HashiCorp Consul is a tool for discovering and configuring services in the IT infrastructure. It provides service discovery, health checking, key/value stores and support for multiple data centers out of the box.
$0
always free
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
HashiCorp Consul
Mixpanel
Editions & Modules
Open Source (self-managed)
$0
always free
HCP Consul (Cloud)
$0.027/hr
Per Hour
Enterprise
Self-Managed Custom Deployments
Free
$0
per month
Growth
$17
per month
Enterprise
Contact sales
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Consul
Mixpanel
Free Trial
Yes
No
Free/Freemium Version
Yes
Yes
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
No
No
Entry-level Setup Fee
Optional
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!
Consul looks to me like an amazing solution to store configuration data. In huge cloud environments like what we are using nowadays, it is quite important to have a reliable source of parameters to our distributed applications, easily scalable and also, easy to change parameters spreading them efficiently over our entire environment.
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
Service Health: Using Consul for service health/discovery has been critical to our success in a hybrid environment
K/V Store: The Consul K/V store is the best solution out there for our particular use case, which is as a locking mechanism to coordinate otherwise random runs of our configuration management system. This has allowed us to have peace of mind of system availability in our on-prem infrastructure.
API: The Consul API as a whole is excellent and extremely easy to work with
Documentation: Hashicorp really does documentation well. Their examples are easy to follow and everything is written in a manner that is easy to understand for beginners with the tool.
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.
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.
Consul's API is extremely user friendly. While their web interface isn't quite as "mature", it's still pretty easily navigated for the average person. Together they make a pretty easy to pick up and use tool.
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
I've never used paid support from HashiCorp, but I consider its support a good one, since they provide a lot of free resources for the community and there are good user groups supporting you on several sorts of issues. Also, HashiCorp is known as a company with a strong relationship with the community, that is easily noticed by the events HashiCorp promotes over the world.
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.
We used to use Microsoft SQL Server for configuration management of our services. Unfortunately that was a pain because of:
Developers did not know how to persist objects effectively in MS SQL Server
SQL queries or a custom web UI were the ways of keeping the data up to date, but both options were hard to use
Each service would have its own slightly different configuration in a file and in MS SQL Server so that caused a lot of confusion and configuration management overhead
Consul brought the following benefits:
Its own modern web UI
Streamlined use of objects and multiple different configuration (JSON-based)
Service DNS vs IP addresses is a God-send for the dev and operations teams.
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.
It contains a native web UI, which in contrast to its counterparts, is handy, very intuitive and - most importantly - very informative. It leaves no room for doubt about your services "forest" health. So, for that purpose, the learning curve was almost down to non-existent. Our team managed to work seamlessly with Consul being our services API
Our management staff had a difficult time understanding what Consul was really all about. For technical staff it is pretty simple to understand the huge value such a tool can pose to our suite of solutions, but once our management staff took the grasp of its valuable handy set of tools, we didn't take long to start using it and keeping track of our Swarm overall health, with was a constant concern for the entire company before.
For load balancing purposes, we were relying pretty much on guesses before we decided to use Consul. One would check a certain node overall health and decide if we would need to spring a new instance at AWS or Digital Ocean.
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.
