7 Best Mixpanel Alternatives in 2026 (Honestly Compared)

Last updated: February 2026

Mixpanel is one of the most powerful product analytics platforms on the market. It's also one of the most complex — and once you outgrow the free tier, one of the most expensive.

If you're a small-to-mid SaaS team, an indie hacker, or a product manager who just wants to understand how people use your product without spending weeks configuring dashboards, Mixpanel might be more tool than you need. The learning curve is steep, the pricing scales fast (Group Analytics alone is a paid add-on), and the setup demands careful event planning from day one or your data becomes a mess.

That doesn't make Mixpanel bad. It makes it wrong for a lot of teams.

This guide covers seven alternatives — each with different strengths, trade-offs, and price points. I've tried to be honest about all of them, including the one I built.

Quick Comparison

1. Grain — Best for Real-Time Journey Analytics Without Setup Overhead

Website: grainql.com

Pricing: Free tier available

Best for: Solo founders, SaaS teams, and anyone who wants to see real user behavior without configuring funnels

Full disclosure: I built Grain. I'm going to be honest about what it does well and where it falls short.

What Grain does differently is replace the funnel model with real-time journey maps. Traditional analytics tools force user behavior into linear steps — sign up, onboard, activate, convert. But real users don't work that way. They explore sideways, loop back to pricing three times, abandon for a week, and return through a completely different entry point. Grain reconstructs every session as a timeline graph (called Tracks) so you see the actual path, not the path you assumed.

The other big differentiator is that Grain is fully cookie-less. It uses daily-rotating identifiers instead of persistent cookies, which means GDPR and CCPA compliance by default — no cookie banners needed for analytics. This also means you're actually seeing all your users, including the ~30% that Safari, Firefox, and Brave would otherwise hide from cookie-based tools.

Setup takes about two minutes: add the SDK (one script tag), and automatic tracking captures page views, clicks, form submissions, and navigation without manual instrumentation. The dashboard streams events in real time with sub-50ms query latency — when I say real-time, I mean you're watching users navigate your product as it happens.

Grain also includes Kai, an AI assistant you can ask natural-language questions about your data. Instead of building custom reports, you ask "why did signups drop last Tuesday?" and get an answer backed by actual behavioral patterns.

Where Grain falls short: It's web-only right now (native mobile SDKs are on the roadmap but not shipped). The team is small and new, so more advanced features don't exist for self-serve customers. If you need deep behavioral cohort analysis across millions of users, Grain isn't there. And the AI assistant, while useful, is early — it's still in beta.

Choose Grain if you want to see how real users actually navigate your product, you care about privacy, and you don't want to spend days setting up tracking. Skip it if you need mobile analytics (for now 😏)

2. PostHog — Best for Dev Teams Who Want Open-Source and Full Control

Website: posthog.com

Pricing: Free up to 1M events/month, then usage-based starting at ~$0.000031/event

Best for: Engineering-led teams who value open source, self-hosting, and having analytics + feature flags + session replay in one stack

PostHog is the Swiss Army knife of product analytics. It bundles product analytics, web analytics, session replay, error tracking, feature flags, A/B testing, surveys, and a data warehouse into a single platform. For engineering teams that want to own their entire analytics stack, it's hard to beat.

The generous free tier (1M events, 5K recordings, 1M feature flag requests per month) means most small teams pay nothing. PostHog reports that 98% of their users are on the free plan. When you do start paying, usage-based pricing with volume discounts up to 82% keeps costs reasonable — significantly cheaper than Mixpanel or Amplitude at scale.

Self-hosting is a real option. The open-source version runs on your infrastructure under an MIT license, which matters if your data can't leave your servers. That said, PostHog themselves recommend their cloud product for most teams, and the self-hosted version caps at ~100K events/month before you'll hit performance issues.

The trade-off is complexity. PostHog does a lot of things, and that means there's a lot to configure. The setup isn't hard for developers, but it's not a "paste one script tag and you're done" experience. You'll want to plan your event schema. The UI, while improving rapidly, can feel overwhelming — there are a lot of tabs, a lot of options, and finding the right report sometimes takes exploration.

Choose PostHog if you're an engineering team that wants one platform for everything, you value open source, or you need self-hosting. Skip it if you want something simple that non-technical team members can use on day one.

3. Amplitude — Best for Enterprise Product Teams with Data Resources

Website: amplitude.com

Pricing: Free (Starter) up to 50K MTUs, Plus at $49/month, Growth and Enterprise are custom (reported $22K–$254K/year)

Best for: Larger product teams with dedicated data engineers who need deep behavioral analysis

Amplitude is the enterprise standard for product analytics. Its behavioral cohort analysis is genuinely best-in-class — if you need to find "users who did X within 3 days of Y but didn't do Z, segmented by geography and plan type," Amplitude handles that better than anyone.

The free Starter plan is surprisingly generous at 50K monthly tracked users, and includes basic analytics, session replay, and unlimited feature flags. The $49/month Plus tier adds behavioral cohorts and more capacity. Beyond that, you're talking to sales.

The problems are well-documented. Pricing transparency drops to zero once you need the Growth plan — you won't find a number on their website, and user reports put it anywhere from $22K to $254K annually depending on scale. Group Analytics (company-level tracking for B2B) is a paid add-on. The learning curve is steep: multiple users report that without a dedicated data engineer, most of Amplitude's power goes unused.

Setup requires manual SDK instrumentation. You need to plan your event taxonomy carefully before writing a single track() call, because fixing a bad event schema later is painful. Real-time data has minutes of delay (not hours, but not instant either).

Choose Amplitude if you have a data team, a meaningful analytics budget, and need the deepest behavioral analysis available. Skip it if you're a small team, don't have someone dedicated to analytics, or if "call us for pricing" makes you uncomfortable.

4. Heap — Best for Auto-Capture and Retroactive Analysis

Website: heap.io

Pricing: Free up to 10K sessions/month (6 months history), Growth starts at ~$300/month

Best for: Teams that want to capture everything automatically and define events after the fact

Heap's core idea is appealing: capture every user interaction automatically, then define the events you care about retroactively. Instead of planning your tracking schema in advance (and inevitably missing something), Heap records everything and lets you slice it later.

This is genuinely powerful. If your PM asks "how many users clicked the pricing toggle last month?" and you didn't set up that event, Heap still has the data. With Mixpanel or Amplitude, the answer is "we'll add tracking and check next month."

The free tier (10K sessions, 6 months of data history) is enough to evaluate the product for a small site. Paid plans start around $300/month, which is a meaningful jump.

The limitations: Heap's session-based pricing model can be unpredictable — a session is defined as 30 minutes of activity, and costs scale with session volume rather than events. The free tier's 6-month data retention means you lose historical data regularly. Real-time analytics isn't Heap's strength; data is batched, so you're looking at what happened, not what's happening right now.

Heap was acquired by Contentsquare in 2023, and the product direction has been moving toward enterprise digital experience analytics. If you're a small team, you might feel like you're not the target audience anymore.

Choose Heap if you don't know what questions you'll want to ask your data tomorrow and want the safety net of capturing everything. Skip it if you need real-time data, have a tight budget, or want something lightweight.

5. Plausible — Best for Simple, Privacy-First Web Traffic Analytics

Website: plausible.io

Pricing: Starts at $9/month based on page views

Best for: Blogs, marketing sites, and anyone who wants a clean Google Analytics replacement without the complexity

Plausible is the analytics tool for people who hate analytics tools. The entire product is a single, clean dashboard. The tracking script is about 1KB (compared to Google Analytics' ~45KB). It's open source, EU-hosted, and fully privacy-compliant with no cookies.

For what it does — web traffic analytics — Plausible is nearly perfect. You see visitors, page views, referrers, top pages, and geographic data. That's it. And for a lot of sites, that's all you need.

The critical distinction: Plausible is web analytics, not product analytics. It doesn't track individual user journeys, doesn't support custom events at the depth of Mixpanel or Grain, doesn't do funnel analysis, and doesn't have user-level segmentation. If you need to understand how specific users interact with your SaaS product's features, Plausible isn't the right tool.

Pricing is straightforward — based on monthly page views, starting at $9/month. No event limits, no surprise charges, no "call us" tiers.

Choose Plausible if you need a GA replacement for your marketing site or blog and value simplicity and privacy above all. Skip it if you're building a SaaS product and need to understand user behavior at the feature level — Plausible doesn't do that.

6. June.so — Best for B2B SaaS with Company-Level Analytics

Website: june.so

Pricing: Contact sales (targets companies with $1M+ ARR)

Best for: B2B SaaS teams that need to understand how companies (not just users) engage with their product

Most analytics tools track individual users. June tracks companies. This is a meaningful difference for B2B SaaS, where your real customer is an organization, not a person. You want to know "is Acme Corp's usage increasing?" not just "is John's usage increasing."

June auto-generates company-level reports, integrates directly with Salesforce and HubSpot, and gives you dashboards per customer — which is exactly what a B2B customer success team needs. The AI features let you query company engagement data in natural language.

The limitations are about scope and access. June publicly targets companies with at least $1M ARR, which prices out early-stage startups. Pricing requires contacting sales (no public tiers), and the product is specifically designed for B2B — if you're building a B2C product, June's company-centric model doesn't apply.

The analytics depth is narrower than Mixpanel or Amplitude. You won't find the same level of custom funnels, advanced segmentation, or event-level drill-down. June trades depth for B2B-specific usefulness.

Choose June if you're a B2B SaaS past $1M ARR and need company-level analytics tied to your CRM. Skip it if you're early-stage, B2C, or need granular event-level analytics.

7. Google Analytics 4 — Best for Free (and Worst for Almost Everything Else)

Website: analytics.google.com

Pricing: Free (GA4 360 is enterprise-priced)

Best for: Teams with zero budget who need basic traffic data and Google Ads integration

GA4 is free. That's its primary advantage, and for a lot of teams, it's a real one. If the alternative is no analytics at all, GA4 is better than nothing.

Beyond the price, GA4 has deep integration with Google's advertising ecosystem. If you're running Google Ads, the conversion tracking and audience features are genuinely useful and hard to replicate elsewhere without paying for a separate ads analytics tool.

Now for the problems. GA4's interface is widely regarded as confusing — even experienced analysts report struggling to find basic reports. The transition from Universal Analytics was rough, and the event-based data model, while technically more flexible, requires more setup than the old page-view model. Real-time reporting is unreliable (24-48 hour delays are common for standard reports). And because GA4 uses cookies, you're losing data from privacy-focused browsers and users who decline consent.

There are also privacy concerns. GA4 sends data to Google's servers, which has led to GDPR enforcement actions in several EU countries. If you're building for a privacy-conscious audience, using GA4 sends the wrong signal.

Data sampling kicks in on larger datasets (unless you're on GA4 360), which means the numbers you see might not be the actual numbers. For a product where accuracy matters, this is a serious issue.

Choose GA4 if you need free analytics and Google Ads integration. Skip it if you value your time (the UI will cost you hours), need real-time data, care about privacy, or want accurate numbers at scale.

Decision Framework: Which Tool Fits Your Situation?

Here's a more direct way to think about it:

You're a solo founder or SaaS team (under 100 people) and you want to understand user behavior without a week of setup: Grain gives you real-time journey analytics out of the box with minimal configuration. Cookie-less tracking means you're seeing all your users, not just the ones who accept cookies. Technical teams can also use Grain’s SDK to log custom events and use remote config and control copywriting, UX, and feature flags without touching the codebase.

You're an engineering team that wants to own the full stack and values open source: PostHog gives you analytics, session replay, feature flags, and experiments in one self-hostable package. The free tier is generous enough that most small teams never pay.

You're an enterprise product team with dedicated data engineers and a real analytics budget: Amplitude has the deepest behavioral analysis tools on the market. The complexity is worth it if you have people who can use it.

You don't know what questions you'll ask and want a safety net of capturing everything: Heap auto-captures all interactions so you can define events retroactively. Pay more, but never miss data.

You just need simple web traffic analytics and want a clean GA replacement: Plausible is the lightest, most private option. It's not product analytics — but if all you need is traffic data, it's the best at that.

You're a B2B SaaS and need company-level analytics tied to your CRM: June.so is built specifically for this. Narrow focus, but if it fits your model, nothing else comes close.

Your budget is zero: Start with GA4 (everyone else does), but plan your migration now. You'll thank yourself in six months.

Final Thoughts

There's no single "best Mixpanel alternative" because the right tool depends on your team size, technical resources, budget, and what questions you're actually trying to answer.

If I had to give one piece of advice: don't choose an analytics tool based on what you might need in two years. Choose based on what you need this week. The best analytics tool is the one you actually use — and for most small teams, that means the one with the lowest setup friction and the shortest time to first insight.

Start simple. Get data flowing. Make decisions based on what you see. You can always upgrade later.

Written by Eray, founder of Grain. Yes, I'm biased — but I tried to be fair. If I got something wrong about any of these tools, let me know.