At the most fundamental level: Heap's products - our SDKs, infrastructure, interface, pricing - were built from the ground up and optimized for this "capture everything" philosophy. Mixpanel tacked it onto an experience that's still built around manual instrumentation.
This becomes obvious when you actually use both products. I encourage you to do so and witness the differences yourself.
A few deficiencies of Mixpanel's approach relative to Heap:
* Performance. If you click around Mixpanel's site, you'll notice a tracking request get sent for each and every interaction. Click 10 times in a row, and Mixpanel's SDK will issue 10 separate requests in succession. Heap's SDK does the right thing: batch events. This is because Heap's SDK is optimized for automatic event tracking, while Mixpanel's was built for legacy manual tracking.
* Data trustworthiness. Form submissions and link clicks can unload the page before an analytics request gets sent, which means Mixpanel will drop a large percentage of events (~30% in our experience). This gets exacerbated on mobile devices with poor internet connections. Heap does the right thing in each of these cases (it's actually a surprisingly tricky technical problem). This sort of data gap is dangerous for any real analysis, because you're basing decisions upon figures that are fundamentally wrong (especially on mobile!). The "best-effort" approach works for manual tracking, but not for automatic tracking.
* Data completeness. Mixpanel fails to capture some key client-side events, including pushstate and hashchange events. If you have a single-page webapp, pushtate/hashchange events are critical in understanding a user's flow through your product. Heap captures these (and other interactions) seamlessly. Mixpanel doesn't.
* Scale. Owler is the only customer cited as using Mixpanel's autotrack feature in production (at least as far as I can tell from their press release). Heap's automatic tracking, on the other hand, is live and battle-tested on some of the largest websites on the internet (heapanalytics.com/customers). It'll be interesting to see how Mixpanel's approach scales to their customer base. It's clearly not fully figured out: you'll note a "X-MP-CE-Backoff" response header to each of their analytics requests, presumably to pause data collection when their backend load is too high.
* Pricing. Mixpanel still applies traditional per-event pricing here. This causes a few issues: 1) costs can balloon unpredictably as you track more events, 2) you're disincentivized from exploring new data, 3) you have to do a cost/benefit analysis for each new event you're thinking to track. This is a major deterrent to ad-hoc, retroactive, exploratory analysis, which is the primary benefit of capturing everything.
It's clear that automatic data collection is the way of the future, and there's still so many more ways to evolve it (stay tuned!). I think we'll see more and more tools adopt this approach over time. But dealing with a surplus of data requires a fundamental rethinking of analytics practices, and it's not as simple as shoehorning features into traditional experiences.
Thanks for pointing out some areas where we can improve. We will work on making autotrack great over the year specifically for those things but we haven't seen any major problems with our large customers from performance to pricing. If we do, we are committed to changing things quickly.
Hey there- I was the product manager for this product at Mixpanel. I can help explain how Mixpanel addresses those points effectively and how we differentiate ourselves.
A few things Mixpanel does really well:
* Mixpanel is the most complete reporting platform: We have been around since 2009 and have evolved to allow customers to get deep analysis of their data. Mixpanel has more than double the reports and allows you to do things like predict which users will convert, a/b test outcomes and identify issues in user flow, all of which helps our customers make data driven decision, understand your revenue, and more. Additionally with Mixpanel you can dive even deeper into your data to make smart business or product decisions.
* Mixpanel offers a fully integrated marketing suite: Using Mixpanel you can also learn about and re-engage your users with a full suite of notifications include email, push, sms, in-app, and surveys and get full reporting on the impact.
* Mixpanel is truly cross-platform: Mixpanel is the one stop shop for cross platform analytics without a developer. We are able to track data on web and mobile, no matter the device or platform.
Regarding some of your specific points:
* Performance: We have done extensive performance testing and haven’t seen or heard any issues for our customers using the product. The requests previously mentioned are asynchronous requests and have extremely little performance impacts on our customers’ product. If it turns out this is really a selling point adding client side queueing can be done in less than a week.
* Data trustworthiness: 30% data discrepancy here is extreme and our testing works well- I would recommend just trying it out yourself. Again, special handling for link tracking can easily be added if we detect issues for customers (we are constantly monitoring data accuracy)
* Scale: Mixpanel has been around since 2009 and have significant experience dealing with scale. Owler is just one example of a customer we have using Autotrack but we have a paying customer base of 4,200, with tens of thousands more customers using Mixpanel for free. Many of those customers are already using Autotrack to send many millions of events every day.
* Pricing: Mixpanel doesn’t charge for the retroactive data that we have collected only the data you use. While you do have to decide at the event level if an event is worth it- it is most closely tied to the value you receive from Mixpanel. You only pay for data that is actionable and can drive ROI. With session based pricing, even if you have users that aren’t truly using your product you still have to pay, even though they are not giving you great insights about your business.
Hey, don’t take my word for it just sign-up and see.
Can anyone chime in on the differences/experiences between the two?