Google Tag Manager vs. Mixpanel

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
Google Tag Manager
Score 8.8 out of 10
N/A
From Google, the Google Tag Manager is a tag management application that facilitates creating, embedding, and updating tags across websites and mobile apps, thus gaining the benefits of data standardization and speed of deployment. Google touts an agency friendly system with multiple user access, and tools to improve tags performance like debugging, and rules, macros or automated tag firing. The Google Tag Manager also integrates with Google product DoubleClick. Moreover, Google Tag Manager is…N/A
Mixpanel
Score 8.7 out of 10
N/A
Mixpanel helps companies measure what matters, make decisions fast, and build better products through data. With self-serve product analytics solution, teams can analyze how and why people engage, convert, and retain—in real-time, across devices—to improve their user experience. Mixpanel serves over 26,000 companies from different industries around the world, including Expedia, Uber, Ancestry, DocuSign, and Lemonade. Headquartered in San Francisco, Mixpanel has offices in New York,…
$0
per month
Pricing
Google Tag ManagerMixpanel
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
Free
$0
per month
Growth
$17
per month
Enterprise
Contact sales
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Google Tag ManagerMixpanel
Free Trial
NoNo
Free/Freemium Version
NoYes
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoNo
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
Additional DetailsMixpanel uses MTU (Monthly Tracked User) pricing, which is designed to scale with your company. MTUs are roughly equivalent to the number of unique visitors on your product and each user is counted once per month, even if they use multiple devices. If Events based pricing makes more sense for your business, reach out to us and we can work with you!
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
Google Tag ManagerMixpanel
Considered Both Products
Google Tag Manager
Chose Google Tag Manager
Google Tag Manager is naturally the first one to implement as I use Google Analytics. However I do use the others too as they provide functionality that GTM doesn't. But you do also have to pay for some of these functions. I use these tools for growth hacker marketing, so …
Mixpanel

No answer on this topic

Features
Google Tag ManagerMixpanel
Security
Comparison of Security features of Product A and Product B
Google Tag Manager
4.4
Ratings
58% below category average
Mixpanel
-
Ratings
Role-based user permissions4.40 Ratings00 Ratings
Tag Management
Comparison of Tag Management features of Product A and Product B
Google Tag Manager
6.6
Ratings
18% below category average
Mixpanel
-
Ratings
Tag library7.00 Ratings00 Ratings
Tag variable mapping7.00 Ratings00 Ratings
Ease of writing custom tags6.00 Ratings00 Ratings
Rules-driven tag execution4.90 Ratings00 Ratings
Tag performance monitoring7.80 Ratings00 Ratings
Page load times6.00 Ratings00 Ratings
Mobile app tagging8.30 Ratings00 Ratings
Library of JavaScript extensions6.00 Ratings00 Ratings
Data Management & Integrity
Comparison of Data Management & Integrity features of Product A and Product B
Google Tag Manager
6.2
Ratings
25% below category average
Mixpanel
-
Ratings
Event tracking8.00 Ratings00 Ratings
Mobile event tracking6.00 Ratings00 Ratings
Data distribution management7.00 Ratings00 Ratings
Universal data layer7.00 Ratings00 Ratings
Automated error checking3.00 Ratings00 Ratings
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Google Tag ManagerMixpanel
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Fullstory
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Score 9.1 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
Adobe Experience Platform Launch
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Score 5.1 out of 10
Whatfix
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Score 8.2 out of 10
Enterprises
Tealium Customer Data Hub
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Score 8.2 out of 10
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Score 8.2 out of 10
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User Ratings
Google Tag ManagerMixpanel
Likelihood to Recommend
8.5
(0 ratings)
9.0
(0 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
7.0
(0 ratings)
10.0
(0 ratings)
Usability
7.0
(0 ratings)
9.0
(0 ratings)
Availability
9.1
(0 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Support Rating
2.0
(0 ratings)
1.0
(0 ratings)
Online Training
7.3
(0 ratings)
8.0
(0 ratings)
Implementation Rating
9.8
(0 ratings)
8.9
(0 ratings)
User Testimonials
Google Tag ManagerMixpanel
Likelihood to Recommend
Google Tag Manager is well suited when the marketer or marketing team does not work closely with the developers. In this scenario, it means that the marketer can deploy 3rd party tools such as live chat widgets, advertising pixels, and much more themselves in a timely manner. Google Tag Manager may be less relevant in an organization where the marketer is also the developer or has a strong development background, where they can implement the 3rd party tags directly on the site when they need. But even in this instance, there's still great benefit in using Google Tag Manager.
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Mixpanel is a versatile platform that integrates features to connect every work team and get the best out of them in productivity and results. Moreover, it will improve the flow of information and interaction between all your company staff; it will unify and help promote collaboration between the different work areas. Without a doubt, I highly recommend this software
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Pros
  • Selecting elements on a site [object, class, cookie, etc] (to later fire an event, send some data, etc) is very easy with triggers. Want to add an event when someone clicks on a button? Super easy. It was many many DOM selectors and you can even add custom functions if you need to do something more specific
  • In general, firing events in different circumstances is very easy mixing triggers and tags. You can track almost any element of the DOM and do whatever you want with it.
  • Testing is a great functionality. Only you can see what's on the site and you can debug it easily by seeing which events or tags were triggered and all the DOM elements involved (and why they matched the trigger).
  • Working in environments (staging, production) and versioning is easy to do, deploying changes in 2 clicks.
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  • Mixpanel's ease of use is easily their best feature, allowing you to quickly create graphs with a few point and clicks. Their UI is also fairly snappy and well-designed.
  • Tying together events with user attributes allows you to properly segment users into cohorts which can then be tracked individually. Proper segmentation is where most analytics solutions earn their keep.
  • Live view is a nice perk that gives you a good feel for who's on your site and what they're doing at any single point in time. This can be further filtered to focus on particular events of interest.
  • Mixpanel has flexible plans that work for smaller startups as well.
  • Their documentation is top notch.
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Cons
  • There are several good integrations, but there can always be more. Native tracking for call tracking solutions, analytics providers, non-Google advertisers would be top of my list.
  • Documentation is just dreadful. Luckily there are some awesome folks out there doing crowdsourced tutorials (shout out to Simo Ahava) but by and large the Google Tag Manager instructions are worth what you pay for them.
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  • I didn't use the engagement features at all but it seems like they could have a better WYSIWYG editor for the emails for non-technical people using Mixpanel.
  • The custom reports feature seems to be really powerful but I wish they had more resources/templates for creating custom reports. I don't code so it was really hard for me to use this feature...BUT the reports I was able to get help with, were really powerful.
  • I wanted a dashboard area for all of my reports in one view. It seems like they were implementing this when I was moving jobs. If it's not available yet, they definitely need to add a master dashboard page for arranging saved reports.
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Likelihood to Renew
Until a strong case or need arises for enterprise tag management, I cannot see any reason why we would discontinue using Google Tag Manager. Even if we were to switch to a different vendor, we would still likely use Google Tag Manager to manage Google Analytics code and Google AdWords conversion and remarketing pixels
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It's not an all encompassing solution like Google Analytics tries to be, but MixPanel offers much easier to use and understandable data insights. That's valuable when juggling many responsibilities as startup life demands, so a renewal would be easily justified.
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Usability
Google Tag Manager is the best tool to centralize everything in one place including marketing, analytics, integration with third party tools for AB testing, cookie management, etc. it includes user's management, debugging features, tag approval process, etc. it also saves time and resources by not relying on developers.
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Relativity easy to use. Once you get the hang of it, very easy to create dashboards for different use cases. I split my dashboards between customers or use cases
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Support Rating
It depends wether you are seeking official support from Google itself, in which case it would be rated very low because it's not their business model, they would rather have you work with one of their Google Analytics Certified Partner (GACP). In terms of self-served support, Google offer extensive documentation at https://developers.google.com/tag-manager/, recently revamped training (https://analyticsacademy.withgoogle.com/course05/preview), has active forums and user community (https://plus.google.com/u/0/communities/104865292981489764063) which can typically answer even the most advanced questions.
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There is no support at all for free-plan users. There used to be a good support but something changed. If everything had gone great we could've considered upgrading but it is so bad that we'll look for an alternative once we finish the current project. Given that the documentation is very poor, there are some aspects in which customer support could have helped a lot, but with no support, we are left with some needs unfulfilled.
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Online Training
I thought there was a little bit too much emphasis on AdWords stuff, not enough on the generic application of GTM.
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Mixpanel has a great resource about their product, with videos on how to use it and real world examples from other companies on how they integrate Mixpanel into their business processes.
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Implementation Rating
Planning and communication will help greatly with an in-house implementation. If there are large teams, try to limit the number of people involved to 1-2 developers (back-end dev may be necessary depending on your platform), one analytics marketer and one project manager.
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Mixpanel is a simple JS script installation. For adding events to track, its simply a matter of adding the code where you want it. Their API and documentation are easy to understand and use.
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Alternatives Considered
With GTM we are able to integrate GA4 with other platforms we use. We can then send data to GA4 and AdWords and relay that info to our customers. They all work well together and give us a good opportunity to report back to our clients. We haven't used a ton of other products that do what GTM does, so I guess it has a leg up there
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Datanomix is an excellent tool, with similar characteristics; however, Mixpanel has been our preference for two main reasons: one, to have customization and to be able to adapt the interface and tools to our use, and two, to be able to count on reports that it automates the work of sales analysis and being able to evaluate progress.
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Return on Investment
  • GTM has allowed us to show positive ROI for multiple clients via connecting their two websites so that they could see the amount of money advertising generates.
  • GTM has also shown a positive ROI from an internal perspective as we can use templates to immediately upload our standard, customized event tracking which saves hours of testing and configuration.
  • GTM's lack of error catching features has caused more time and individual testing but the improved preview feature has helped save time.
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  • User event data has helped us improve our product, which has increased subscriptions.
  • Being able to send helpful messages to some users who drop off after certain events has helped us reduce our churn.
  • We have been able to identify the Monthly super-active users, understand their usage of our product, which we use to conduct focus groups to help us shape the product.
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ScreenShots

Mixpanel Screenshots

Screenshot of Mixpanel's Insights report enables you to see how often users perform meaningful actions, monitor growth of key user cohorts, like power users, and slice and dice trends by any attribute.Screenshot of Mixpanel's powerful Flows report enables you to identify top user paths to see where people get stuck, and discover actions users take before, after, or between key events.Screenshot of Mixpanel's Retention report helps you understand how often users return and visualize feature stickiness. You can also slice and dice retention data to identify user groups that retain best and to find out what causes churn.