head to head
Mixpanel vs Plausible
Plausible is the open source alternative to Mixpanel — product analytics for user behavior and retention. Here is the honest comparison.
Yes — Plausible is a viable free replacement for Mixpanel. Plausible is open source under AGPL-3.0, written in Elixir, with 29,116 GitHub stars, 1,866 forks and 60 open issues; it was last pushed 8 hours ago. Mixpanel is priced Free tier, then growth-based pricing (commonly cited as expensive at scale), while self-hosting Plausible carries no licence fee — the trade is your operational time instead of a subscription. 2 other open source Mixpanel alternatives are tracked here, led by PostHog at 39,835 stars. Plausible ranks #3 of 3 tracked open source Mixpanel alternatives by stars. The tracked set, by adoption: PostHog (39,835 stars), Umami (38,885 stars). Replacement criteria on this page: 4 reasons to move to Plausible and 3 reasons to stay on Mixpanel.
choose Plausible if
- Your Mixpanel bill is growing with seats or usage
- You need your data in a format and server you control
- Your compliance posture requires auditing the code that touches sensitive data
- You have (or can rent) a server and basic Docker comfort
stick with Mixpanel if
- You need the polished onboarding and support SLAs of a commercial vendor
- Your team has zero capacity to operate software, even self-hosted-simple
- You depend on a Mixpanel integration ecosystem that the OSS alternatives have not replicated
Side by side
| Plausible (open source) | Mixpanel | |
|---|---|---|
| Price | Free (self-hosted) | Free tier, then growth-based pricing (commonly cited as expensive at scale) |
| License | AGPL-3.0 | Proprietary |
| Source code | Public, auditable | Closed |
| Self-hosting | Yes — plausible/analytics | Cloud only |
| Data ownership | Your server, your format | Vendor's cloud |
| Community | ★ 29K · ⑂ 1.9K | — |
| Built with | Elixir | — |
Why people look for a Mixpanel alternative
Teams outgrow Mixpanel's free tier quickly and usage-based pricing scales painfully. Product data stays on third-party servers. PostHog, Plausible and Umami cover the same ground with self-hosting.
About Plausible
Plausible Analytics is an open source, privacy first web analytics tool — a lightweight, cookie free alternative to Google Analytics — for teams that want traffic and conversion insights without collecting personal data, available as a managed cloud service or a self hosted community edition under the AGPL 3.0 licence.
read the full Plausible overview →
Other open source alternatives to Mixpanel
last updated nightly · ranking method: github stars, live-tracked
Frequently asked questions
Is Plausible a good replacement for Mixpanel?
Plausible is an open source alternative to Mixpanel (Product analytics for user behavior and retention). It is written in Elixir and licensed under AGPL-3.0, with 29,116 GitHub stars.
Is Plausible free compared to Mixpanel?
Yes. Plausible is open source — there is no licence fee, and you can self-host it. Mixpanel is typically a paid subscription, so the trade-off is licence cost against the operational work of running it yourself.
How do I migrate from Mixpanel to Plausible?
Migration effort depends on the data formats involved. Check Plausible's documentation for import options, and compare the feature table above to confirm the capabilities you depend on are covered before switching.