FullStory vs Amplitude
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
Quote on request
Quote onlyFree tier available
Free tierWhat drives the bill
The metric that actually scales your invoice.
Quote-based annual contracts priced by session volume. Among the more expensive tools in the category.
Paid plans are quote-based on monthly tracked users and events; enterprise contracts are substantial.
Free tier
Free plan with limited monthly sessions.
Free plan with a monthly event allowance suitable for early-stage products.
Open source
Self-hostable
No-code authoring
Languages
Platforms
Fits teams
Adoption
Widely used
FullStory · since 2014
Category standard
Amplitude · since 2012
Strengths
- Retroactive analysis is a genuine capability difference, not a marketing angle.
- Excellent search: find the eleven sessions where a specific error occurred in checkout.
- Strong privacy controls with element-level exclusion rules.
- The deepest retention and cohort analysis in mainstream product analytics.
- Good free tier for early-stage products.
- Strong data-governance tooling for event taxonomy.
Limitations
- Expensive, with opaque quote-based pricing.
- Capturing everything raises data-governance questions that need answering up front.
- Meaningful learning curve to use the search language well.
- 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.
Best for
Product and support organisations that need to investigate specific user problems in depth.
Product teams that need rigorous behavioural analysis over time.
All of these integrate with: Segment, Slack, Salesforce, Snowflake.
Pricing last reviewed August 2026 and is indicative only — confirm on each vendor’s own page.