Amplitude vs Matomo
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 tierFrom $29 per month (Cloud, 50k hits; annual billing gives 2 months free)
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.
Self-hosting is free but plugins such as heatmaps and A/B testing are paid add-ons. Cloud scales with hits.
Free tier
Free plan with a monthly event allowance suitable for early-stage products.
Self-hosted Community edition is free forever with unlimited users and hits; premium plugins are paid.
Open source
GPL-3.0
Self-hostable
No-code authoring
Languages
Platforms
Fits teams
Adoption
Category standard
Amplitude · since 2012
Widely used
InnoCraft · since 2007
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.
- Complete data ownership with no third-party processing — the strongest GDPR position available.
- No sampling, unlike free tiers of hosted analytics.
- Can be configured to run without cookies or consent banners.
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.
- Self-hosting requires PHP and MySQL operations, including performance tuning at scale.
- The interface is less refined than modern product analytics tools.
- Advanced features are paid plugins even on the free self-hosted edition.
Best for
Product teams that need rigorous behavioural analysis over time.
Public sector, healthcare and European organisations with strict data-residency requirements.
Pricing last reviewed August 2026 and is indicative only — confirm on each vendor’s own page.