Who Mixpanel is
Mixpanel is a product analytics company founded in 2009 and headquartered in San Francisco. It is built on events: each action a customer takes in your product is an event, and its reports turn those events into funnels, retention, flows and cohorts.
Next to these reports it offers session replay for web and mobile apps, experiments and feature flags, and connectors to warehouses such as BigQuery and Snowflake. It holds a SOC 2 Type II attestation and ISO 27001 and ISO 27701 certifications, stores data in the US, the EU or India, and develops its own Flutter SDK, the toolkit our mobile apps are built with. That is why it is one of the product analytics connectors of our analytics and monitoring module.
What it does in your platform
Analytics & monitoring
Shows your product team how customers use your apps: where they leave onboarding, which features they come back to and what each release changed. Screen and tap events come from Mixpanel's SDKs in the apps and money events from the platform's server, all under one random platform ID per customer, and only for customers who agreed.
How the connection works
Our Flutter apps use mixpanel_flutter, the Flutter SDK that Mixpanel develops and maintains, and the web apps use Mixpanel's JavaScript SDK. Money events go from the platform's server through Mixpanel's /import API, authorised by a service account that never leaves your platform's secrets.
The customer agrees
Nothing reaches Mixpanel until the customer agrees to analytics. The choice is kept in the platform, and the app opts them in or out with the SDK's own calls; opting out also clears any events still queued on the phone.
They sign in
The app identifies the customer to Mixpanel by their random platform ID, never a name, email or phone number, so their events from the app, the web and the server count as one customer.
They open a transfer
Screen and tap events on the tracking plan, such as the transfer screen opening, are queued on the phone and sent to Mixpanel's EU endpoint in batches, every 60 seconds and when the app goes to the background.
The money moves on the server
When the transfer settles, the platform sends the event from its server through /import, with an insert ID so a retry is never counted twice, and the figures match the ledger.
The team finds the drop-off
Your product team sees the path from the transfer screen to the settled transfer as one funnel. Where customers drop off, session replays show what happened, with text fields always masked and card or identity screens masked or skipped.
They ask to be forgotten
The platform stops sending and creates a deletion task in Mixpanel's GDPR API for the customer's platform ID. Mixpanel deletes their events and profile, which can take up to 30 days, and the platform checks the task until it is complete.
Next to other providers
Mixpanel is one of the module's product analytics connectors, next to Amplitude, Google Analytics for Firebase and PostHog. It measures rather than messages: customer engagement, mobile attribution and crash monitoring have connectors of their own in the module. Each tool knows a customer by the same random platform ID, so your teams can follow one journey across them without sharing a name or an email address.
The tracking plan, the consent choices and the platform IDs belong to your platform, not to Mixpanel. Replacing Mixpanel later does not change your apps, and the events already in Mixpanel can be exported through its Raw Data Export API.
When Mixpanel fits best
A strong fit when
- Your product team wants to build its own funnels, retention reports and cohorts, without waiting for a data team.
- You want to watch the sessions behind a drop-off, with text and images masked by default in your Flutter apps.
- You want your analytics data kept in the EU, with a Flutter SDK made by Mixpanel itself.
Also worth a look
- Amplitude, Google Analytics for Firebase or PostHog, the module's other product analytics connectors.
- A product analytics tool your team already uses: its account becomes a connector too.
How we get you live
The contract
We help you get your Mixpanel account and contract in place, and set up your organisation, projects and team access with you.
The data
We create your projects in Mixpanel's EU region, which can only be chosen when a project is created, and agree the tracking plan with your team: every event and property, and nothing else.
The keys
The service account for /import and the GDPR API's OAuth token, which expires after a year, stay in your platform's secrets. The apps carry only the project token, which Mixpanel describes as an identifier, not a secret.
A full test run
Events, replay masking and deletions are checked first in a separate test project, as Mixpanel recommends for session replay, before your first real customer.
