Congrats to Mixpanel on the raise. I have heard many great things from them and used them at a previous company. They've done a great job of making it a no-brainer for startups to start using more advanced analytics tools (not just Google Analytics) from day 1. I think we're all better off for the ability it gives product developers to improve their product based on actual usage--since it means the overall quality of products is far better than if vanity metrics drove all product decisions.
I noticed they mentioned Heap Analytics (https://heapanalytics.com/) as one of their competitors. We've been using Heap for over a year and it seems like the logical and magical next step in analytics. Mixpanel gave you smarter analytics on things you had the foresight to track, but Heap automatically tracks everything from the day you integrate it. That means you can get smart analytics even on things you didn't have the clairvoyance to start tracking 6 months ago, or didn't have the resources to insert tracking code in.
For startups, Heap's automatic and retroactive tracking is huge. It means we can iterate on product features and marketing/outreach schemes way more quickly while still getting insight into what's successful and what's not. It's not perfect--a couple times we've added special class names to our HTML elements so Heap can distinguish them, but that's still easier than adding manual tracking code--but it's a huge improvement over the old way.
I noticed Heap has a page comparing themselves with Mixpanel (https://heapanalytics.com/compare/heap-vs-mixpanel) but I don't see anything similar from Mixpanel's POV. I'd be curious to hear what Mixpanel's plans are in this area (automatic/retroactive tracking).
100% agree with the theory of what you're saying, but in practice I've found that none of these new event-based analytics tools provide much value until you add custom attributes to the events. That is where you get the important slicing and dicing and segmentation.
Unfortunately, Heap's approach only captures the events automatically but can't capture the business-specific attributes that need to go on those events. Ultimately that will always require some human being to think about their business-specific problems.
1. Empirically, we've found that our customers rarely fall back on custom attributes. The vast majority of queries run in Heap (>75%) operate on automatically-captured events. To me, this suggests we've either: 1) cut out a significant portion of implementation work, or 2) enabled analysis that was previously blocked by implementation work. If either (or both) are true, it's a win, and suggests that automatic event-tracking produces salient data out-of-the-box.
2. That said, some metrics are important and do require manual instrumentation. Coincidentally enough, we're about to launch a feature that solves the problem you mention and requires no extra implementation work. We're excited about it. Want to try it out on newrelic.com?
I noticed they mentioned Heap Analytics (https://heapanalytics.com/) as one of their competitors. We've been using Heap for over a year and it seems like the logical and magical next step in analytics. Mixpanel gave you smarter analytics on things you had the foresight to track, but Heap automatically tracks everything from the day you integrate it. That means you can get smart analytics even on things you didn't have the clairvoyance to start tracking 6 months ago, or didn't have the resources to insert tracking code in.
For startups, Heap's automatic and retroactive tracking is huge. It means we can iterate on product features and marketing/outreach schemes way more quickly while still getting insight into what's successful and what's not. It's not perfect--a couple times we've added special class names to our HTML elements so Heap can distinguish them, but that's still easier than adding manual tracking code--but it's a huge improvement over the old way.
I noticed Heap has a page comparing themselves with Mixpanel (https://heapanalytics.com/compare/heap-vs-mixpanel) but I don't see anything similar from Mixpanel's POV. I'd be curious to hear what Mixpanel's plans are in this area (automatic/retroactive tracking).