The best Mixpanel alternatives, compared honestly
Mixpanel is still one of the best event-analytics products built, with a free tier of 1 million events a month and unlimited seats on every plan. Two dated things changed the calculation. On 1 September 2025 Mixpanel moved to ingestion-time billing and cut default data retention to two years, so a warehouse backfill is now billed in the month it arrives and anything longer than two years is a conversation with your account team. Then on 8 November 2025 a smishing campaign led to a data export that OpenAI disclosed publicly before terminating its use of Mixpanel. This page compares 7 alternatives on the thing every listicle skips: what one billable unit actually is, and whether the vendor publishes a rate for it at all.
The best Mixpanel alternative depends on what's actually hurting:
- The bill is unpredictable → PostHog: same unit as Mixpanel, all six price bands published, and per-product spend caps that stop ingestion instead of invoicing you.
- You need the biggest free tier → Amplitude: 2M events a month free, forever, with replay and experimentation included.
- The data must not leave your infrastructure → Matomo: GPL-3.0, free forever on premise, EU-hosted in the cloud.
- You want Mixpanel's shape at a flat price → OpenPanel: AGPL-3.0, flat published tiers, 1M events for $90 a month.
Why teams look elsewhere
What pushes teams off Mixpanel
Mixpanel did not get worse at analytics. Every recurring reason on this list is about billing mechanics, data custody or the fact that the rate you would pay at scale is not published anywhere.
One published rate, and it is the entry rate
Mixpanel's docs state that on a 1M monthly events plan "the additional data rate is $.00028 per event", then add that buying higher volumes upfront lowers it through volume discounts. Those discounts are not published. So the only number you can plan with is $0.28 per 1,000 events, and it is the worst one on the card.
Retention default cut to 2 years, effective 2025-09-01
The same changelog entry that announced ingestion-time billing also said Mixpanel is "updating our default data retention period to 2 years" and to "contact your account team" for more. In the pricing matrix, "Customizable data retention policy" is an Enterprise-only row, so longer history is a sales motion, not a plan upgrade.
Backfills are billed when they arrive
Ingestion-time billing means a historical import lands on this month's invoice, not the month the events happened. Mixpanel's docs are also explicit that warehouse imports count like any other source: "Events imported through a warehouse connection are treated as any other source." Replaying two years of history through a warehouse connector is a full-price ingestion event.
Overrun on Free locks your dashboards, not the pipe
Exceeding 1M events on the Free plan blocks you from viewing your own reports until you upgrade or the counter resets. Collection carries on. The other free-tier ceiling catches teams by surprise too: 5 saved reports per seat, a governance limit rather than a volume one.
A vendor incident became customers' incident
Mixpanel's CEO confirmed on 27 November 2025 that on 8 November 2025 the company detected a smishing campaign and ran its incident response, contacting impacted customers directly. OpenAI separately disclosed the exported dataset and ended its use of Mixpanel. A social-engineering compromise is not a product defect, but it is the clearest argument for the self-hostable options below.
The interesting parts are add-ons
Feature Flags, Experimentation, Metric Trees, Data Pipelines and Group Analytics are add-ons rather than plan features, and the uplifts apply to overage too: Data Pipelines +20%, Group Analytics +40%. Metric Trees is Enterprise-only. SAML SSO, SCIM, audit logs and EU data residency also sit on the unpriced tier.
The shortlist
7 Mixpanel alternatives worth evaluating
This category does not split by feature, it splits by meter. Four vendors bill events, one bills hits, one bills sessions, and two never say what they bill at all. That decides your invoice far more than the feature matrix does, so the ranking weights a published, comparable rate heavily. Each pick lists one honest strength and one real weakness.
Same unit as Mixpanel and all six bands published, from $0.0000500 per event at 1M down to $0.0000090 above 250M, with 1M events, 5,000 replays and 1M flag requests free every month and unlimited team members. Per-product spend caps stop ingestion for that product rather than sending a bill. Weakness: self-hosting is not the escape hatch it looks like. PostHog's own docs call it "officially unsupported" and state that "all paid-plan features are Cloud-only", with sizing guidance that flags trouble past roughly 300k events a month.
2M events a month free forever, no card, unlimited seats, 10K session replays and limited experimentation included. The Plus plan starts at $0 with the first 2M events free and scales to 70M. It is the closest like-for-like to Mixpanel on capability, and it is also where a chunk of this market already went: Amplitude acquired both June and Command AI. Weakness: no rate is published above Plus, and SSO plus project permissions start at Growth, which is exactly the unpriced tier.
GPL-3.0, 21.8k stars, pushed 2026-08-20, and On-Premise is "free to download" forever with no volume ceiling. Cloud is EU-hosted in Frankfurt from €29 a month in hit bands from 50K to 10M, with 24 months of raw data and no sampling. Weakness: two of them. The hit is the widest unit here (page views, events, downloads, outlinks, site searches, content tracking and crashes all count), and self-hosted Matomo is free core only: funnels, heatmaps, session recording, cohorts, A/B testing and SAML are paid Marketplace plugins.
Its README opens with "An open-source alternative to Mixpanel" and it means it: funnels, cohorts, profiles, session history, replay, A/B testing, an MCP server. AGPL-3.0, and the cloud is flat monthly pricing by volume: 100K $20, 1M $90, 5M $250, 50M $900, with unlimited websites, users and dashboards at every tier. Self-host is free with unlimited events. Weakness: a small project at 6.7k stars, no free tier (30-day trial), no retention stated on the pricing page, and flat tiers mean 1.1M events costs the same as 2.5M.
Plain MIT with no enterprise directory and no branding clause, 38.3k stars, pushed 2026-08-20, self-hosting free and unrestricted. Cloud Hobby is $0 for 100K events with 6-month retention; Pro is $20 with 1M events and $0.00003 per extra event, the lowest published rate on this page. Overage never interrupts collection. Weakness: the meter counts metadata. Umami states that "each data property stored counts as one event", so a five-property event is six billable events, and behavioural analysis is lighter than Mixpanel's.
Mobile-first analytics with push and in-app messaging built in, sold as private cloud or on premise, and the self-hosted Community edition is genuinely free. Weakness: read the licence file. It is headed "Countly Lite License", AGPL-3.0 with a modified Section 7 stating you "cannot remove any Countly logo or branding" from any interface an end user can see, which is a hard blocker for white-label products. Cloud starts at $175 a month, the highest floor here, there is no free cloud tier, and the pricing page never names the unit it meters.
Heap records interactions retroactively, so you can define an event today and still have last quarter's data for it. That is a real capability Mixpanel's track-call model does not have, and it is why Heap is on the list at all. Free covers 10k monthly sessions with 6 months of history and SSO included. Weakness: it bills sessions, a unit nothing else here uses, and publishes no price for any paid plan: Pro is listed as "Custom Session Pricing". Now owned by Contentsquare and being folded into that suite.
Deliberately left out: June, which announced on 8 August 2025 that it is "joining Amplitude" and whose pricing page shows a single plan with no price; RudderStack, which is a customer data pipeline rather than product analytics and ships under the source-available Elastic License 2.0, so it complements these tools instead of replacing Mixpanel; Plausible, AGPL-3.0 and excellent, but web analytics rather than user-level funnels and cohorts (it stays in the meter table below as a contrast row); and Google Analytics 4, which publishes no GA360 price and samples data, so "the number you see equals the number you sent" does not hold.
Side by side
Mixpanel alternatives compared
Prices as of August 2026, from each vendor's own pricing page, USD as published unless marked. The column that decides most migrations is "One billable unit is": free tiers quoted in different units are not comparable, and three vendors here publish no rate at all. Mixpanel's own row is the baseline.
| Tool | One billable unit is | Free tier, in that unit | Published rate past the free tier | Default retention | Self-host | Licence |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Mixpanel | Event, across all projects in the org | 1M events / month | $0.00028 per event, stated for the 1M plan only; volume discounts exist but are unpublished | 2 years, since 2025-09-01 | ✗ none | Proprietary |
| PostHog | Event, per product | 1M events, 5,000 replays, 1M flag requests | ✓ six bands, $0.0000500 down to $0.0000090 | 7 years on Cloud | Free but ✗ officially unsupported, paid features Cloud-only | MIT, with ee/ under the PostHog Enterprise License |
| Amplitude | Event | 2M events / month | ✗ not published above Plus | 2 years on Plus | ✗ none | Proprietary |
| Matomo | Hit: page view, event, download, outlink, site search, content tracking or crash | None on Cloud, trial only; unlimited self-hosted | Cloud hit bands from €29 / month at 50K hits, to 10M then contact sales | 24 months raw on Cloud Business, reports kept indefinitely | ✓ free forever, core only; premium features are paid plugins | GPL-3.0 |
| OpenPanel | Event | None, 30-day trial without a card | Flat tiers: $20 at 100K, $90 at 1M, $250 at 5M, $900 at 50M | Not published | ✓ free, unlimited events | AGPL-3.0 |
| Umami | Event, and each stored property counts as one | 100K events / month (Hobby) | ✓ $0.00003 per event on Pro, $0.00002 on Business | 6 months Hobby, 2 years Pro, 5 years Business | ✓ free and unrestricted | MIT, no carve-out |
| Countly | ✗ not named on the pricing page | None on cloud, 14-day trial | ✗ not published; Flex starts at $175 / month | Not published | ✓ free, but branding may not be removed | AGPL-3.0 with modified §7 ("Countly Lite License") |
| Heap | Session | 10k sessions / month | ✗ "Custom Session Pricing", no figure | 6 months on Free, 12 on Growth | ✗ none | Proprietary |
| Plausible (contrast row, not ranked) | Pageview plus custom event | None, 30-day trial | Tiered from $9 / month at 10k pageviews | 3 years Starter and Growth, 5 years Business | ✓ free | AGPL-3.0 |
The only apples-to-apples number: 5,000,000 events a month
Three vendors count events and publish a rate, so three cells can be filled by arithmetic. The rest are empty because the vendor does not publish one, and an empty cell is the finding.
| Tool | Base fee | Included events | Published rate above | 5M events / month |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Mixpanel Growth | $0 | 1,000,000 | $0.00028 | $1,120.00 |
| PostHog | $0 | 1,000,000 | $0.0000500, then $0.0000343 | $152.90 |
| Umami Pro | $20 | 1,000,000 | $0.00003 | $140.00 |
| Amplitude | $0 | 2,000,000 | ✗ not published | ✗ |
| Countly | $175 | Not stated | ✗ not published | ✗ |
| Heap | ✗ not published | 10k sessions free | ✗ different unit | ✗ |
Working: Mixpanel 4,000,000 × $0.00028 = $1,120.00. PostHog 1,000,000 × $0.00005 plus 3,000,000 × $0.0000343 = $152.90. Umami $20 plus 4,000,000 × $0.00003 = $140.00. Read this as a transparency comparison, not a 7x price claim. Mixpanel's own documentation says volume discounts lower that rate for larger commitments and does not publish them, so a negotiated Mixpanel contract will not look like the number above. What is verifiable is that PostHog publishes every band to 250M+ events and Mixpanel publishes one number. Product analytics only, no session replay, monthly billing. Pricing changes often; check each vendor for current terms. Compiled August 2026.
Official pages: Mixpanel · Mixpanel pricing docs · PostHog · Amplitude · Matomo · OpenPanel · Umami · Countly · Heap
A fair call
When Mixpanel is still the right choice
Migrating analytics is not a data export, it is re-instrumenting a product and re-teaching a company. Event names, properties, cohorts, saved reports and every dashboard someone screenshots into a board deck have to be rebuilt, and the two systems have to run in parallel long enough to trust the new numbers. Price the rebuild before you price the seats.
Mixpanel is still right if…
- You are under 1 million events a month. The free tier is genuinely generous, seats are unlimited on every plan, and the per-event rate that makes the headline arithmetic ugly never applies to you.
- You have many analysts and modest volume. Mixpanel does not charge per seat, so a 40-person team on 2M events pays for the events; tools that price per user invert that maths entirely.
- You have a negotiated contract. The published $0.00028 is the entry rate, and Mixpanel says volume commitments lower it. If you already have a quote, compare the quote, not this page's arithmetic.
- Your team lives in Mixpanel's analysis model. Flows, retention, impact analysis and the report-building UX are still best in class, and no open-source option matches the depth of behavioural analysis.
Look elsewhere if…
- You need to forecast the bill at 10M or 100M events: PostHog publishes every band; Mixpanel publishes one.
- You keep more than two years of history: retention beyond the 2-year default is an Enterprise conversation, while Umami Business keeps 5 years and self-hosted Matomo keeps whatever you keep.
- A vendor incident is unacceptable to your compliance story: Matomo (GPL-3.0), OpenPanel (AGPL-3.0) and Umami (MIT) all run entirely on your own infrastructure.
- You are about to backfill a warehouse: ingestion-time billing charges that history at the current rate in the month it lands.
- You want events defined after the fact rather than instrumented in advance: Heap's autocapture is the one capability here Mixpanel does not have.
Common questions
Common questions about Mixpanel alternatives
What is the best Mixpanel alternative in 2026?
PostHog, for most teams, because it is the only tool that counts the same unit as Mixpanel and publishes its entire rate card, from the first paid event down to the 250 million band, with unlimited team members and per-product spend caps that stop ingestion instead of billing you. Amplitude is the closest like-for-like on capability and has the largest free tier in the category at 2 million events a month, but it publishes no rate above its Plus plan. If the requirement is that the data never leaves your infrastructure, Matomo is GPL-3.0 and free forever on premise.
What does Mixpanel actually charge per event?
Mixpanel publishes one per-event number: 0.00028 dollars, which is 28 cents per 1,000 events. Its own documentation attaches that rate to the entry plan, stating that if you are only on a 1 million monthly events plan, the additional data rate is 0.00028 dollars per event, and adds that purchasing higher volumes upfront lowers the rate through volume discounts it does not publish. Every plan is metered on events counted across all projects in your organisation, with the first 1 million per month free on both the Free and Growth plans.
Why can't I compare Mixpanel's free tier to Matomo's or Heap's?
Because they count different things. Mixpanel, PostHog, Amplitude and Umami bill events; Matomo bills hits, which its documentation defines as page views, events, downloads, outlinks, site searches, content tracking and crashes; Heap bills sessions; Plausible bills pageviews plus custom events. One page view with a download, an outlink click and a site search on it is four Matomo hits, one Heap session, and however many track calls you chose to fire in Mixpanel. Only three of these tools count events and publish a rate, so only three of them can be compared arithmetically.
What happens if I go over the limit on Mixpanel's free plan?
You lose access to your reports. Mixpanel's billing documentation states that free-plan users who exceed 1 million events in a month are blocked from viewing their reports until they either upgrade to a Growth plan or the monthly counter resets. Ingestion is not the thing that stops, your dashboards are. On the Growth plan the behaviour is different: data keeps flowing and the overage is charged at the start of the next month at your a la carte rate. The other quiet limit on Free is 5 saved reports per seat, which is a governance ceiling rather than a volume one.
How long does Mixpanel keep my data now?
Two years by default. Mixpanel changed the default retention period to two years effective 1 September 2025, announced in the same changelog entry as its move to ingestion-time billing, and its guidance is to contact your account team to discuss custom retention options for anything longer. Configurable retention appears in the pricing feature matrix as an Enterprise-only row. For comparison, Umami gives 6 months on its free Hobby tier, 2 years on Pro and 5 years on Business; Matomo Cloud Business keeps 24 months of raw data and report data indefinitely; Heap's free tier keeps 6 months.
Which Mixpanel alternative is genuinely open source?
Read the repository, not the marketing page. Matomo is GPL-3.0. Umami is plain MIT with no enterprise directory. OpenPanel and Plausible are AGPL-3.0. PostHog is MIT for its core but everything under the ee directory is governed by the PostHog Enterprise License, which requires a paid subscription for production use. Countly's licence file is headed Countly Lite License and is AGPL-3.0 with a modified Section 7 that forbids removing Countly logos or branding from any screen an end user can see. RudderStack is Elastic License 2.0, which is source-available and not OSI-approved open source.
Can I self-host PostHog to avoid the bill?
Not realistically. PostHog's own self-hosting documentation says self-hosted deployments are officially unsupported, that the company offers no guarantees about them, that every change including security fixes ships continuously to PostHog Cloud rather than to releases, and, decisively, that all paid-plan features are Cloud-only. Its own sizing guidance flags problems past roughly 300,000 events a month. If you want a self-hosted instance that stays whole, Matomo, OpenPanel, Umami and Countly are the ones built for it.