When comparing Smartlook vs Amplitude, the Slant community recommends Smartlook for most people. In the question“What are the best event-driven analytics tools for web apps? ” Smartlook is ranked 1st while Amplitude is ranked 2nd.
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro Suport Web & mobile
Pro Can create funnel and heatmap from historical data
Big plus vs hotjar when you need to wait for recording after the setup
Pro Not expensive
Much cheaper than full story
Pro Get JSON data with export API
Any output data you can get in a dashboard, you can also get as JSON through their export API.
Pro Generous free plan
The free plan allows you to log 10 million events per month. There are also 2 paid plans - Business and Enterprise. Business costs $995 and allows for up to 100M events per month while Enterprise has the price is negotiated on a case by case basis and supports an unlimited number of events.
Pro Event Flows visualize popular user paths
Event Flows, an Enterprise level feature, shows a branching user-action path from or towards a certain page/action.
For example, it could show most popular actions performed after landing on a product page or the most popular path towards clicking the buy button.
Compared to funnels, that allow you to track if users follows a predetermined path and where they drop off, Event Flows show what users choose to do instead. And while it's possible to create a funnel for each branching path, that involves a lot of time and some guesswork which is not present in Event Flows.
Additionally, it's possible to integrate Amplitude with Mode to create a User Paths report. It's similar to the Event Flow, but visualized differently.
Pro SDK is open source and transparent
For apps that need high security auditing, or just if you want to know what code you're including, the SDK is open source with code available on GitHub.
Pro Gives you raw SQL access to your data
Enterprise customers can get direct access to Amazon Redshift's PostgreSQL Database. This offers multiple benefits - it allows for queries that are not supported by the dashboard, gives portability and ownership and allows using that data to build realt-time services based on that data.
Cons
Con Privacy handling for EU is quite complexe
Con Default data retention of 30 days is quite short
Con No sampling
Con No installation tracking out of the box
It's possible to enable installation tracking by using a third-party service like Adjust and routing their data to Amplitude.