Amplitude
Product analytics that goes deeper than Mixpanel on cohort and behavioral analysis
What it does
Amplitude is a product analytics platform. Like Mixpanel, it tracks user behavior inside a product through events, cohorts, funnels, retention, and pathing. Amplitude leans more into governance (event taxonomy, data quality, self-serve for large teams) and experimentation (A/B testing built in on paid tiers). Common comparison: Mixpanel is the individual analyst's tool, Amplitude is the enterprise product-org tool.
Free tier
Yes
Starts at
$61/mo
Setup
medium
Key features
Integrates with
Segment, Salesforce, Iterable, Slack, Snowflake
Who this fits
- Product-led B2B SaaS teams with a real product analytics discipline
- Consumer apps and mobile apps at scale needing cohort and retention analysis
- Growth teams running experiments (Amplitude has native A/B testing in the same event data)
- Enterprises needing SSO, data governance, HIPAA options, and role-based access
- Product managers who want to answer "which users adopt feature X and how does that predict retention"
Who it does NOT fit
- Marketing-first teams (Amplitude will feel like the wrong shape; use GA4 or a marketing analytics platform)
- Solo founders and pre-PMF teams (product analytics is wasted before you have signup volume)
- Local service businesses (this is a product tool, not a website tool)
- Teams without an analytics engineer or PM who owns the event taxonomy
Pricing
Real gotchas
- Amplitude's free tier includes 50K MTUs but caps saved dashboards, cohorts, and lookback windows. Once you hit those caps, upgrade is the only option [source: amplitude.com/pricing].
- Session Replay is an add-on line item on Plus, priced separately per session. Adding replay to a large user base gets expensive fast.
- The MTU model means a bot storm or an accidental identify() call on every anonymous visitor spikes your bill. Filter at the SDK.
- Amplitude Analytics and Amplitude Experiment are separate products under the same umbrella. Buying one does not include the other.
- Historical data cannot be reprocessed if event schema changes. Rename an event, break the historical funnel.
Integrations that matter
Otto’s take on this tool
Recommend Amplitude for growing product teams (10+ people, real product analytics discipline, likely to hit enterprise tier eventually). Recommend Mixpanel for smaller product teams or teams that prioritize UI simplicity. Recommend Heap for teams that want autocapture and do not want to instrument events manually. Do NOT recommend for websites, local businesses, agencies, or trades; those are wrong-shape use cases.
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