Amplitude vs Heap
Feature checklists rarely decide anything. What decides it is the pricing metric, who has to write the tests, and which limitation you can live with.
Entry price
Free tier available
Free tierFree tier available
Free tierWhat drives the bill
The metric that actually scales your invoice.
Paid plans are quote-based on monthly tracked users and events; enterprise contracts are substantial.
Paid tiers are quote-based by session volume.
Free tier
Free plan with a monthly event allowance suitable for early-stage products.
Free plan with a monthly session limit.
Open source
Self-hostable
No-code authoring
Languages
Platforms
Fits teams
Adoption
Category standard
Amplitude · since 2012
Widely used
Contentsquare · since 2013
Strengths
- The deepest retention and cohort analysis in mainstream product analytics.
- Good free tier for early-stage products.
- Strong data-governance tooling for event taxonomy.
- Retroactive event definition eliminates 'we didn't track that' entirely.
- Very fast time to first insight — no instrumentation project required.
- Warehouse sync for teams that want the raw data.
Limitations
- Requires deliberate event instrumentation — nothing works without it.
- Enterprise pricing rises steeply with tracked users.
- Replay and experimentation are newer and less mature than the analytics core.
- Autocaptured data needs governance or the event list becomes unusable noise.
- Session-based pricing on high-traffic products.
- Acquisition means overlap with Contentsquare's own products.
Best for
Product teams that need rigorous behavioural analysis over time.
Product teams that want analytics without an instrumentation backlog.
All of these integrate with: Segment, Snowflake, Salesforce, Slack.
Pricing last reviewed August 2026 and is indicative only — confirm on each vendor’s own page.