When comparing Amplitude vs Heap, the Slant community recommends Heap for most people. In the question“What are the best analytics tools for a SaaS web applications?” Heap is ranked 3rd while Amplitude is ranked 4th. The most important reason people chose Heap is:
After adding a JavaScript snippet to the site, Heap captures every event that you can organize later instead of having to define events upfront. It means that if you decide to track something new you have data from the past as well.
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Pros
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.
Pro Capture everything, organize it later
After adding a JavaScript snippet to the site, Heap captures every event that you can organize later instead of having to define events upfront. It means that if you decide to track something new you have data from the past as well.
Pro User friendly
Heap does not require any coding knowledge to set up.
Pro Free plan
If your site has less than 5000 monthly visitors, you can use Heap for free indefinitely.
Pro Highly detailed
Since every single data point is logged you can do highly specific analysis.
Pro Tracks guest-turned-user data
Heap will combine registered user data with data before registering.
Pro Powerful and easy to set up cohort analytics
Cohort analysis allows you to compare things like user retention over time, what kind of progress has been made with that retention over time, how many people perform certain actions from a set starting point over time, etc.
Pro Visit based pricing
Heap determines cost of service based on monthly visits instead of the more common data point based pricing that incentivises tracking less data points to save money.
Cons
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.
Con No Android integration
Heap lacks Android integration.
