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The market is divided between big tech entrants building on top of complete Marketing Automation platforms marketed towards enterprise marketing orgs and stand-alone tools user engagement tools that are marketed towards Product (and occasionally Development) teams.
We are starting to see competitors from both the APM space and the user engagement space begin to expand into the other. This is a signal that they see the value in both observability and product analytics, which is validation for our direction to pursue both in GitLab.
Due to the heavy emphasis on SaaS and the high data volumes - most pricing in this market is consumption-based. This may be done by compute resources needed, network traffic used, or events received.
Here we explore instrumentation capabilities of key players in the product analytics services market, specifically examining Mixpanel, Amplitude, and Heap Analytics across various parameters.
| Company | Amplitude | Mixpanel | Heap Analytics |
|---|---|---|---|
| Event Data Structure | Allows capture of event, user, and user group properties | Allows capture of event, user, user group, and look up (data external to Mixpanel) properties | Allows capture of user, session, page-view, and event properties |
| Automatic Tracking | Not provided | Not provided | Provides a combination of automatic and manual tracking |
| Data Governance | Amplitude, while not allowing updates or changes to old events, features a robust governance system. This system facilitates bulk deletion or blocking of events and properties, marking events as active or inactive, changing visibility, and enhancing data taxonomy accessibility for all users. | Mixpanel utilizes Lexicon, an interface that empowers authorized individuals to seamlessly add and edit events, annotate, and make changes to properties without requiring developer intervention. | Heap Analytics boasts a comprehensive data governance feature set, including Categories & Naming Conventions for workspace organization, Definition Verification for managing trusted definitions, Dataset Cleanup to address inactive and unused definitions, Event Repair Flow for reviewing and fixing inactive events, and Definition History for tracking the creation and updates of definitions. |
In summary, Mixpanel and Amplitude emerge as formidable contenders for meticulous event-based tracking and user-centric analysis. However, Heap Analytics distinguishes itself with automatic event tracking capabilities and a user-friendly point-and-click interface.