My second talk at the MariaDB Fest was ANALYZE for statements: MariaDB’s hidden gem (slides, video). It also has a comparison with MySQL, with its EXPLAIN ANALYZE feature. MariaDB’s ANALYZE supports more kinds of statements, and a basic test has shown it has a lower CPU overhead for workloads with tight loops. I believe this is caused by MariaDB making fewer gettimeofday() calls. It might show fewer details about the query plan, though.
My experience with ANALYZE FORMAT=JSON was that it is immensely useful for troubleshooting query optimizer support issues.
Sergei Petrunia's blog 