Mobile analytics: Mixpanel vs Amplitude vs Flurry vs Localytics
Here at Polecat we often integrate analytics services when developing mobile applications. We have worked with the following systems:
- Mixpanel
- Amplitude
- Flurry
- Localytics
In our opinion, they are the main players in the mobile analytics market today. Our customers’ choice of analytics is influenced by several parameters:
- Real-time — how quickly events sent from the device appear in the analytics interface.
- Funnels — availability and convenience of conversion funnels.
- Installations tracking.
- External API — capability to send data not only from the mobile application, but also from other sources. For example, a server or website.
- Price.
Let’s examine each parameter in detail.
Real-time
In some cases, it is important to see and analyze what is happening in the application with minimal delay. When updating an app you make changes in the interface to increase user conversion. Real-time analytics allows you to determine the effectiveness of such changes right after release.
Mixpanel, Amplitude and Localytics provide real-time data. In the first two systems, events come with a delay of a few seconds. In Localytics, the delay is several minutes.
Flurry does not have real-time functionality. The data update rate is not documented. Usually, it takes a day for data to appear in the analytics. The conversion funnel calculations we describe below take even longer. Once, we had to wait three days for a funnel to finalize.
Conversion funnels
Conversion funnels are one of the key tools used in analyzing quality indicators. For example, the percentage of users who reached the purchase product screen against the percentage who stopped at registration. All analytics platforms mentioned in this article support conversion funnels, but some do it better.
Mixpanel
When building a funnel in Mixpanel, you can add conditions to each event in it. For example, when tracking registrations for a funnel, you can choose to only track registrations from Facebook.
User funnels can be segmented according to parameters of any of its events. You can add your own parameters by sending them from the application along with the event. For example, the event is a tap on a certain button in the app: we want to change its color and meanwhile watch the change in user behavior depending on the change of the button color. Thus, the button color will be the parameter of the event.
You can also see how the conversion changes over time; the change of the percentage of users going through events inside the funnel.
Amplitude
Just like in Mixpanel, you can add a condition to each event forming a funnel and watch the change of conversion over time. In addition, it has an interesting and unusual feature which shows which users completed steps and what they did to get there.
Flurry
It has funnels, but they work in a different way.
- Fast segmentation of users is possible only by existing segments. If you want to add another segment to a funnel, its calculation will take about a day.
- You can’t apply conditions on certain steps of the funnel.
- You can create no more than 10 segments.
- Calculation of a funnel after its creation takes about a day.
- Flurry provides a useful graph of the conversion changes over time.
Localytics
Quite an unusual tool for working with conversion funnels. If in Mixpanel and Amplitude everything is quite similar, Localytics decided to approach the issue differently.
1. You can apply several conditions to each step of the funnel. It is convenient and, in fact, replaces segmentation of the entire funnel in other analytic services.
2. Determining the time range for a funnel is done by applying an additional condition to the step. There is no ability to see changes in the conversion rate over time on one graph.
3. You can see events for each step of the funnel (except the first one), before and after it, for users who converted or failed to do so, respectively.
4. Detailed segmentation of users who passed a step, according to its parameters and predefined segments (platform, version of the system, country, language, etc.).
Installations tracking
Between viewing an advertisement and installing the application, the tacking of users allows us to estimate the effectiveness of the advertising campaign.
Implementing such tracking in mobile applications is not easy. This is why not all analytics have the mechanism.
Mixpanel and Amplitude do not have such functionality “out of the box”, so the app data (attribution data) has to be sent to third-party services:
- for Mixpanel it is Adjust or AppsFlyer,
- for Amplitude it is Adjust.
Installation tracking is conveniently implemented in Flurry from the beginning. Localytics has a built-in facility for tracking installations over some ad networks (Adwords, InMobi, Facebook, and others). For tracking users from another source not supported in the analytics you must connect to a third-party service — Adjust, AppsFlyer, Kochava and others.
External API
Commonly, when data is sent to the analytics from a mobile application, or from the web backend, you need an interface (API) for the backend to send it through. Mixpanel and Amplitude have external APIs for sending events, Flurry and Localytics do not.
Price
To make price comparison easier, let’s suppose that all users in our system are active and each of them sends 5 events per day, 20 days a month (assuming users are not active every day). Then 10,000 users will generate 1,000,000 events per month.
The table below shows the monthly price of analytics for 1/5/10/30/50/100 thousand users per month.
To summarize what we have said about analytic services…
We cannot choose a winner or loser in this comparison. The choice of analytics depends on the characteristics of the mobile application and the personal preferences of the developers.
We hope that this information will make your choice easier and better informed.
