Amplitude vs Countly
An independent, review-free comparison compiled by the SaaSTracker editorial team. Both products are profiled in full, and neither can pay for placement here.
The short answer
Editorial assessmentCountly compared with Amplitude
Amplitude is the enterprise standard for behavioral analysis, with stronger cohort and predictive tooling and a much larger integration surface. Countly competes on deployment model rather than analytical depth: Amplitude is cloud-only, Countly can run entirely inside your network. Teams that need sophisticated analysis and can accept a US-hosted vendor pick Amplitude; teams whose blocker is where the data lives pick Countly and accept a less refined analysis layer.
Choose Amplitude if
Product-led software companies who want analytics, session replay, feature flags, experiments, and in-app guides from one vendor on an event meter rather than per seat, and who expect to stay under 70 million events a month where the self-serve Plus plan applies and no sales call is required.
Choose Countly if
Mobile and multi-platform product teams with a data residency, regulatory, or sovereignty constraint that rules out sending raw events to a US cloud, and teams that want analytics, push, surveys, and A/B testing from one server instead of four vendors.
Side by side
13 attributes| Attribute | Amplitude | Countly |
|---|---|---|
| Category | Product Analytics | Product Analytics |
| Starting price | $0 (Free, 2M events per month forever); Plus starts at $0 with the first 2M events free (free plan available) | Free if self-hosted (Lite); managed Flex starts at $175 per month (free plan available) |
| Pricing model | Usage-based on events ingested per month across four plans. Free and Plus are self-serve with published limits, Growth and Enterprise are quoted, and add-ons on the upper tiers are priced as a percentage of the platform plan. | Three editions. Countly Lite is free and open source under AGPLv3, self-hosted, and limited to the aggregate analytics layer. Countly Flex is a managed private cloud priced by monthly active users and data points, with a base Advanced Analytics plan and two paid capability bundles (Adaptivity and Intelligence) added on top. Countly Enterprise is a self-hosted commercial license with all capabilities included, priced by quote and billed annually. |
| Free plan | 2 million events per month forever with no credit card, including 10,000 monthly session replays and 500 active AI visibility prompts. Behavioural cohorts are not included on the free tier. | Countly Lite is free forever but self-hosted, and excludes drill, funnels, cohorts, and user profiles. The free tier that previously existed on the hosted Flex plan was removed in 2026. |
| Free trial | No fixed trial; the permanent free plan is the evaluation path, and paid features can be trialled within it | 14 days on Flex (credit card required); demo environment for Enterprise |
| Best for | Product-led software companies who want analytics, session replay, feature flags, experiments, and in-app guides from one vendor on an event meter rather than per seat, and who expect to stay under 70 million events a month where the self-serve Plus plan applies and no sales call is required. | Mobile and multi-platform product teams with a data residency, regulatory, or sovereignty constraint that rules out sending raw events to a US cloud, and teams that want analytics, push, surveys, and A/B testing from one server instead of four vendors. |
| Setup time | A working chart in under an hour with autocapture or a CDP connection. A properly instrumented, governed implementation across web and mobile is a two to four week project, longer than Mixpanel because there is more platform to configure and because tracking plans are worth doing properly from the start. | A Flex instance and a first SDK integration can be live in a day. Self-hosting Lite or Enterprise is a genuine infrastructure project: provisioning, MongoDB, TLS, backups, and upgrade planning, typically a few days for someone who has done it before and longer for someone who has not. The instrumentation work, deciding which events to fire and what properties to attach, is the part that takes weeks regardless of edition. |
| Learning curve | Moderate. Chart building is approachable, but the platform rewards understanding behavioural cohorts, tracking plans, and how experiments read metrics, and none of that is obvious on day one. Expect a designated owner rather than assuming everyone will self-serve. | Moderate. The aggregate dashboards are readable immediately. The harder skill is event design, because Countly rewards a small number of well-segmented events and punishes a sprawl of one-off event names; Data Manager exists precisely because most teams get this wrong first. Operators of self-hosted deployments need MongoDB familiarity as an ongoing requirement, not a one-time one. |
| Platforms | Web (browser SDK with optional autocapture and a standalone replay SDK), iOS and Android native SDKs, React Native and Flutter, Server-side SDKs across major languages, HTTP ingestion API, Warehouse import and export | iOS, macOS, watchOS, tvOS, Android, Web (JavaScript SDK), React Native, Flutter, Cordova, Ionic, Unity and Unreal, Desktop (Windows, macOS, Linux), Node.js, Java, .NET, Python, PHP, IoT and connected devices |
| Compliance | SOC 2 Type II, ISO 27001, GDPR with a published DPA, CCPA, HIPAA available under enterprise arrangements | GDPR, CCPA, HIPAA-capable when self-hosted, COPPA, ISO 27001 |
| Founded | 2012 | 2013 |
| Headquarters | San Francisco, California, United States | London, United Kingdom |
| Ownership | Public company, NASDAQ: AMPL | Independent, bootstrapped (Countly Ltd, registered in England and Wales) |
Strengths and limitations
Amplitude
Strengths
- The broadest self-serve platform in the category: analytics, session replay, feature flags, experiments, guides, surveys, and a CDP layer under one event meter.
- A permanent free plan of 2 million events a month including 10,000 session replays, and a self-serve Plus tier that stretches to 70 million events before any sales involvement.
- Behavioural cohorts are a first-class shared object rather than a per-report filter, so one definition drives charts, experiments, guides, and outbound audiences.
- Feature flags are included from the Plus tier rather than gated behind enterprise, which is unusually generous packaging.
Limitations
- Above 70 million events a month, pricing goes dark. Growth and Enterprise are quoted, and add-ons priced as a percentage of the platform plan make the cost curve steeper than it looks.
- Behavioural cohorts are excluded from the free plan and capped at 20 on Plus, which is a meaningful limit given that cohorts are the mechanism everything else depends on.
- The platform is large and there is more configuration surface than a small team needs; the tool is genuinely harder to learn than Mixpanel for a non-technical user.
- Hosted only. There is no open source edition and no self-hosted deployment, so teams with a hard requirement to keep behavioural data inside their own infrastructure are out.
Countly
Strengths
- Genuine self-hosting, including a free open source edition, which very few product analytics tools still offer credibly.
- Analytics and engagement in one system: a cohort defined from behavior is immediately addressable by push, in-app message, survey, or journey.
- Breadth across mobile, web, desktop, and IoT from one server, with mature first-party SDKs on all of them.
- Crash reporting with symbolication built in, so app stability and product behavior share a single app version and device breakdown.
Limitations
- The hosted free tier was removed in 2026, so the cheapest managed entry point is now $175 per month, which puts Countly out of reach for many small teams that would have trialled it.
- Lite lacks the granular data store, so funnels, cohorts, drill, flows, and user profiles are simply absent from the free edition. This is the single most misunderstood thing about Countly.
- On Flex, funnels and cohorts sit in the paid Intelligence bundle rather than the base plan, so the real cost of a comparable analytics setup is above the advertised entry price.
- Self-hosting means operating MongoDB. Reviewers repeatedly report friction with the Docker image, memory pressure, and incompatibility with some managed MongoDB providers, and the minimum viable server is larger than teams expect once push notifications are enabled.
Pricing compared
Amplitude
Usage-based on events ingested per month across four plans. Free and Plus are self-serve with published limits, Growth and Enterprise are quoted, and add-ons on the upper tiers are priced as a percentage of the platform plan.
- Free$0
- PlusStarts at $0, scaling with volume
- GrowthQuoted
- EnterpriseQuoted
Amplitude's value depends almost entirely on whether you use the platform or only the charts. At 10,000 monthly users generating perhaps 300,000 events, the free plan covers you with replays included, which makes Amplitude one of the cheapest ways to run real product analytics at small scale. At 100,000 monthly users on disciplined instrumentation, roughly 3 million events, you are on Plus and paying tens of dollars a month rather than hundreds, which is aggressive pricing for what you get. If you also retire a feature-flag subscription, an onboarding tool, and a survey widget, the effective value is very strong. If you use Amplitude purely as a charting tool, you are paying platform complexity for chart value, and Mixpanel or PostHog will feel lighter. The risk sits above 70 million events, where published pricing disappears and you are negotiating with a public company that has enterprise revenue targets.
Countly
Three editions. Countly Lite is free and open source under AGPLv3, self-hosted, and limited to the aggregate analytics layer. Countly Flex is a managed private cloud priced by monthly active users and data points, with a base Advanced Analytics plan and two paid capability bundles (Adaptivity and Intelligence) added on top. Countly Enterprise is a self-hosted commercial license with all capabilities included, priced by quote and billed annually.
- Lite$0
- FlexFrom $175
- EnterpriseCustom quote
Countly's value depends almost entirely on which edition you are talking about. Self-hosted Lite is one of the few genuinely capable free analytics servers, and for a team with infrastructure skills it delivers sessions, events, crashes, and push for the price of a VM. Managed Flex is not cheap at $175 per month for a base plan that excludes funnels and cohorts, and against Mixpanel's or PostHog's free and low tiers it loses on price outright. What you are actually buying at that price is isolation: your own instance, your choice of region, and no shared multi-tenant store. If data residency is a requirement rather than a preference, that premium is the whole point and it is reasonable. If it is not, the hosted incumbents give more analytics per dollar.
Editorial verdict on each
Amplitude
Category LeaderAmplitude is the most platform you can buy in this category without a sales call, and for a product-led company that would otherwise be paying for analytics, feature flags, an onboarding tool, and a survey widget separately, that consolidation is the whole argument. The free tier is real, Plus stretches to 70 million events self-serve, and feature flags being included at that level is genuinely generous packaging. Buy it if you will use the platform, not just the charts, and if you have someone willing to own tracking plans and cohort definitions. Look elsewhere if you want the lightest possible tool (Mixpanel), if you want to self-host (PostHog or Matomo), or if you can foresee crossing 70 million events, because that is where published pricing ends and enterprise negotiation begins.
Read the full Amplitude profileCountly
Countly is the answer to a specific question: what do you use when the behavioral data cannot leave your control? On that question it is one of a very small number of credible options, and it goes further than its self-hosted peers by putting push notifications, in-app content, surveys, A/B testing, and crash reporting on the same server as the analytics, so a cohort you define is a cohort you can message. Thirteen years of independent, bootstrapped development shows in the breadth of the SDKs and the seriousness of the governance tooling. The problem is the middle of the market. The 2026 removal of the Flex free tier and a $175 per month entry price that still excludes funnels and cohorts means a small business without a data residency requirement will get more analytics for less money from Mixpanel, PostHog, or Amplitude, and a small business with no operations capability should not casually take on self-hosted MongoDB. Buy Countly when regulation, sovereignty, or vendor consolidation on mobile is the actual constraint. If it is not, buy something cheaper.
Read the full Countly profileAmplitude profile last reviewed 2026-08-22; Countly last reviewed 2026-08-23. Pricing is compiled from public sources and can change without notice. See our methodology.