AppGlance vs Mixpanel
Mixpanel is one of the defining product-analytics tools: funnels, cohorts, session replay, experiments, and a query engine that can answer almost any question about your product. This page is for the mobile developer deciding whether they need all of that, or something smaller that stays in their pocket.
These are different categories wearing the same word. Mixpanel is an analysis platform for a product team: its free tier is bigger than ours (1M events a month against our 100k) and its querying goes far deeper. AppGlance is a pulse for the person who made the app: who is in it right now, who just bought, and a push on your phone when it happens.
Pick Mixpanel to sit down and analyze. Pick AppGlance to stay connected to a live app without sitting down at all.
Who wrote this: we make AppGlance. Mixpanel is an independent product and we do not speak for it. The details below were checked in August 2026 and products move, so verify anything decision-critical at mixpanel.com. If we have got something wrong, tell us and we will fix it.
What Mixpanel actually is
Mixpanel has been doing product analytics since 2009, and it shows in the good way: the funnels, cohort and retention tooling is mature, session replay is built in, experiments and feature flags live on the bigger plans, and the free tier is genuinely generous. If your team has a weekly metrics review, Mixpanel is built for that meeting.
It is also built around that meeting. The model is user profiles, identity merging across devices, boards and saved reports, seats and permissions. All of it is power, and all of it is surface area: for a team it is the point, for one person shipping apps it is a console you visit rather than a pulse you feel.
The real difference: analysis you visit vs a pulse that finds you
Strip the feature lists and one design decision separates these tools. Mixpanel assumes the questions come to the tool: you open a board, build a query, read the answer. AppGlance assumes the answers come to you: the phone buzzes because someone bought, you glance at who is in the app right now, and you put the phone back.
The billing model says the same thing. At Mixpanel, every screen view, tap and session marker you track is an event against your allowance, because events are the raw material of analysis. At AppGlance, the chattiest signal an app has, the quiet "still here" presence ping that powers "active right now", never counts at all, because presence is the product, not the input to it.
Which one to pick
Pick Mixpanel if…
- More than one person needs to ask questions of the data, in meetings, with saved boards.
- You want session replay, experiments and multi-touch attribution in one platform.
- You will genuinely use over 100k events a month and want it free while you grow.
- You have, or plan to have, someone whose job includes analytics.
Pick AppGlance if…
- You are the whole team, and you want the six numbers you actually check.
- You want a push on your own phone the moment someone buys or installs.
- You want "no consent banner, no ATT prompt" to be the default, not a configuration project.
- You want your App Store privacy answers generated, not researched.
Side by side
| AppGlance | Mixpanel | |
|---|---|---|
| What it is | A live dashboard and an iPhone app: active right now, today hour by hour, the feed, funnels, retention, per-user stories, push alerts. | A product-analytics platform: funnels, cohorts, flows, retention, session replay, experiments, boards and saved reports. |
| Free tier | 100,000 events a month, every dashboard panel, alerts and webhooks, no credit card. Presence pings and user labels never count. | Bigger: 1M events a month plus 10k session replays, no credit card. Genuinely generous, and events include everything you track. |
| Paid pricing | Flat plans you can read in one breath: $4.99/mo for 1M events, $14.99 for 2.5M, $39 for 7M, $99 for 18M. No sales call at any tier. Subscribe during the beta and your price stays. | Usage-based Growth pricing from $0 scaling to 20M events a month (calculator on their site), then a sales-led Enterprise tier. A startup program gives qualifying young companies a year free. |
| Identity | A random install id by default, nothing personal. identify is one optional call, and the
dashboard previews what it does to your App Store label before you ship it. |
Built around user profiles: identified users, identity merging across devices and platforms, profile properties. The power and the responsibility both come from this. |
| Consent and App Store labels | The default setup collects nothing linked to a person: no ATT prompt, no GDPR banner to show, and the exact App Privacy questionnaire ticks are generated for you. | Configurable, and your responsibility: with profiles, replays and cross-device identity on, you are writing a consent flow and privacy-policy language. Mixpanel documents this well; it is still your project. |
| Live presence | "Active right now" is the headline number, per app, powered by a never-billed ping. | Near-real-time charts and a live view exist; the center of gravity is analysis over time, not who is in the app this second. |
| Alerts | A push on any signal to your own phone: the iPhone app (in beta), ntfy, Discord, or a signed webhook to your server. | Alerts and digests to email and Slack, shaped for teams and thresholds rather than a buzz per purchase. |
| Asking your own questions | Fixed panels: funnels, retention, sessions, versions, countries, per-user pages, CSV export. Deliberately small. | Far deeper. Segmentation, formulas, custom events, saved boards, replays, experiments. This is the product. |
| SDK | Swift and Kotlin, two-line setup, zero dependencies, ~270 KB compiled on iOS and a 107 KB AAR on Android (measured), plus an HTTP API for anything else. | Official SDKs for effectively every platform, plus warehouse connectors and a big integration ecosystem. We have not measured its binaries, so we make no size claim. |
| Track record | New, and says so: in public beta, with our own apps running it in production. | Since 2009. One of the most proven tools in the category. |
Where Mixpanel is the better pick
- The free tier is bigger. 1M events against our 100k, with session replay included. If raw free volume is the deciding factor, they win it.
- Analysis depth. Cohorts, flows, formulas, attribution, experiments: our fixed panels do not try to compete with any of that.
- Session replay. Watching a real session back is sometimes the only way to understand a bug or a drop-off. We do not have it and are not building it.
- Teams. Seats, permissions, boards, Slack: if more than two people need the numbers, Mixpanel is built for you.
- The startup program. A qualifying young company can get a serious analytics platform free for a year. Take that deal if it fits you.
Where we think we are better
- The pulse. A native iPhone app with a push the moment someone buys is a different relationship with your app than a board you remember to open.
- The privacy default. Nothing personal collected unless you flip a switch, no ATT prompt, no consent banner, and the App Store questionnaire answered for you. At Mixpanel this is your homework.
- Pricing you can predict. Five flat numbers, no calculator, no sales call, and presence never counts. Our biggest plan is $99 a month, and you know that without talking to anyone.
- Sized for one person. Six numbers, one screen, two-line setup, and a paste-in prompt that lets an AI agent do the integration and the tracking plan.
- Attention. Support goes to the person who wrote the SDK. During the beta, that is a feature no platform can match.
The fastest way to compare is to look
The demo is the real dashboard on sample data from four apps. No account, nothing to uninstall.
Also worth reading: all the comparisons, how this compares with Amplitude, how this compares with Firebase Analytics, what privacy-first analytics actually means, and the free App Store privacy label tool.