Zenith vs Mixpanel
Website analytics, without instrumenting an entire product
Mixpanel is a product analytics platform, and a strong one. It answers what users do inside an application. Zenith answers how a website is doing. Those are different jobs, and picking the wrong one costs weeks of instrumentation you did not need.
Zenith vs Mixpanel, feature by feature
Including the rows Zenith loses. Where Mixpanel has something behind a paid tier or a plugin, the table says so rather than pretending it is missing.
| Feature | Zenith | Mixpanel |
|---|---|---|
| Privacy & compliance | ||
| Cookie-free tracking | Yes | No |
| No cookie banner required | Yes | No |
| GDPR compliant by default | Yes | Requires configuration |
| No personal data collected | Yes | No |
| You own the raw data | Yes | No |
| Open source | MIT | No |
| Self-hosting | Yes | No |
| Analytics features | ||
| Real-time dashboard | Yes | Near real-time |
| Visitors, pageviews, sessions | Yes | Via events |
| Bounce rate & visit duration | Yes | Via events |
| Custom events | Yes | Yes |
| UTM & campaign tracking | Yes | Yes |
| Funnel analysis | No | Yes |
| Cohort analysis | No | Yes |
| Session replay | No | Yes |
| Heatmaps | No | No |
| A/B testing | No | Via integrations |
| Feature flags | No | No |
| Agency & client work | ||
| Unlimited sites per deploy | Yes | Per project |
| Cost per extra client site | Nothing | Counts toward your events |
| Dashboard on the client's own domain | Yes | No |
| Client never sees a third-party tool | Yes | No |
| Automatic monthly client emails | Yes | Scheduled reports |
| Per-client logins | Yes | Team seats |
| SEO | ||
| Built-in SEO audits | Yes | No |
| Core Web Vitals from a real render | Yes | No |
| SEO report emails | Yes | No |
| Setup & usability | ||
| Install | Script tag or npm | SDK + event design |
| Learning curve | Minutes | Weeks |
| Tracking script size | ~1 KB | ~60 KB |
| API access | Yes | Yes |
| Unsampled data | Yes | Plan dependent |
| Hosting & pricing | ||
| Hosting | Self-hosted | Cloud only |
| Pricing model | Free, open source | Subscription |
| Price scales with | Nothing | Events |
| Every feature included | Yes | Higher tiers for more |
Two different questions
Mixpanel earns its keep when you have an application with a signup funnel, retention curves and features whose usage you need to compare. Zenith earns its keep when you have a marketing site, a blog or a client's brochure site and you need to know who read what, where they came from, and whether the SEO is sound. Buying Mixpanel for the second job means paying in setup for answers you did not ask.
Instrumentation
Mixpanel is only as good as the events you define, name consistently and maintain — that work is real and it never quite finishes. Zenith records pageviews the moment the script is on the page, including client-side route changes, and custom events are there if you want them. You get a useful dashboard on day one rather than after an instrumentation project.
Privacy and ownership
Mixpanel is a cloud platform that builds user profiles, which usually means cookies, a consent banner, and a data processing agreement your client is a party to. Zenith stores a daily-rotating hash and no identifier, so there is no profile to build and nothing to consent to, and the whole dataset sits on a server you control.
Choose Mixpanel if
You are measuring a product rather than a website: funnels, cohorts, retention, feature adoption, experiments. Zenith does none of that and is not trying to. Many teams run both — Zenith on the marketing site, a product analytics tool inside the app — and that is a sensible arrangement rather than a compromise.
Own your clients’ analytics.
One deploy, every site you build, no consent banner and no per-site cost. It is MIT licensed and it runs on one server.