Pendo vs Amplitude: Which is the Better Product Analytics Tool?13 min read

If you are debating  Pendo vs Amplitude? Which of them should you choose to generate growth insights for your product? This is a serious dilemma.

In our article, we aim to help you make the decision. We also have a quick look at Userpilot as an alternative for each of the tools.

Pendo vs Amplitude at a glance

To keep it short, the main difference is that Amplitude is a product analytics platform, while Pendo is an full-stack that combines analytics, in-app engagement, and roadmap planning under one roof

Pendo for product analytics

Pendo is an established product adoption platform for enterprise clients.

It’s best known for its in-depth analytics features, but it also allows you to collect user feedback and offers a range of in-app onboarding features, which you can use for both web and mobile products.

Pendo analytics features

The tool supports a whole host of analytics features:

• Paths – for mapping out every possible sequence of events leading up to or following a user action
• Reports – including page views, feature clicks, track events, guide views
• NPS tracking and analytics (not available in the free plan)
• Product Engagement Score (PES) tracking and analysis

Let’s have a more detailed look at these four:

• User segmentation
• User retention analysis
• Funnels
• User feedback module

Pendo segmentation

Pendo segmentation functionality allows you to group your users by all imaginable criteria:

• product usage and user behavior data, like tagged feature clicks, tagged page views, guide views, poll responses, and resource center views
• visitor and account data, including demographic and systems data
• mobile-specific data, like app or OS version

You can use it to target specific segments with Pendo Guides (in-app messages).

For example, you could trigger them for users who have completed a certain event without using a specific feature that’s relevant to their use case.

Pendo retention analysis

Retention analysis allows teams to find out if users stay with the product and keep using it repeatedly over time. This is an indication of how valuable they find the product.

Pendo allows you to collect retention data and present it in a very accessible way. You can filter the data by activity type, apps, cohort type and size, segment, and date range.

The chart is interactive and when you click on each of the squares, you get detailed data about visitors, both retained and dropped.

This means you can:

• Target each of them with specific in-app guidance
• Reach out with emails to re-engage the churned users
• Trigger surveys to understand their behavior patterns better

Pendo funnels

A user funnel is a sequence of actions completed by a user in-app leading up to a specific objective.

For example, this could be 1) logging in 2) inviting a teammate, and 3) sending them a message.

Using a user funnel in your SaaS helps you identify friction points and make data-driven decisions to boost conversions.

In Pendo, you can customize funnels by:

• funnel steps
• date range
• segments
• time out period

Once you complete this, you can retrieve the funnel from the reports. It looks like this.

Each column stands for one step in the funnel. The darker bars mean users have advanced to the next step, while the paler ones are those that have dropped.

Just like the retention chart, the funnel is interactive.

Pendo feedback module

Pendo offers two ways of collecting user feedback: Pendo Polls and Pendo Feedback.

The latter is a standalone feature that requires a separate subscription. It is used primarily for collecting and analyzing customer requests and qualitative feedback in-app at scale.

However, you cannot use it to run NPS or CSAT surveys, for which Pendo has a separate module. Alternatively, you can collect user sentiment data via the Polls.

Pendo Feedback’s key features include:

• active and passive feedback and customer request collection
• responses tagging
• customer engagement analysis
• planned and released feature tracking
• road-mapping

Pros and cons of Pendo

What are Pendo’s greatest strengths and weaknesses when it comes to product analytics?

Pros of Pendo

• Works on mobile apps as well as web apps
• In-depth analytics that is easy to set up and use
• Proprietary Product Engagement Score (PES)

Cons of Pendo

• 1-hour delay in user behavior data recording, meaning you can’t trigger in-app guides in response to specific events
• The high price tag for access to more advanced plans and the need for a separate subscription for Pendo Feedback

Pendo pricing

Pendo offers a free plan but its usefulness is very limited. To access the more advanced analytics features, like NPS and PES, you need the higher plans and for Pendo Feedback a separate subscription.

• Free
• Starter: $7000/year
• Growth: price available only on request
• Portfolio: price available only on request
• Pendo Feedback: separate module with custom pricing

Pendo also offers a free 14-day trial as well as a demo.

Amplitude for product analytics

Amplitude is one of the most sophisticated analytics around at the moment.

As a dedicated analytics tool, it offers a wide range of features that SaaS product teams can deploy to identify areas to add value to their digital products and make data-driven decisions. Amplitude Analytics can be used on both mobile and web apps.

Amplitude analytics features

Amplitude analytics functionality includes:

• Milestone analysis
• Retention analysis
• Custom dashboards
• Predictions
• User segmentation
• Pathfinder
• Funnel analysis

We’ll be focusing on the main features in detail below.

Amplitude event segmentation

Just like Pendo, Amplitude allows you to group your users into segments using a whole host of criteria.

Event segmentation is one of the key Amplitude charts because that is where you can see what your users are doing inside the product. The segmentation chart allows you to:

• identify and evaluate the key events performed by a user segment over a specific period of time
• determine the total number of (unique) users completing events inside the product
• determine the frequency of event occurrence
• identify users who fire specific events on a regular basis

Amplitude pathfinder

Pathfinder enables visualization and analysis of all the actions that users complete while interacting with the product.

Most importantly, pathfinder helps you identify the sequences of events, called paths, that users fire over a specified period of time. This includes outgoing and incoming paths up to 50 steps deep.

What’s the use of Pathfinder? It allows you to:

• uncover the most common event paths leading up to conversion/activation
• determine the happy path to conversion/activation
• build funnel charts

Amplitude funnel analysis

Once you’ve identified the happy path to conversion or activation with Pathfinder, you can now use funnel analysis to analyze and assess how users navigate it.

Thanks to conversion drivers, Amplitude provides insights into user behavior leading up to conversion or drop-off. This allows you to identify obstacles and friction points. As a result, you can:

• reduce churn and improve retention
• improve user onboarding experiences
• turn your users into your product advocates
• drive freemium and trial conversion to paid plans

Pros and cons of Amplitude Analytics

What are the biggest advantages and limitations of Amplitude analytics?

Pros of Amplitude Analytics

• Real-time analytics
• Cross-platform analytics that allows you to track as your users move between your native apps, mobile apps, and webpages
• Wide range of reports and analyses
• Ability to integrate data from various sources, for example, marketing automation systems or CRM systems

Cons of Amplitude Analytics

• No user engagement features
• It’s an analytics-only tool, so you need additional software to act on the insights to drive growth
• High level of customization which makes set-up difficult

Amplitude pricing

Just like Pendo, Amplitude offers a free trial. However, this one is way more generous than Pendo’s. How much do the other plans cost? Unfortunately, this is available only on request.

Starter: free

Growth: price available only on request

Enterprise: price available only on request

Introducing Userpilot: A better alternative to Pendo and Amplitude for product analytics

If you’re a mid-market or enterprise SaaS company with a product team, Userpilot might be just the digital adoption platform you need.

Let’s run through some of Userpilot’s key features and see how they compare.

• Onboarding engagement analytics: You can easily assess the impact of your onboarding flows, guidance, etc. by analyzing the engagement rate of tooltips, interactive walkthroughs, checklists, etc.

Userpilot product analytics features

Here are Userpilot’s top product analytics features:

• Autocapture: Userpilot automatically records everything your users do, like clicks and form inputs, so you don’t need to tag events or involve developers.

• Session replays: Userpilot’s Session Replays let you watch real-time recordings of how users interact with your product, so you can see exactly what they experience. It’s a simple way to uncover friction points, understand user behavior, and improve your product’s usability.

• Trends and funnels: Userpilot’s trends and funnels report lets you extract actionable insights from big data. You’ll be able to see which stage of an onboarding/conversion funnel most users drop out on and create trend reports with detailed breakdowns by user or period.

• Retention tables: This lets you gauge product performance to see how effective your product is at retaining users using cohort tables and retention curves.

• Paths: You can generate and access path reports directly within the reporting builder in Userpilot, alongside funnels, trends, and retention reports. With Userpilot Paths, you can have an overview of how users navigate your product features – offering invaluable insights into their interactions with your products.

• Analytics dashboards: These dashboards enable you to keep track of your key product performance and user behavior metrics at a glance, without any technical setup required. You can also create your own customized dashboards.

Userpilot’s ease of use

You can get Userpilot set up and running in minutes with its Chrome extension and a copy/paste of one line of JavaScript code into your app.

Beyond the single line at installation, there is no coding necessary to access, implement, or test all the tools, features, and resources Userpilot offers.

Check out this article to see how easy it is to get Userpilot up and running.

Userpilot’s 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 $799/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 vs Walkme

Here’s a sum up of how Userpilot stacks against Walkme:

Userpilot vs Pendo

Here’s a sum-up of how Userpilot stacks against Pendo:

Conclusion

Unfortunately, it’s not possible to give a definitive recommendation for which tool is “best” overall. Pendo tends to beat WalkMe for most SaaS use cases, and Userpilot is a fantastic option for SaaS startups and SMEs that promise greater value for money.

Does flexible, code-free onboarding software sound like a good fit for your company? If so, check out a Userpilot demo and get started today!

Conclusion

Who wins the Pendo vs. Amplitude contest? Both of them are robust analytics tools. While Amplitude has more advanced and highly customizable features, Pendo allows you to trigger in-app experiences to drive engagement.

Despite free plans, both products work out to be quite expensive if you want to use the more advanced features, so it might be a good idea to consider alternatives like Userpilot.

If you want to see how Userpilot can help you make data-driven decisions to improve your product, book the demo!