Is Amplitude or Heap cheaper?

Amplitude starts at $0 (Free, 2M events per month forever); Plus starts at $0 with the first 2M events free (free plan available). Heap starts at Free up to 10,000 monthly sessions; the Growth tier is commonly reported at around $3,600 per year (free plan available).

Amplitude vs Heap

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 assessment

Heap compared with Amplitude

Amplitude is the deeper analytics engine with a broader self-serve platform (experiments, feature flags, guides, CDP) and published pricing you can evaluate without a sales call. Heap's edge is the collection model: Amplitude still expects a tracking plan, and an event you never defined is an event you cannot analyze. Small teams without dedicated data engineering usually get to a first answer faster on Heap; teams with an analytics function that will maintain a taxonomy typically prefer Amplitude's depth and transparency.

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 Heap if

Product and growth teams at small to mid-sized software companies who want analytics that answer questions retroactively without a tracking-plan project, and who value not having to negotiate engineering time for every new metric.

Side by side

13 attributes

Attribute	Amplitude	Heap
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 up to 10,000 monthly sessions; the Growth tier is commonly reported at around $3,600 per year (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.	Session-based subscription, billed on monthly sessions rather than seats or events. Four tiers: Free, Growth, Pro, and Premier. Only the free plan has a published limit; Growth gives a self-serve estimate after you install the snippet, and Pro and Premier are quoted by sales against your session volume on an annual commitment. Session replay, additional projects, and extra years of data retention are separately priced add-ons.
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.	Up to 10,000 monthly sessions, 6 months of data history, core charts, unlimited enrichment sources, and SSO, with no technical support
Free trial	No fixed trial; the permanent free plan is the evaluation path, and paid features can be trialled within it	Free plan rather than a time-limited trial; paid-tier trials arranged through sales
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.	Product and growth teams at small to mid-sized software companies who want analytics that answer questions retroactively without a tracking-plan project, and who value not having to negotiate engineering time for every new metric.
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.	Under an hour to install the snippet or mobile SDK and begin capturing. The real work starts afterwards: defining the virtual events that matter, wiring identify calls, and connecting enrichment sources typically takes a week or two of part-time effort before dashboards are trustworthy.
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.	Low to start, moderate to do well. Building a chart is easy; writing virtual event definitions that stay correct through front-end changes is a skill, and so is resisting the urge to define an event for every interaction now that doing so is free.
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	Web (JavaScript snippet), iOS and Android SDKs, React Native, Google Tag Manager, Server-side libraries
Compliance	SOC 2 Type II, ISO 27001, GDPR with a published DPA, CCPA, HIPAA available under enterprise arrangements	GDPR, CCPA, SOC 2 Type II, HIPAA (with BAA on qualifying plans), ISO 27001
Founded	2012	2013
Headquarters	San Francisco, California, United States	San Francisco, California, United States
Ownership	Public company, NASDAQ: AMPL	Acquired by Contentsquare; deal announced September 2023 and completed December 2023

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.

Heap

Strengths

Autocapture removes the single biggest failure mode in product analytics, which is discovering that the event you need was never instrumented.
Retroactive event definition means a new metric has months of history on the day it is created, rather than starting a clock.
Non-technical users can define events visually on the live site, so analytics work does not queue behind engineering.
Illuminate genuinely surfaces findings nobody queried for, which is rare in a category where most tools only answer what you already thought to ask.

Limitations

Autocapture produces a very large and noisy raw surface; without ongoing governance the event list becomes unusable and teams end up doing the taxonomy work they hoped to avoid.
Virtual events defined against CSS selectors break silently when the front end is refactored, and a definition that is too loose quietly overcounts across all historical data at once.
Paid pricing is opaque: Growth requires installing the snippet before you see a number, and Pro and Premier are sales-quoted with no published anchor.
Data retention caps at twelve months on standard tiers, so year-over-year comparison requires paying for extra retention or exporting to a warehouse.

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.

Heap

Session-based subscription, billed on monthly sessions rather than seats or events. Four tiers: Free, Growth, Pro, and Premier. Only the free plan has a published limit; Growth gives a self-serve estimate after you install the snippet, and Pro and Premier are quoted by sales against your session volume on an annual commitment. Session replay, additional projects, and extra years of data retention are separately priced add-ons.

Free$0
GrowthQuoted after snippet install (commonly around $3,600 per year)
ProCustom session pricing
PremierCustom session pricing

The free plan is one of the better deals in product analytics: 10,000 monthly sessions with full autocapture, SSO, and six months of history is enough to run a real early-stage product. The step above it is where the value question gets harder. Growth at roughly $3,600 a year is competitive with Mixpanel and Amplitude for a small team, but Heap's opacity means you cannot compare on a spreadsheet without contacting sales, and the features a growing B2B team most wants (account analytics, the engagement matrix, warehouse sync) sit on quote-only tiers with add-ons stacked on top. Judged purely on capability per dollar the product is strong; judged on procurement friction for a five-person company, it is the least small-business-friendly part of an otherwise small-business-friendly tool.

Editorial verdict on each

Amplitude

Category Leader

Amplitude 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 profile

Heap

Heap made a genuinely good bet: that the expensive part of product analytics is not the charts but the instrumentation decisions you have to make before you know what you need. Autocapture plus retroactive event definition solves that better than anything else in the category, and Illuminate turns the resulting data mass into findings rather than just storage. For a small product team without analytics engineering, the free plan at 10,000 monthly sessions is one of the strongest starting offers available. The reservations are commercial and structural. Paid pricing is quote-only above a Growth tier that will not even show you a number until the snippet is installed, session replay and retention are add-ons that inflate the real cost, and the twelve-month history ceiling undercuts the very promise of retroactive analysis. Add the Contentsquare acquisition folding Heap into a larger platform and the long-term shape of the standalone product is uncertain. Start free and stay there as long as the volume allows; before upgrading, get a written quote that includes replay and retention, and compare it honestly against PostHog and Mixpanel, both of which will tell you their price without a phone call.

Read the full Heap profile

Amplitude profile last reviewed 2026-08-22; Heap last reviewed 2026-08-23. Pricing is compiled from public sources and can change without notice. See our methodology.