No. 15 of 30 ยท Product and event analytics
Amplitude
The deepest behavioural analysis on the list, with two million events a month for nothing.
Every plan, including the free one, carries unlimited seats and the full platform rather than a cut-down version.
The verdict
Amplitude is the most analytically ambitious tool here. Behavioural cohorts, pathfinder analysis, compass and correlation reports go after a harder question than funnels do: not what happened, but which early behaviour predicts whether somebody sticks around. For a product team with real scale and a real hypothesis, there is nothing on this list that answers that better.
The free tier is the most generous in the product analytics category at 2 million events a month, and unlike most freemium tools it gives you the whole platform, with session replay, experimentation, guides and surveys included rather than held back. Unlimited seats on every plan, including free.
What you actually get
The cost is complexity, and it is the highest here. Amplitude rewards a well-designed taxonomy and a person who knows what a behavioural cohort is, and it punishes teams who install it hoping the tool will supply the hypothesis. Setup scores a 4 for that reason: it is not that the SDK is hard, it is that a useful Amplitude implementation is a job with an owner.
Everything true of Mixpanel on privacy is true here. Cookies by default, a US vendor with EU residency as an option, and a design intent that is precisely to follow identified users across sessions over long periods. On a marketing site it is the wrong instrument, heavy and over-specified. Against Mixpanel the split is clean: Amplitude has the better free allowance and the deeper analysis, Mixpanel has the clearer everyday reports. A team that will genuinely use cohort and pathfinder analysis should take Amplitude. A team that mostly wants funnels everybody can read should take Mixpanel.
Best for
Product teams at enough scale to have real behavioural questions, with someone whose job includes answering them, who will use cohort and path analysis rather than admire it.
Getting it running
SDK plus a designed event taxonomy, and realistically an owner who understands the analytical model. The most demanding setup on this list after Adobe.
What to watch out for
The learning curve is the steepest here and half-configured implementations are common and useless. Cookies and a consent obligation in the EU and UK. Event-based pricing above the free tier needs modelling. Heavy script, wrong for content sites.
Pricing and practicalities
Free: 2M events a month forever, 10K monthly session replays, unlimited seats, full platform. Plus starts at $0 with the first 2M events free, scaling to 70M events, adding heatmaps and two-year retention. Growth and Enterprise are quoted. Prices read 2026-09-11.
Who should go elsewhere
Anyone running a website rather than a product, where Absolutely Analytics answers the real questions without a consent banner or a taxonomy project. Also not for small teams without an analytics owner, who will get more from PostHog's broader, blunter toolkit.
How it compares
The decisive comparison is Mixpanel, which is the same category of tool with a different balance of depth against legibility. Against PostHog it is deeper on analysis and narrower on everything else.
Head to head:
The ten measures
Each measure is scored 0 to 10 and weighted. The overall figure is the weighted mean, and it is relative to the other 29 tools on this list rather than absolute. How this works.
What this rests on
Amplitude's own pricing page, read 2026-09-11, including the free allowance, unlimited seats and the Plus ceiling; its public documentation on behavioural cohorts, pathfinder and EU residency.
Desk research against published pricing and documentation. The complexity judgement reflects the documented analytical model and public training material rather than a measured onboarding test.
This is a desk review. I have not been given access by the vendor, I have no commercial relationship with them, and everything above is my opinion rather than a statement of fact. If something here is wrong, tell me and I will correct it.