Is Amplitude or Matomo cheaper?

Amplitude starts at $0 (Free, 2M events per month forever); Plus starts at $0 with the first 2M events free (free plan available). Matomo starts at Free self-hosted (Community edition), or 29 euros per month for Matomo Cloud at 50,000 hits (free plan available).

Amplitude vs Matomo

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

Both sides assessed

Amplitude compared with Matomo

Matomo is privacy-first web analytics with session recording and heatmaps, self-hostable for free or on EU-hosted cloud from around 29 euros a month, and it answers traffic questions well. Amplitude answers in-product behaviour questions and cannot sensibly be used as a web analytics tool. Buy Matomo for the marketing site and GDPR posture; buy Amplitude for the application. Plenty of companies run both, and that is the correct answer more often than picking one.

Matomo compared with Amplitude

Not really substitutes. Amplitude is event-based product analytics for measuring behaviour inside an application, with feature flags, experiments, and guides on top, hosted only. Matomo is web analytics with behavioural features attached, self-hostable, EU-hosted, and consent-exempt. A European SaaS company frequently runs Matomo on the marketing site and Amplitude inside the product, and that split is usually the right answer rather than a compromise.

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 Matomo if

European small businesses, agencies, public sector bodies, and privacy-conscious companies who want analytics plus heatmaps and session recording under their own ownership and EU hosting, and who would prefer to run without a cookie consent banner rather than to lose a third of their data to one.

Side by side

13 attributes

Attribute	Amplitude	Matomo
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 self-hosted (Community edition), or 29 euros per month for Matomo Cloud at 50,000 hits (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.	Two products. Matomo Cloud is a subscription metered on hits per month with EU hosting. Matomo On-Premise is free open source software with premium features sold as plugins or as bundles priced by user count and hit volume.
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.	Matomo On-Premise Community is free forever with unlimited users and unlimited hits, covering the full web analytics feature set. Heatmaps, session recording, funnels, cohorts, and A/B testing are premium plugins that are not included.
Free trial	No fixed trial; the permanent free plan is the evaluation path, and paid features can be trialled within it	Free Matomo Cloud trial with no credit card required; the self-hosted Community edition needs no trial
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.	European small businesses, agencies, public sector bodies, and privacy-conscious companies who want analytics plus heatmaps and session recording under their own ownership and EU hosting, and who would prefer to run without a cookie consent banner rather than to lose a third of their data to one.
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.	Fifteen minutes on Matomo Cloud: create an account, add the tag, configure privacy settings, and reports appear. Self-hosting is a half day for a straightforward install and considerably longer to configure archiving, retention, and privacy properly on a site with real traffic.
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 reporting is familiar to anyone who has used Google Analytics, but Matomo exposes far more configuration, particularly around privacy, retention, and anonymisation, and getting the consent-exempt configuration right requires reading rather than guessing.
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 via JavaScript tracker or server-side tracking APIs, Matomo Tag Manager, Mobile app SDKs for iOS and Android, Self-hosted on any PHP and MySQL or MariaDB hosting, Managed cloud hosted in Frankfurt, Germany
Compliance	SOC 2 Type II, ISO 27001, GDPR with a published DPA, CCPA, HIPAA available under enterprise arrangements	GDPR, CCPA, CNIL approval for use without tracking consent when correctly configured, HIPAA and other regimes achievable on self-hosted deployments within your own compliance perimeter
Founded	2012	2007
Headquarters	San Francisco, California, United States	Wellington, New Zealand, with a distributed team across New Zealand, Germany, Austria, France, the United States, and India
Ownership	Public company, NASDAQ: AMPL	Independently owned, operated commercially by InnoCraft Ltd, with the core platform released as open source

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.

Matomo

Strengths

One of very few analytics tools approved by France's CNIL for use without tracking consent, which means tracking 100 percent of visitors rather than the fraction who accept a banner.
Genuine data ownership: self-hosted deployments keep everything on your own infrastructure with direct database access, and Matomo states it never accesses, sells, or monetises customer data.
EU cloud hosting in Frankfurt removes the transfer question for European buyers entirely, without requiring them to run servers.
Heatmaps, session recording, funnels, cohorts, form analytics, and A/B testing under the same privacy posture, which is a wider behavioural feature set than any other privacy-first analytics tool offers.

Limitations

The data model is visit and pageview centric rather than event and user centric, which makes product analytics questions about feature adoption inside a logged-in application awkward compared with Mixpanel or Amplitude.
Session recording has no engineering context: no console output, no network inspection, no stack traces, and no application state, so it cannot be used to debug frontend failures.
The behavioural features are premium and are not included in the free Community edition or at the entry cloud price, so the useful configuration costs more than the headline figure.
Self-hosting requires real operational work, including a database, PHP, and cron-driven report archiving that becomes a genuine performance consideration on a busy site.

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.

Matomo

Two products. Matomo Cloud is a subscription metered on hits per month with EU hosting. Matomo On-Premise is free open source software with premium features sold as plugins or as bundles priced by user count and hit volume.

On-Premise CommunityFree
Cloud StarterFrom 29 euros
On-Premise Team bundleFrom 230 euros
On-Premise Business bundleFrom 1,209 euros
On-Premise Enterprise bundleFrom 2,834 euros

Matomo's value is a function of what you are actually buying, which is ownership and consent posture rather than analytical sophistication. At 10,000 monthly users on a normal content or ecommerce site you are likely inside 300,000 to 600,000 hits, which puts Cloud in the tens of euros a month, comfortably cheaper than an equivalent commercial stack and with no consent banner losses. At 100,000 monthly users you are into the millions of hits and paying meaningfully more, at which point self-hosting the free Community edition plus the specific premium plugins you need becomes the cheaper answer if you have server competence. Against Google Analytics 4, which is free, Matomo costs money and returns unsampled data, full ownership, and the ability to track everyone rather than the consenting minority, and for a European business that trade is usually worth it. Against a real product analytics tool, it is not a value question at all, because it is not the same product.

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

Matomo

Matomo is the most complete answer available to the question of how to see visitor behaviour without surrendering the data. Nineteen years of development, more than a million sites, EU hosting in Frankfurt, a free self-hosted edition with unlimited users and hits, and a CNIL approval that lets you track everyone rather than the consenting minority add up to something no other tool in this category offers. Buy it for the marketing site, the ecommerce store, and the compliance posture, and budget honestly for the premium plugins that provide the heatmaps and session recording, because the headline free and 29 euro figures do not include them. Do not buy it as product analytics for a SaaS application, and do not buy the free version unless someone is genuinely willing to run a server.

Read the full Matomo profile

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