Mixpanel Sandbox Interactive Demo
Try a sandbox demo of Mixpanel, a product analytics platform built around event-based tracking. See how teams use funnels, retention reports, and user segmentation to understand how people actually use their products.
What is Mixpanel?
Mixpanel is a product analytics platform built around event-based tracking. Founded in 2009 and used by companies like Uber, Twitter, and Airbnb, it captures user actions in real time and gives product teams a way to answer specific questions about how their product is being used.
The core difference from pageview analytics is granularity. Mixpanel tracks discrete events: button clicks, form submissions, feature interactions. Each event carries the user ID and any properties you choose to pass, which means you can filter and segment the data by plan, role, cohort, or time period. Funnel, Retention, and Flow reports are where most teams spend their time.
This sandbox walks you through those core reports in a clickable format. No account setup or data pipeline required.
How to get started with Mixpanel
- 1
Set up your project
Sign up at mixpanel.com and create a project for your product. The free plan supports up to 20 million monthly events. Once the project is created, Mixpanel gives you a project token, which you'll reference in your tracking code to route events to the right place.
- 2
Install the Mixpanel SDK
Add the Mixpanel JavaScript SDK to your web app, or the appropriate mobile SDK for iOS or Android. Before you start firing events, spend time defining your event taxonomy: a list of the specific user actions you want to track and the properties each event should carry. Getting this right early saves a lot of cleanup later.
- 3
Identify your users
After a user logs in, call mixpanel.identify() with their unique ID to tie their events to a persistent profile. Use mixpanel.people.set() to attach user properties like plan, role, and signup date. These properties become the dimensions you'll use to filter and segment reports.
- 4
Build your first funnel
Open the Funnels report and define the sequence of events that makes up your activation path, for example: Sign Up, Create First Project, Invite Teammate, Activate. Mixpanel will show you the conversion rate at each step and where users are dropping out of the flow.
- 5
Analyze retention
Build a Retention report to see what share of new signups return to the product at 1, 7, and 30 days. Segment by cohort to compare retention across user groups, for example by acquisition channel or plan type, and identify which segments are holding engagement over time.
Explore more Mixpanel guides
Step-by-step interactive demos and tutorials for Mixpanel.
Who is Mixpanel most useful for?
The teams that get the most from Mixpanel tend to have clear questions they're trying to answer about user behavior. Product managers use it to trace which features correlate with activation and retention, and where users fall out of key flows. Pairing that with a Supademo of your funnel setup gives new PMs a way to understand not just what the numbers say, but how the measurement was designed.
For growth engineers and analysts, Mixpanel's funnel and experiment views are the primary working surface. Documenting your dashboard configurations in a Supademo walkthrough cuts the onboarding time for new team members significantly.
Attribution work beyond click-through rates is where marketing teams find value. Because Mixpanel tracks behavior at the user level, you can connect acquisition channel to long-term engagement, not just initial conversion.
Customer success teams tracking adoption across accounts use Mixpanel differently: more cohort-level, less individual session. Building Supademo guides around the report templates your CS team uses most often lets the whole team pull insights without depending on an analyst.
Alternatives to Mixpanel
Mixpanel fits a specific analytics use case. If the approach doesn't match how your team works, here are four alternatives worth a closer look.
PostHog is open-source and self-hostable, which makes it a practical option for teams with data privacy constraints or self-hosting requirements. Beyond event analytics, it bundles session replay, feature flags, and A/B testing in the same platform.
View demo →
GA4 is free and most web teams already have it installed. Its event model resembles Mixpanel's on the surface, but the reporting is oriented toward traffic and acquisition rather than product behavior. Works well if your primary questions are about marketing channels; less so if you're trying to understand feature adoption or retention.
View demo →
Amplitude covers the same core report types: funnels, retention, and cohorts. The two tools are close enough that most teams choose based on pricing structure or which one their data team already knows. Amplitude has a stronger foothold in larger enterprise analytics setups.
Heap captures all user interactions automatically, without requiring you to instrument individual events upfront. The tradeoff is less control over your data model. Mixpanel requires explicit instrumentation but gives you more flexibility in how events and properties are structured.
FAQs on Mixpanel
Commonly asked questions about Mixpanel. Have more? Reach out and our team will be happy to help.
Is Mixpanel free?
Mixpanel does have a free tier. It supports up to 20 million monthly events and includes full access to core reports like Funnels, Retention, and Flows. Paid plans extend data history, add pipeline integrations, and unlock group analytics.
What is the sandbox demo?
The sandbox demo is a Mixpanel walkthrough built with Supademo. It takes you through the key report types, including funnels, retention, and user analytics, in a clickable format that doesn't require you to create an account or connect any data.
How does Mixpanel track events?
Mixpanel event tracking works through a JavaScript SDK, mobile SDKs, or server-side libraries. To send an event, you call mixpanel.track('Event Name', {property: value}). Each call records a timestamp, ties the event to a user, and stores whatever properties you include.
What is the difference between Mixpanel and Google Analytics?
The difference comes down to what question each tool is designed to answer. Google Analytics is built around web traffic: sessions, pageviews, and acquisition channels. Mixpanel is built around user behavior: who did what, how often, and whether they came back. Most product teams reach for Mixpanel; most marketing teams reach for GA.
Can Mixpanel track mobile apps?
Mixpanel tracks mobile apps through native SDKs for iOS (Swift and Objective-C) and Android (Java and Kotlin), with support for cross-platform frameworks like React Native and Flutter. The event tracking model is consistent across web and mobile, so the same report types work regardless of platform.
How does Mixpanel Retention work?
Retention in Mixpanel measures what percentage of users who completed a starting event, such as signing up, came back to complete a follow-on event over the days and weeks after. The report breaks this down by time interval so you can see where engagement falls off and which cohorts hold their activity best.