Alternatives to Amplitude

What changes when you move off Amplitude

Amplitude sells one hosted platform, and the pricing page puts product analytics, web analytics, session replay, experiments, guides and surveys on every plan with unlimited seats. Leaving unbundles several jobs at once: the first table covers the event side, the second covers traffic, and replay, experiments and surveys are separate products again. Check which of those you opened last month, before the columns above decide anything.

The counting model goes with it. Events are the unit on the bill and in the reports, and autocapture in Browser SDK 2 turns page views, sessions, form starts, file downloads and campaign attribution into events by default. A tool billed by pageviews counts something narrower, so the same traffic lands elsewhere on the ladder. Retention differs by plan too: Free keeps one year of data and Plus two, and session replays are kept one month on every plan.

What to check before you switch

1. What you can take out. The Export API returns a zipped archive of JSON files, one event per line, authorised with the API key and secret key. One request covers at most 365 days, and EU projects call the EU host.
2. Where the organization sits. The EU data center is chosen at signup and offered on every plan, and the browser SDK then sends events with its server zone set to EU.
3. What happens at the limit. A Free account that passes its monthly event allowance three times is blocked from charts and dashboards, and an account that stays over the limit is deleted six months after the first block. Plus bills the extra usage.
4. Which identity you lose. Cookies keep a device ID, session data and campaign details for 365 days by default. With identityStorage set to none nothing is stored, but each visit gets a new device ID, so visits join up only after your code identifies someone.

What a web analytics tool will and will not answer

The second table is here because the product analytics category is small, and people leaving one of those tools often land on the traffic side. A web analytics tool reports how many people arrived, where from and which pages they read. Few of them keep user profiles, so cohort retention and per-user journeys are missing or thinner than now.

That move is reasonable when the questions left are about channels, campaigns and pages, and product behaviour is read from your own database. It is the wrong one when experiments, funnels keyed to a signed-in account or replay sit in the weekly routine.

Which of these can import your data

Two tools in the first table read an Amplitude project directly. Mixpanel documents a free migration service for projects under 15 million events, still marked beta: you supply the Amplitude API key and secret, a Mixpanel token and a date range, with a dry run available first. The guide warns that backfilled events count toward the plan in the month Mixpanel receives them. PostHog’s managed migration takes the same pair of Amplitude keys, imports at most a year per job, removes no duplicates and needs a paid plan.

Heap and Pendo document the opposite direction, warehouse export rather than import. Nothing in the second table reads an Amplitude file: Matomo imports aggregated reports from Google Analytics, DataFast reads a Plausible export, and Koko Analytics takes files from WordPress plugins.

Questions and answers

Can I take my Amplitude history with me?

Yes. The Export API hands over raw events as JSON, a year per request. Two tools here read the project through the same keys; the rest start counting on install day.

Will the new tool show the same numbers?

No. Amplitude counts events, including the ones autocapture adds, and recognises devices by an identifier in the browser. Several tools in the second table count pageviews and recognise nobody between visits, and bot filtering differs by vendor. The cookieless page covers the methods.

What happens to a Free account I stop using?

Charts and dashboards are blocked once the account has passed its event allowance three times, and Amplitude deletes an account that stays over the limit six months after the first block.