When comparing Amplitude vs Splunk, the Slant community recommends Amplitude for most people. In the question“What are the best cross-platform mobile analytics tools?” Amplitude is ranked 3rd while Splunk is ranked 8th. The most important reason people chose Amplitude is:
Any output data you can get in a dashboard, you can also get as JSON through their export API.
Specs
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
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 Easy to use, powerful search
It's human readable, intuitive, fast and with auto-complete to boot. And if you need more advanced functionality out of your queries, 120+ page search manual will give you an insight in how much is actually possible.
Pro Widely used
De facto standard for log aggregation, monitoring, analysis and reporting.
Pro Scales effortlessly
It is built for enterprise use, meaning it scales easily.
Pro Real-time graphs
You can create visualizations that update in real time.
Pro Cross-platform
OS X, Linux & Windows are supported. You can also access Splunk from iOS and Android devices.
Pro Free version
With restrictions on log size and devices a free version is available.
Pro Alerts
Splunk can turn searches into alerts.
Pro Understands data in any format or language
Pro Extendable via a large selection of apps
Additional functionality can be added with over 500 apps.
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 Expensive
Splunk is pretty expensive compared to other solutions.
Con Antiquated
The interface and service are very antiquated
Con Seriously SLOW ingest
Their docs and sales say it will ingest up to 20k EPS, but reality is more like 1k eps per server.
Con Complex set up process
