Amplitude

Amplitude is a product analytics platform. Instead of counting page views, it tracks the events users perform inside a product - signing up, creating a project, inviting a teammate, upgrading - and lets teams analyse those events as funnels, retention curves, user paths and cohorts to understand what drives people to stay or leave. It is one of the two names that defined the event-based analytics category, alongside Mixpanel, and it has grown up with larger customers. Beyond core analytics it now offers experimentation for A/B tests, feature flags, session replay, a customer data platform for routing events to other tools, and AI features for asking questions of your data in plain language. The pitch is a single digital analytics platform rather than a collection of point tools. The strengths are analytical depth and governance. Behavioural cohorts, multi-step funnels with conversion windows, retention by any property, and the ability to define a taxonomy of events and enforce it across teams are what mature product organisations need. The free tier is generous enough for early startups to start properly instrumented. The costs are complexity and implementation work. Event analytics is only as good as the tracking plan behind it: deciding what to track, naming it consistently and instrumenting it correctly takes real effort, and a messy implementation produces charts nobody trusts. Pricing at scale is based on tracked users or events and can become significant for high-volume consumer products. The main alternatives are Mixpanel, which is similar in scope and often preferred for ease of use; PostHog, which is open source and bundles analytics with replay, flags and experiments for engineering-led teams; Heap, which auto-captures events retroactively; and Google Analytics 4, which is free but built around marketing rather than product questions. Choose Amplitude when product analytics is central to how you make decisions and you are willing to invest in a clean tracking plan.