Google Analytics vs Mixpanel vs Adobe vs Amplitude

Olamide Sule, founder of Dolphin Analytics: a digital analytics expert based in London delivering solutions for agency and in-house clients.

“Google Analytics or Mixpanel” is one of the most common tool questions we get, and it usually starts from a wrong assumption: that the two do the same job and you have to choose one. They don’t. GA4 and Mixpanel measure different things, so the honest answer is often “both, for different questions.” This is the head-to-head we’d give a client, with Adobe Customer Journey Analytics and Amplitude added for anyone weighing the full enterprise four-way. For the wider category overview of six platforms, see our digital analytics tools comparison; this post is the direct evaluation.

Product and pricing details link to each vendor’s own pages. These tiers move, so verify current pricing before you buy.

Google Analytics vs Mixpanel: what’s the actual difference?

GA4 is web analytics and Mixpanel is product analytics, so they answer different questions rather than compete for the same job. GA4 measures traffic, campaigns and conversions: where visitors came from and whether marketing worked. Mixpanel measures behaviour inside a product or app: which features get used, where people drop off, and what predicts them coming back.

That split is the whole decision. A marketing team proving which campaigns drive revenue needs GA4. A product team working out why users abandon a signup flow needs Mixpanel. Both tools track events, so on the surface they look interchangeable, but they are tuned for different owners asking different questions. Pick by the question you need answered, not by which dashboard looks nicer in a demo.

GA4 vs Mixpanel: head to head

Here is how the two line up on the things that actually decide the choice.

	GA4	Mixpanel
What it measures	Traffic, channels, campaigns, conversions	In-product events, funnels, cohorts, retention
Best fit	Marketing teams, especially Google Ads-led	Product and growth teams
Pricing	Free; paid GA360 tier for scale	1M events/month free, then event-based
Biggest strength	Google Ads integration; free at most volumes	Fast, self-serve funnel and retention analysis
Main weakness	Shallow for product behaviour; sampling above 10M events	No marketing-channel view; needs a clean event plan
Setup effort	Low	Low to medium

When GA4 wins

Pick GA4 when the questions are about marketing. It is free for the vast majority of sites, and its integration with Google Ads is the strongest single reason to run it: conversion data flows straight back into campaign optimisation without a separate connector. The limits show up past marketing reporting. Data retention caps user- and event-level detail at 14 months, which only affects Explorations and funnel reports, not standard aggregated reports. Ad-hoc queries can sample once a single query crosses 10 million events, and the fix for both limits is exporting raw data to BigQuery.

When Mixpanel wins

Pick Mixpanel when the questions are about the product. A marketer or product manager can build a funnel or a retention chart in an afternoon without waiting on an analyst, which is Mixpanel’s core pitch. Pricing is event-based, with 1 million monthly events free before usage pricing applies. The catch is not the tool, it is the data going into it: Mixpanel is only as good as the event plan behind it, so naming and tracking have to stay consistent from day one. Skip that and the funnels quietly stop matching reality within a few months.

Where do Adobe CJA and Amplitude fit? The enterprise four-way

Buyers comparing all four (GA360, Mixpanel, Amplitude and Adobe Customer Journey Analytics) are usually running an enterprise evaluation or planning a migration, not choosing a first analytics tool. At that level the split is less about web versus product and more about scale, governance and how much budget and headcount the platform justifies.

Tool	What it’s for	Best fit	Pricing basis
GA360	GA4 at enterprise scale: higher limits, less sampling, SLAs	Large marketing teams outgrowing free GA4	Paid enterprise tier, quoted per account
Mixpanel	Fast, self-serve product analytics	Product teams wanting answers without an analyst	Event-based; 1M events/month free
Amplitude	Deep retention, cohorts and governance at scale	Growth teams with multiple squads on shared data	Event-based; free allowance, then usage
Adobe CJA	Unifying online and offline data into one reporting layer	Enterprises already on Adobe Experience Platform	Custom, quoted per account

GA360 is the paid enterprise tier of GA4. Same interface and event model, with raised data limits, reduced sampling and service-level agreements. You pay for scale and contractual support, not different features.

Amplitude covers the same core ground as Mixpanel (funnels, cohorts, retention) but goes deeper on governance and cohort analysis for larger product organisations. Its pricing is event-based with a free allowance, and the depth comes with a steeper learning curve, so it rewards teams that set up a proper tracking plan first.

Adobe Customer Journey Analytics is Adobe’s cross-channel analytics layer, built to unify online and offline sources into a single reporting view. It only makes sense for organisations already invested in Adobe Experience Platform, with a dedicated analytics team and the budget to match. The licence is rarely the blocker; the taxonomy and data-modelling work upstream usually decides how long a rollout takes.

Which one should you actually pick?

For most marketing teams, GA4 is the default: free, and unbeatable for Google Ads reporting. Add Mixpanel or Amplitude only when the questions turn to in-product behaviour that GA4’s event model handles clumsily. Reserve GA360 for marketing teams genuinely outgrowing free GA4’s limits, and Adobe CJA for enterprises already committed to the Adobe estate.

Your situation	Pick
Prove which marketing channels and campaigns work	GA4
Fast, self-serve funnel and retention analysis for a product	Mixpanel
Deep retention and governance across multiple product teams	Amplitude
Outgrowing free GA4’s limits and sampling	GA360
Enterprise already on Adobe Experience Platform	Adobe CJA
Agency running marketing plus product analytics across clients	GA4 for marketing, plus the product tool that fits each client

Most teams that sell a product run two tools: GA4 for marketing, and a product analytics tool once in-product behaviour becomes the question worth answering. One is not a replacement for the other.

Why the tool matters less than the tracking underneath it

Choosing the platform is the easy part. Whether it gives you numbers you can trust comes down to implementation: whether events fire consistently, whether consent is set up so you’re not silently losing a chunk of UK and EU traffic, and whether the figures match what actually happened in the business. A perfectly chosen tool sitting on a broken tag setup produces confident-looking, wrong data, which is worse than no data at all.

Duplicate events from an old migration, a conversion that stopped firing after a checkout redesign, consent settings blocking more visitors than anyone realised: those faults break the numbers on GA4, Mixpanel, Amplitude or Adobe just the same. See how Dolphin Analytics approaches tracking for the checks we run before trusting any platform, and our digital analytics audit tools guide for the specific checks. If you want to know what’s really firing on your site before you commit to a tool, Sonar scans your tracking in minutes.

Comparing tools usually means you’re about to invest real money in one. If your current numbers already look off, or you’re not sure whether it’s the tool or the tracking underneath it, that’s exactly what the free audit is built to catch, before you migrate to a platform that won’t fix it.