Mixpanel is one of the deepest product analytics tools you can use, and a small startup pays nothing for it up to 1 million events a month. Volume is rarely what sends a team of three looking. More often it's the cap of five saved reports per seat and no saved cohorts on Free, or an open question that sits before sign-up, about where people came from, when Mixpanel is built for what they do after.
We checked every tool below against its vendor's own pages in October and November 2026.
The short answer
Start with Spreelytics if your questions begin with channels and campaigns and end with who paid, since it is free up to 1 million events a month with revenue by channel included.
PostHog and Amplitude are the closest swaps if you want Mixpanel's depth with replay, flags and experiments on a free plan, and PostHog is the one you can host yourself. Heap suits a team that hasn't written a tracking plan yet. For plain traffic numbers, Plausible or Umami will do, and Umami even has a small free cloud plan.
At a glance
| Tool | Best for a small startup that wants | Free plan | Replay | Flags and experiments | Self-host |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Spreelytics | Traffic, product analytics and revenue by channel in one place | 1M events a month | On Growth | No | No |
| PostHog | Replay, flags and experiments from one vendor | 1M events a month, one project | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Amplitude | The biggest free bundle | 2M events a month | Yes | Yes | No |
| Heap | Every click recorded, no tracking plan | 10k sessions, 6 months of data | Paid add-on | Reads other tools' tests | No |
| OpenPanel | Mixpanel-style reports in open source | No, 30-day trial | Yes | Variant breakdowns only | Yes |
| Umami | A light tool that is easy to host | 100k events, 1 site | Business plan, or self-hosted | No | Yes |
| Plausible | Simple, cookieless traffic stats | No, 30-day trial | No | No | Yes |
| Rybbit | Replay and error tracking beside web stats | No, 7-day trial | Pro plan, or self-hosted | No | Yes |
| Mixpanel, for reference | Deep event analysis | 1M events a month | 10k a month | Yes | No |
1. Spreelytics
We make Spreelytics, so read our entry with that in mind.
One script tag sends a single stream of events, and that stream feeds both the traffic pages (sources, referrers, entry pages and all five UTM fields) and the product side, where you get goals, funnels, retention cohorts, journeys, segments and a timeline for every person. Nothing is sampled. Connect Stripe, Paddle, Polar or Lemon Squeezy and each payment is credited to the channel that brought the buyer, by last-touch or linear, with MRR and ARR on a Revenue page. That works on the free plan. Mixpanel keeps its attribution models for paid plans.
New projects start cookieless, so nothing is stored in the browser until you switch one first-party cookie on. AI crawlers are counted on your server. An MCP server lets Claude, ChatGPT or Cursor read your numbers and build funnels on every plan, and there's no infra to run.
Where others win: we have no feature flags, experiments or heatmaps, and no self-hosting. Session replay needs the Growth plan and covers websites only, while Mixpanel gives 10,000 replays a month free, mobile included, and adds native mobile SDKs and nine attribution models on top.
Pricing: free up to 1 million events a month, forever, with unlimited projects, team members and dashboards, every feature except session replay and the in-app AI assistant, and 13 months of data. Growth adds both and keeps five years, from $59 a month for 1 million events. At 10 million it's $339, against $1,176 on Mixpanel's Growth plan, billed monthly. See pricing and Spreelytics vs Mixpanel.
2. PostHog
Open source, with product analytics, session replay, feature flags, experiments, surveys and a data warehouse under one SDK. You can use its cloud or run it yourself. For an engineering-led team that ships behind flags, it's the widest toolkit on this page, ours included.
Web analytics is a newer part of the product, and revenue attribution is still in beta, with first or last touch as the only two models on offer.
Pricing: free up to 1 million events a month in one project, with a year of data. Events past that on Free are dropped. Pay-as-you-go keeps the free million, then charges per event. Events tied to a signed-in person cost extra, so 10 million comes to $324.40 a month if they're anonymous and $1,080 if every one is identified. See PostHog pricing.
Choose it if you want one vendor for analytics, replay and experiments, or need to self-host.
3. Amplitude
Amplitude does the same kind of event analysis as Mixpanel, with a bigger free plan. You get 2 million events a month, 10,000 session replays, unlimited feature flags, one live experiment and AI agents, and its ten attribution models include a data-driven one with ad spend beside revenue.
Saved charts stop at ten for the whole account, and behavioural cohorts need the paid Plus plan.
Pricing: free up to 2 million events. Plus is $720 a month at 10 million events, billed monthly, against $1,176 on Mixpanel. Mixpanel vs Amplitude goes through both plan by plan.
Choose it if you like Mixpanel's way of working and want a bigger free allowance before you pay.
4. Heap
Heap records every click and page view on its own from the day the snippet goes in. Name an event months later and its past is already there. Handy when you don't yet know which events matter. It is part of Contentsquare now, and has SDKs for iOS, Android, React Native and Flutter.
Free shows six months of history. Paid plans show a year as standard.
Pricing: a free plan of 10,000 sessions, then paid plans, with replay and heatmaps sold as add-ons on Pro and Premier. See Spreelytics vs Heap.
Choose it if you'd rather not plan tracking up front, or you ship a mobile app.
5. OpenPanel
An open-source analytics tool built as a Mixpanel alternative, with funnels, retention, user flows, person profiles and session replay that masks all text by default. The cloud runs in Frankfurt, and there are SDKs for iOS and Android. Self-hosting has no event limit.
Its device ID resets every day, so a visitor who never signs in counts as new each day. Revenue comes from your own webhook code.
Pricing: a 30-day trial on its cloud, then $90 a month at 1 million events and $350 at 10 million. Free to self-host. See Spreelytics vs OpenPanel.
Choose it if you want Mixpanel-style reports in open source and are happy to run a server.
6. Umami
Small, friendly and MIT licensed, and the easiest tool here to host yourself, with one container and a database. It has grown well past page counts. Funnels, retention, journeys, visitor profiles and first or last click attribution are on every plan.
Its MCP server only reads. Bots are dropped without a report.
Pricing: the free cloud plan takes 100,000 events on one website, with six months of data, and paid plans run from $20 a month for Pro at 1 million to $200 for Business at 10 million. See Spreelytics vs Umami.
Choose it if your budget is close to zero and you can run a box.
7. Plausible
Web analytics with one mode, cookieless. Its script is tiny and stores nothing in the browser. The cloud sits in the EU, and the code is open source for anyone who would rather run it on their own server. If you miss a clean page of sources and top pages, that is what Plausible is.
It never recognises a returning visitor, which rules out retention and person timelines, and funnels, user journeys and revenue goals all wait for its Business plan.
Pricing: a 30-day trial, then $69, $104 or $139 a month at 1 million pageviews for Starter, Growth and Business. See Spreelytics vs Plausible.
Choose it if you need traffic numbers and nothing about individual people.
8. Rybbit
Open source and cookieless, with funnels, journeys, retention and user profiles, plus two things we don't do: it links JavaScript errors to the sessions they hit and records Core Web Vitals from real visits. It runs on an EU cloud or on your own server with Docker.
By its own FAQ, there's no revenue report yet.
Pricing: a 7-day trial, then $69 a month for Standard or $139 for Pro at 1 million pageviews. Replay is on Pro, and self-hosting is free. See Spreelytics vs Rybbit.
Choose it if you want replay and error tracking in one open-source tool.
How to choose
- Your questions start before sign-up: Spreelytics, for sources, campaigns and which channel brought each paying customer.
- You want replay, flags and experiments on a free plan: PostHog or Amplitude.
- You haven't decided what to track: Heap.
- The code has to be open, or the data on your own server: PostHog, OpenPanel, Umami or Rybbit.
- You only need traffic: Plausible, or Umami's free cloud plan.
Some teams should stay, since Mixpanel gives you replay, flags and experiments on Free, native mobile SDKs and data held in the US, the EU or India. If your free plan's report cap hasn't bitten yet and your product lives on a phone, it may still be the right tool. Mixpanel pricing shows what it costs once you pass a million events, and web analytics vs product analytics helps if you aren't sure which kind of tool you need.