Mixpanel vs Google Analytics 2026: Events, Price, Limits

Mixpanel vs Google Analytics looks like a choice between a paid tool and a free one, but both now run on events, both have free tiers, and the real differences are in what each is built to answer and where each runs out. Google Analytics 4 is built for traffic and marketing reporting, closely tied to Google Ads. Mixpanel is built for analysing what users do inside a product. Every vendor fact here comes from its own pages, read on 16 October 2026.

The short answer: GA4 for free traffic reporting, Mixpanel for product analysis, Arktis for a store's orders

Choose Google Analytics 4 if you want free reporting on where traffic comes from and what it does, with Google Ads data built in and room to import cost data from other ad platforms. Choose Mixpanel if you want to analyse behaviour in depth, with funnels, retention, cohorts and nine attribution models, and you are willing to plan your events: it is free up to 1 million events a month and then $0.00028 per event on Growth.

For an online store, Arktis is the clear winner. Both GA4 and Mixpanel count purchases from the events you send them. Arktis takes the orders from the store itself, by Shopify webhook or from Stripe, matches them back to a visit and, where that visit carried an ad click identifier, to the ad platform. It counts conversions per UTM campaign and per ad platform and syncs Meta spend per campaign once a day. It costs $49, $149 or $349 a month, with session recordings and a 7-day free trial on Growth.

Key takeaways

GA4 is free, with event data in explorations kept for 2 or 14 months on a standard property, sampling once a query passes 10 million events, and a daily BigQuery export capped at 1 million events. Its attribution reports offer data-driven, paid and organic last click, and Google paid channels last click, since Google removed first click, linear, time decay and position-based models in November 2023. Mixpanel is free up to 1 million events a month and then $0.00028 per event, and its calculator shows 1.5 million events at $140 a month on monthly billing or $100 a month on annual.

Two event models

Both tools now record events, but they expect different amounts of planning.

GA4 collects a good deal without code. Its help centre says enhanced measurement lets you measure interactions by enabling options in the interface, with no code changes required, and lists page views, scrolls, outbound clicks, site search, video engagement, file downloads and form interactions. Purchases are not on that list, so ecommerce data has to be sent separately.

Mixpanel's pricing documentation describes an event as a data point that represents an interaction between a user and your product, and gives e-commerce examples such as Added to Cart and Purchase Completed. You decide what to track and which properties to attach, and the bill follows the number of events. Identity calls and user profile updates are excluded from the billable count, according to the same page. Mixpanel also offers optional autocapture, which our Heap vs Mixpanel comparison covers.

Pricing: free against metered

Google describes Analytics as giving you the tools free of charge. The paid edition, Google Analytics 360, raises the limits described below, and our Google Analytics 360 pricing guide covers what is known.

Mixpanel publishes its rate. The free plan includes unlimited seats, up to 1 million events a month, 10,000 session replays a month and five saved reports per seat. Growth starts at $0, includes the first 1 million events free, and covers up to 20 million events a month. Its documentation gives the additional data rate on a 1 million event plan as $0.00028 per event, with lower rates for larger volumes bought upfront. On 16 October 2026 the calculator showed 1.5 million events a month at $140 on monthly billing, or $100 a month and $1,200 a year on annual billing, viewed from Sweden in US dollars. Enterprise is quoted, and Mixpanel's tracked-user Enterprise plan starts at $20,000 a year.

Three Mixpanel billing rules matter. You cannot set a billing limit, only usage alerts. Events are counted when they are ingested, not by their timestamp, so a backfill lands in the month you run it, though some older accounts are still billed by event timestamp. And the free plan does not charge overages: past 1 million events it blocks your reports until you upgrade or the month resets. Our Mixpanel pricing guide goes through the add-ons.

Limits that matter: retention, sampling and export

GA4's data retention setting allows 2 or 14 months for user-level data, key events and other event data on a standard property, with 26, 38 and 50 months for other event data available only on 360. Google notes that the setting does not affect standard aggregated reports; it applies to explorations and funnel reports. So a year-on-year funnel comparison in an exploration needs the 14-month setting in place early, because an increase only applies to data that has not already been deleted.

Sampling can occur in GA4 when a report, exploration or request uses more events than the property's quota, which Google sets at 10 million events for event-level queries on standard properties and up to 1 billion on 360.

GA4's daily BigQuery export is limited to 1 million events on standard properties, and Google says the daily export is paused if a property consistently exceeds that. Streaming export has no event limit.

Mixpanel's limits sit in the price instead: Growth runs to 20 million events a month, and Enterprise, which runs to 1 trillion, adds a custom data and replay retention policy. On every plan Mixpanel deletes events after two years by default for projects created since 1 September 2025, while older projects keep five years until their plan changes, and its privacy documentation says session replays are kept for 30 days.

Attribution

GA4 offers three models in its attribution reports. Data-driven attribution uses each account's data to assign credit across ad interactions. Paid and organic last click gives all credit to the last channel clicked before the key event, ignoring direct visits. Google paid channels last click gives all credit to the last Google Ads channel and falls back to paid and organic last click when there was none. Google states that first click, linear, time decay and position-based models have not been available since November 2023.

Mixpanel's attribution feature is available on Growth and Enterprise. Its documentation lists first touch, last touch, linear, participation, time decay with a 7-day half-life, U-shaped, J-shaped, inverse J-shaped and custom models, with last touch and a 30-day lookback window as the default. It attributes by a property on your touchpoint events, typically UTM source, medium or campaign, so Mixpanel recommends tracking UTM parameters as event properties on every touchpoint.

Both tools attribute what they observed in their own event stream. A purchase event blocked by a browser, or an order placed after the tag failed, simply is not there to credit. For the differences between models, see marketing attribution models explained.

Ad cost data and ROAS

GA4 has a direct advantage here. Google Ads data appears inside Analytics, limited to a rolling 36-month window, and campaign data import lets you upload aggregated cost, clicks and impressions from other ad platforms. Google says this lets you calculate return on non-Google ad spend for each campaign, source and medium. Mixpanel lists campaign reporting on every plan, for analysing traffic and marketing channel performance, but it has no built-in ad platform sync: its documentation shows how to bring spend in as events through a warehouse connector template, a custom pipeline from the Google and Meta APIs, or the paid Vendo integration, and then calculate return on ad spend.

Who each is for

Pick GA4 if you mainly need channel reporting and Google Ads integration at no cost, and can work within its retention and sampling rules. Pick Mixpanel if you build a software product and need to understand activation, retention and feature use, and you have someone to own the tracking plan. Many companies run both. Our Google Analytics alternatives and Mixpanel alternatives guides cover the rest of the field.

The verdict for an online store

A store's central record is the order. Arktis starts there. Its tracker records pageviews automatically and captures gclid, fbclid, msclkid, ttclid and other ad click identifiers on landing, plus UTM parameters, and holds them against the visitor across sessions, server side. Shopify orders arrive by webhook and are matched on email where the store has identified the visitor, otherwise on the UTM source of a session from the previous 24 hours, which can be another visitor's session. Stripe customers are matched through a four-pass waterfall, and unmatched orders are kept, unattributed.

Arktis counts conversions per UTM campaign and per ad platform, where a conversion is a session marked converted by a matched order, a goal or a convert call, and it syncs Meta spend per campaign once a day. Google, TikTok and other spend entered by hand per platform and period gives a cost per conversion per platform, labelled CAC in the dashboard, and one blended return on ad spend. The Models view compares first-touch, last-touch, linear, time-decay and position-based credit per ad platform, five rule-based models over lookbacks of 7 to 90 days, for visits that carried a click identifier. An AI Assistant Traffic panel counts sessions and conversions from ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude and similar assistants.

Where Arktis does not fit

Arktis is not product analytics and not a free tool. It is not built for analysing behaviour inside a software product and has no feature flags or product experiments, so a software team should pick Mixpanel. It identifies visitors per browser and does not join one person across devices. It does not import Google Ads or TikTok spend automatically, where GA4 shows Google Ads data natively and accepts imported cost per campaign. If channel reporting is all you need and the budget is zero, GA4 is the sensible start.

To see which UTM campaigns and ad platforms your conversions came from, start the 7-day Growth trial, or compare the tiers on the pricing page. Arktis vs Google Analytics and Arktis vs Mixpanel compare each tool with Arktis directly.

Sources

Google Marketing Platform: Analytics, Analytics offered free of charge, accessed 16 October 2026

Analytics Help: enhanced measurement events, events collected without code changes, accessed 16 October 2026

Analytics Help: data retention, retention settings, their scope and the 36-month Google Ads window, accessed 16 October 2026

Analytics Help: about data sampling, 10 million event quota on standard properties and up to 1 billion on 360, accessed 16 October 2026

Analytics Help: set up BigQuery Export, the 1 million event daily export limit, accessed 16 October 2026

Analytics Help: get started with attribution, the three available models and the November 2023 removals, accessed 16 October 2026

Analytics Help: import campaign data, non-Google cost import and return on non-Google ad spend, accessed 16 October 2026

Mixpanel pricing page, plan limits and the Growth calculator, accessed 16 October 2026 from Sweden, shown in US dollars

Mixpanel docs: pricing, the $0.00028 rate, non-billable events, over-limit behaviour, billing limit and Enterprise entry point, accessed 16 October 2026

Mixpanel docs: attribution, plan availability, the nine models, default model and lookback window, accessed 16 October 2026

Mixpanel docs: GDPR compliance, two-year event retention and 30-day replay retention, accessed 16 October 2026

Mixpanel docs: ad spend, importing ad network cost data, accessed 16 October 2026