in time. This can be further filtered to focus on particular events of interest.
Mixpanel has flexible plans that work for smaller startups as well.
Firebase/Firestore has very limited support for querying more complicated items; for example, performing a simple string search is not possible.
While upfront costs are low, costs can grow quickly if you're not careful about what you are being billed for.
Dashboards have at times shown different information to what is billed, and support from Google is less than stellar and not as effective as that from Amazon or Microsoft.
I didn't use the engagement features at all but it seems like they could have a better WYSIWYG editor for the emails for non-technical people using Mixpanel.
The custom reports feature seems to be really powerful but I wish they had more resources/templates for creating custom reports. I don't code so it was really hard for me to use this feature...BUT the reports I was able to get help with, were really powerful.
I wanted a dashboard area for all of my reports in one view. It seems like they were implementing this when I was moving jobs. If it's not available yet, they definitely need to add a master dashboard page for arranging saved reports.
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.
Firebase functions are more difficult to use, there are no concepts of triggers or cascading deletes without the use of Firebase functions. Firebase functions can run forever if not written correctly and cause billing nightmares. While this hasn't happened to us specifically it is a thing that happens more than one realizes.
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
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.
There is no support at all for free-plan users. There used to be a good support but something changed. If everything had gone great we could've considered upgrading but it is so bad that we'll look for an alternative once we finish the current project. Given that the documentation is very poor, there are some aspects in which customer support could have helped a lot, but with no support, we are left with some needs unfulfilled.
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.
Mixpanel is a simple JS script installation. For adding events to track, its simply a matter of adding the code where you want it. Their API and documentation are easy to understand and use.
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.
Datanomix is an excellent tool, with similar characteristics; however, Mixpanel has been our preference for two main reasons: one, to have customization and to be able to adapt the interface and tools to our use, and two, to be able to count on reports that it automates the work of sales analysis and being able to evaluate progress.
Firebase has been able to help us understand reliably, the drop-off in our user flows with their funnel feature. This has made it easy for us to be able to pinpoint weaknesses in our funnel and test and optimize with data as the dependent variable.
From an economic standpoint, we don't pay for Firebase which is great, but as the saying goes "You get what you pay for" also holds true in this context. As we looked to grow and scale, we looked for a paid solution.
From a developer resource standpoint, Firebase has been extremely easy to integrate into our app. Whether it be the event tracking, dynamic links or crash reporting we have not had to waste too much developer time thanks to their well-organized developer docs.
User event data has helped us improve our product, which has increased subscriptions.
Being able to send helpful messages to some users who drop off after certain events has helped us reduce our churn.
We have been able to identify the Monthly super-active users, understand their usage of our product, which we use to conduct focus groups to help us shape the product.
