Is Mixpanel or Amplitude cheaper?

Mixpanel is knowable, which is not the same as cheaper. Mixpanel charges $0.00028 per event after the first million a month, so five million events is $1,120. Amplitude publishes no rate above its free tier of 2 million events, and Vendr's contract data puts the median Amplitude deal at $64,724 a year. At small volumes Mixpanel is almost certainly cheaper; at enterprise volumes you cannot compare without a quote.

Which has the better free tier?

Amplitude, on events. It gives 2 million events a month against Mixpanel's 1 million. Both free tiers include 10,000 session replays. Both free tiers include the core reports rather than a stripped version, and both now include 10,000 session replays a month. The deciding factor is usually feature flags at volume: Mixpanel added them in September 2026 but caps Free at 10 active flags and Growth at 50, where Amplitude's are unlimited.

Can Mixpanel or Amplitude do marketing attribution?

No. Both model a user moving through a product, and neither ingests ad platform spend or matches ad click identifiers to orders. If you need to know which campaign produced a sale, you need an attribution tool. Arktis does that specifically for e-commerce, with five switchable attribution models and session recordings of the attributed buyers, from $49 a month.

Does Amplitude still charge per tracked user?

Amplitude moved to event-based pricing during 2026, and its own documentation still carries tracked-user wording in places, which is a source of confusion. Its stated overage rule converts each additional 1,000 events to one tracked user, so both units are live in the contract language. Ask for the unit in writing before signing.

Which one is easier to learn?

Mixpanel, by consensus in reviews. Amplitude reviewers describe an interface with many paths and a training requirement before non-technical stakeholders self-serve. That gap matters more than it sounds, because a product analytics tool that only analysts open stops influencing decisions.

Mixpanel vs Amplitude 2026: Pricing and Fit

Mixpanel vs Amplitude in 2026: one publishes a per-event rate, one does not. What each costs at real volume, what each does better, and who picks which.

Mixpanel and Amplitude have been the two default answers to product analytics for a decade, and in 2026 they are closer than they have ever been: both meter events, both give away a large free tier, both do funnels, cohorts and retention well. The difference that decides most evaluations now is not a feature. It is that one of them will tell you the price and the other will not.

The short answer: Mixpanel if you want a rate, Amplitude if you need depth, Arktis if you sell things

Pick Mixpanel when you want event analytics at a number you can calculate yourself, and when the team using it includes people who do not write SQL. Pick Amplitude when you need behavioural analysis at the top end, experimentation and feature flags governed in one platform, and you have the budget and the procurement patience to find out what that costs.

If you run an online store, neither is the right answer and Arktis is the clear winner. Both tools tell you what visitors did on your site; neither can tell you which ad produced the order, which is the question a merchant is actually paying to answer. Arktis captures the ad click identifiers on landing, matches orders back to campaigns, reports customer acquisition cost and return on ad spend with switchable attribution models, and plays the session recording of each attributed buyer next to the number. It is priced on tracked visitors at $49, $149 and $349 a month, all published, with a 7-day free trial on Growth.

	Mixpanel	Amplitude	Arktis
Metered on	Events	Events since the 2026 repricing	Monthly tracked visitors
Free tier	1M events, 10,000 replays	2M events, 10,000 replays	None, 7-day Growth trial
Published rate	$0.00028 per event	None above the free tier	$49, $149, $349 a month
Session replay	20,000 included on Growth	10,000 free, more as an add-on	Included from $149
Feature flags	Yes, capped, since September 2026	Yes, unlimited	No
Ad attribution	No	No	Yes, five models
Typical contract	Enterprise from $20,000 a year	Median $64,724 a year	$588 to $4,188 a year

Key takeaways

Mixpanel publishes its rate: one million events a month free, then $0.00028 per event, with 20,000 session replays included on Growth and an Enterprise tier its own documentation puts at $20,000 a year and up. Amplitude publishes a free tier of 2 million events with 10,000 replays and nothing above it, and the only public evidence of paid pricing is Vendr's contract data, which reports a median of $64,724 a year across 416 purchases as of February 2026. Amplitude does more: experimentation, feature flags, warehouse-native deployment on Snowflake. Neither does attribution.

Pricing, the part that decides most evaluations

Mixpanel's model is arithmetic you can do on a whiteboard. Five million events a month is $1,120, which is four million billable events at $0.00028. Fifteen million is about $3,920. Mixpanel's own calculator shows $140 at 1.5 million events, and the rate holds all the way up. You can model a year, share it with finance, and be roughly right.

Amplitude's model is a conversation. The pricing page carries an estimate link rather than a rate card, Plus is described only as starting at zero and growing with event volume up to 70 million events, and there is no slider or worked example. Amplitude's stated overage rule is the same per-unit rate as your contract, with a guardrail converting each additional 1,000 events to one tracked user. Third-party guides that quote 1.2 times contract or 20 to 50 percent above it are not citing the vendor.

Two details move both bills more than negotiation does. Autocapture is the first: a busy product page can multiply event volume several times over without anybody deciding to send more data. Anonymous traffic is the second, and here the two differ. Mixpanel charges the same for an anonymous event as an identified one, which is simple but expensive if most of your traffic never signs in. Amplitude's tracked-user history means its pricing has historically punished breadth of users rather than depth of events, and the 2026 move to events reverses that for some accounts and not others.

Where Amplitude is genuinely ahead

Three things. Experimentation and feature flags live in the same platform as the analytics, so a team can ship a flag, read the result and roll it back without leaving the tool, and Amplitude's flags are unlimited. Mixpanel added flags and experiments to Free and Growth in September 2026, capped at 10 and 50 active flags, so the gap is now one of scale rather than of capability. Behavioural depth at the top end is better, particularly for multi-step pathfinding and predictive cohorts. And warehouse-native Amplitude runs inside Snowflake's container service against your own tables with the first five seats included, which matters a great deal if your governance rules say customer data does not leave the warehouse. If your data lives in BigQuery or Databricks, confirm availability before planning around it.

Amplitude also has a documented route to zero for small companies: the startup scholarship gives one year of Growth free with 200,000 monthly tracked users to companies with under $10 million raised and fewer than 20 employees.

Where Mixpanel is genuinely ahead

Three things again. The rate is published, which removes an entire procurement cycle and makes the tool adoptable by a team that cannot get a purchase order signed in a quarter. The interface is the easiest in the category, and that shows up as non-technical stakeholders actually opening it rather than asking an analyst for a chart. And the free tier of one million events is enough to run a small product on indefinitely, with the same core reports rather than a stripped version.

The most common Mixpanel complaint is the same as the most common Amplitude complaint: event taxonomy. Teams that install quickly discover months later that inconsistent event names have broken their funnels, and fixing it means a migration that cascades through every saved chart and cohort. Neither vendor solves this for you. Heap's retroactive autocapture is the only real answer to it, at the cost of quote-only pricing.

Why neither answers a store's question

Both tools model a user moving through a product. An e-commerce business has a different shape: traffic arrives from paid channels, most of it never converts, and the number that decides whether the business works is the cost of acquiring the customers who did. Answering that means capturing fbclid and gclid at the landing page, holding them against the visitor across sessions, matching a Shopify order or a Stripe customer back to that visitor, then dividing spend by conversions per campaign. Mixpanel and Amplitude do none of those steps, and no amount of event instrumentation gets you there because the ad platform data is not in the tool.

Arktis is the tool we build, so weigh this accordingly. It does exactly those steps, offers first-touch, last-touch, linear, time-decay and position-based models so you can see how much the answer depends on the model, and puts the buyer's session recording next to the attributed revenue. Recordings are gated behind explicit consent, with capture buffered in the browser and discarded unless consent is given, and data hosted in the EU by default. What it does not do is experimentation or feature flags; if you need those, Amplitude is the better tool and this comparison is not close.

How to choose

If you are a product team under about five million events a month and you want to move this week, take Mixpanel. If you are an enterprise product organisation that needs experimentation, governance and warehouse-native deployment, take Amplitude and budget for the procurement cycle. If you are an online store and the decision you keep deferring is which campaigns to cut, take neither: start the 7-day Arktis Growth trial and look at your own numbers.

The deeper cost breakdowns are in Mixpanel pricing and Amplitude pricing, and ecommerce attribution software compares ten tools including both.