Product Analytics vs Business Analytics — Different Questions, Different Tools
Mixpanel and Amplitude vs Power BI and Tableau: understanding which analytics tool answers which questions.
A marketing VP asks: "What was our customer acquisition cost by channel last quarter?" A product manager asks: "What percentage of users who start the onboarding wizard complete it, and where do they drop off?" Both are analytics questions. But they require fundamentally different tools, data models, and approaches.
Business analytics (BI) answers questions about the business: revenue, costs, growth, efficiency. It operates on transactional data — orders, invoices, subscriptions. The tools are Power BI, Tableau, Looker. The data lives in a warehouse.
Product analytics answers questions about user behavior: what users do in your product, how they navigate, where they struggle, what drives engagement. The tools are Mixpanel, Amplitude, PostHog. The data comes from event tracking.
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