What is Amplitude?
Amplitude is a product analytics tool that helps you turn raw data from user behavior into critical insights about your users and products.
It offers excellent features like customer journey visualization, retention analysis, dynamic audience segmentation, cohort analysis, etc. You can then conveniently analyze the data from its highly customizable dashboard. It also works fine on both mobile and web app versions.
However, Amplitude is an analytics-only tool without any built-in user engagement feature. That said, you might want to consider Amplitude alternatives, like Userpilot, if you’re looking for an advanced analytics tool that also lets you act on the insights.
How much is Amplitude?
Amplitude has a freemium pricing model with a free plan and 3 paid plans. Although it doesn’t publicly disclose the price of the premium plans, we’ll help you get an idea about the price range.
The Amplitude pricing structure is as follows:
- Starter – Free plan.
- Plus – $49 per month.
- Growth – This paid plan can cost you $995+/monthly, depending on your demands. You can request a demo to get the exact amount and see how it works.
- Enterprise – It starts at $2,000+ per month, and you can contact sales to decide on the scale and price.
What can you do with Amplitude?
Amplitude offers businesses a suite of features to understand user behavior, measure product usage, and optimize user experiences. Its main features include:
- Customer journey visualization: Helps you gain insight into user journeys, analyze customer experiences across multiple touchpoints, and track event sequences.
- Dynamic audience segmentation: Lets you segment customers into groups based on shared characteristics by using user behaviors, profiles, and product data.
- Event segmentation: Enables chart creation and user behavior analysis through specific events and properties with tracking and visualization.
- Retention analysis: Helps you perform retention analysis by comparing starting and return events and user actions.
- User cohorts: Offers valuable insights, saves them for further analysis, and lets you segment by customer attributes.
- Session replay: Get in-depth qualitative insights by viewing session recordings of how your users behave in-app.
- A/b and multivariate testing: Conduct product experiments via a/b and multivariate testing to optimize the end-to-end user experience.
What does Amplitude offer in its free plans?
Let’s go through Amplitude’s free plans.
Amplitude Starter plan
The Starter Plan allows users to collect and analyze up to 50,000 monthly tracked users (MTUs) with unlimited events. It includes core analytics features such as user behavior tracking, cohort analysis, and retention analysis. You also get access to advanced behavioral analysis, collaboration, and storytelling features.
However, the Starter Plan has some limitations compared to Amplitude’s paid plans, such as limited data retention, access to integrations, and support options.
Amplitude for Startups
The Scholarship plan specifically aims to help early-stage startups collect and analyze more than enough data to drive growth. This unique pricing plan gives you free access to Amplitude’s Growth plan’s behavioral cohorts, pathfinder, advanced collaboration features, etc., for one year.
You’ll be eligible for it if you’ve:
- Received less than $5 million in funding
- Fewer than 20 employees
It’s also available to US-based startups with a black co-founder, under $30 million in funding, and fewer than 150 employees.
Compared to alternatives like Pendo, Amplitude offers a compelling value proposition for early-stage startups because it is an event-based plan.
What are the paid plans that Amplitude offers?
So what do you get in Amplitude’s paid plans? Let’s see.
Amplitude Plus plan
The Plus plan is a newly introduced plan by Amplitude and is available for 300,000 monthly tracked users. It includes all features in the Starter plan with the following additions:
- Custom dashboards
- Behavioral cohorts
- Session replays
- Custom audiences
- Unlimited product analytics
Amplitude Growth plan
The Growth plan has a custom pricing option with custom MTUs and unlimited events. It offers the following features:
- Advanced behavioral analytics
- Actionable analytics
- Behavioral cohorts
- Cohort analysis
- Single sign-on (SSO)
- Advanced Collaboration (Notebooks, Team Spaces)
- Integration with Slack, Miro
- Onboarding Support
- Customer Success
Amplitude Enterprise plan
The enterprise plan has custom usage limits and custom pricing. It is the best for large businesses with around a million active users. Besides the Growth plan’s offered features, it provides you with the following:
- Data governance at scale (Derived Properties, Taxonomy API, Transformations)
- Root cause analysis
- Real-time monitoring
- Dedicated customer support manager
- Causal insights & monitoring
- Advanced permissions and password-protected links
What are the pros and cons of using Amplitude?
Here are the major strengths and drawbacks of Amplitude to help you make an informed decision.
Pros:
- Offers a comprehensive analysis of user behavior through its features.
- Provides real-time data to make data-driven decisions quickly and efficiently.
- Can handle and analyze vast volumes of data from a large user base.
Cons:
- Can be expensive for small and medium businesses as well as large businesses with huge tracked events and user bases.
- The wealth of features and customization options can be overwhelming to those who don’t have prior experience with data analytics.
- Its learning curve is also quite steep.
- Not enough support for analyzing quantitative & qualitative data, like user feedback or customer sentiment.
- No engagement features for acting on the insights.
What do users say about Amplitude’s pricing?
Users seem to have a generally positive experience with Amplitude, with a rating of 4.5 on G2. The reviewers appreciate the tool’s robust analytics capabilities and customization and how it helps them make data-driven decisions.
However, Amplitude’s cost is one of the major concerns of the reviewers. It has made it difficult for users with smaller budgets to get started with the platform. According to a senior product manager –
Amplitude had a slightly higher barrier to entry when it comes to implementation and pricing….
Another drawback regarding Amplitude’s pricing is it isn’t transparent about the event budget. It can catch a company off-guard and result in unexpected expenses.
Are there better product analytics tools than Amplitude analytics?
While Amplitude is a popular product analytics tool, you should look for an alternative if you want to:
- Get better value for money by using a more affordable solution.
- Perform product adoption, like user onboarding, interactive product tours, etc., with the same tool that performs product analytics for you.
Here are two Amplitude alternatives you might want to check out.
Userpilot – Amplitude alternative
You will get more than product analytics with Userpilot since it is a product adoption and engagement tool as well. Userpilot is a no-code all-in-one solution that can help you analyze user behavior thoroughly, improve your user experience, increase your activation rate, and retain more customers.
Some of Userpilot’s advanced analytics features include:
- Segment customers based on user/company data, customer feedback, content engagement, and more.
- Monitor product usage data in real time.
- Create custom in-app events, use feature tagging, and analyze heatmaps to track user engagement.
- Conduct funnel analysis to identify drop-offs and friction points in the user journey.
- Perform trend analysis to track how important metrics change over time.
- Carry out path analysis to identify the happy path and replicate it for your other users.
- Conduct cohort retention analysis to track retention rates and trends.
- View important metrics at a glance with custom dashboards.
- Integrate with other analytics tools, like Mixpanel, Amplitude, Heap, etc.
Apart from this Userpilot offers additional features to help you collect valuable insights and act on them accordingly:
- Gather customer feedback through various microsurveys, like NPS, CSAT, and CES surveys.
- Create an in-app resource hub with tools like live chat, video tutorials, knowledge hub, and documentation.
- Build onboarding experiences through checklists and interactive walkthroughs or product tours.
- Create in-app guidance using various UI elements, including modals, tooltips, etc.
Although it’s unavailable for mobile apps, we recommend Userpilot for web applications.
Userpilot pricing vs Amplitude pricing
Userpilot’s transparent pricing ranges from $249/month on the entry-level end to an Enterprise tier for larger companies.
Furthermore, Userpilot’s entry-level plan includes access to all UI patterns and should include everything that most mid-market SaaS businesses need to get started.
Userpilot has three paid plans to choose from:
- Starter: The entry-level Starter plan starts at $249/month and includes features like segmentation, product analytics, reporting, user engagement, NPS feedback, and customization.
- Growth: The Growth plan starts at $749/month and includes features like resource centers, advanced event-based triggers, unlimited feature tagging, AI-powered content localization, EU hosting options, and a dedicated customer success manager.
- Enterprise: The Enterprise plan uses custom pricing and includes all the features from Starter + Growth plus custom roles/permissions, access to premium integrations, priority support, custom contract, SLA, SAML SSO, activity logs, security audit, and compliance (SOC 2/GDPR).
Userpilot reviews
After going through reviews, we can objectively say Userpilot is an excellent product growth tool with a high rating of 4.6. Its active users have appreciated its advanced features, user-friendly interface, and top-notch customer support.
Devin B. has written:
If you’re looking for software for analytics, user engagement, software instrumentation, this is your place.
Another customer said:
UP allows the product management team to implement usability improvements on our own without consuming valuable engineering time. It also provides awesome analytics that we use every day and help us see how our product is being used.
Mixpanel – Amplitude alternative
The next alternative, Mixpanel, is a powerful data warehouse specializing in product analytics. It helps you track user behavior and provides insights into engagement, retention, and conversion rates.
Mixpanel’s feature sets include:
- User segmentation
- Group analytics
- User cohorts
- A/b Testing
- Drop-off analysis
- Interactive reports
Mixpanel pricing vs Amplitude pricing
Mixpanel’s paid plans start from a more affordable pricing range than Amplitude with similar or better feature sets.
Here’s what Mixpanel offers:
Starter
- Free
- Up to 20M events/month
- Unlimited data history
- All core reports (Inisights, Flows, Cohorts, Funnels, and Retention) for user journey analysis. However, you can’t save the cohorts you create in this plan
- Metrics in minutes with templates
- Unlimited collaborators and integrations
- US or EU data residency
- Mixpanel Community support
Growth
- Pricing from $20/month
- Everything in the Starter plan
- Unlimited saved reports to monitor, update & iterate on KPIs
- Unlimited saved cohorts for behavioral analysis
- Mixpanel Modeling Layer
- Email support
- Group analytics and data pipeline add-ons
Enterprise
- Custom pricing
- Granular access with privacy controls
- Data views for team-based collaboration
- Onboard users with automated provisioning & SSO
- Personalized customer success to improve data fluency
- Live chat and faster response SLAs
- Early access to beta features
Mixpanel also offers a free plan for Startups in which they can get the Growth plan free for a year. This is for startups who were founded not less than 5 years ago and have received up to $8 million in funding.
Mixpanel reviews
Mixpanel’s users have rated it with an average of solid 4.6. They pointed out its intuitiveness, flexibility, advanced custom reports, and integrations as some fan-favorite strengths.
But many customers have also pointed out that the upgrade from the Mixpanel Free Plan doesn’t pay off. One reviewer had to say:
… the jump to paid can be steep. For my smaller projects, I’d love an entry-level pricing tier.
Another reviewer also had complaints about the value for money for large apps.
Conclusion
Amplitude is one of the best choices for product analytics tools with its features and capabilities. However, the Amplitude pricing structure is a significant drawback, making it less competitive than alternatives, like Userpilot or Mixpanel.
Want to see Userpilot’s advanced analytics features live? Book a demo call with our team and get started!