Amplitude vs Plausible
Both are analytics tools. Here is what separates them.
What Amplitude is
Amplitude is a product analytics platform for tracking what people do inside a web or mobile app and turning that behaviour into cohorts, funnels and retention curves. It is sold as a set of named modules: Product Analytics, Marketing Analytics, Session Replay, Heatmaps, Guides and Surveys, Feature Experimentation, Web Experimentation and Data Governance. Pricing follows event volume rather than headcount. Every plan, the free one included, comes with unlimited seats, so adding a colleague who only reads dashboards costs nothing. Free covers 2 million events a month with no credit card, and includes 10,000 session replays and 2,000 AI feedback records. Plus also starts at $0, because the first 2 million events are free, and scales to 70 million events a month with two years of data retention and 20 behavioural cohorts. Growth and Enterprise move to custom event-based pricing quoted by sales, with 20,000 and 50,000 monthly session replays respectively. Product Analytics is the core: cohort, churn, retention, funnel, conversion and milestone analysis, plus a Conversion Drivers view that looks specifically at the users who completed every stage of a funnel. Alerts and heatmaps unlock from the Plus plan upward. Session Replay records individual sessions on the web through either the Browser SDK or a standalone SDK, and on iOS, Android and React Native. Text is masked by default and retention limits can be set to suit. It also works with the User Privacy API and the DSAR API, so deletion and subject access requests can be answered without unpicking recordings by hand. Experiment puts feature flags and testing in the same account as the analytics. Flags can be deployed client-side or server-side, with local evaluation for low latency and remote evaluation when targeting depends on user context, and the whole thing is exposed through APIs so rollouts can be driven from a CI/CD pipeline. The statistical options go past a plain T-test to sequential testing, CUPED, multi-armed bandits, mutual exclusion groups and holdouts. Access control tightens with the plan. SSO and project permissions need Growth or higher, and role-based access control is Enterprise only. Amplitude MCP pulls insights out into an external AI tool, and Active AI Visibility prompts are capped at 500 on Free, 1,000 on Plus, 2,500 on Growth and 5,000 on Enterprise.
What Plausible is
Plausible Analytics is a web analytics tool that reports how many people visit a site and what they do there, without cookies and without collecting personal data. It is built as a direct alternative to Google Analytics for site owners who want the numbers but not the tracking. The tracking script is under 1 KB, small enough that it does not meaningfully affect how fast a page loads. Because it sets no cookies and stores no personal data, a site running it does not need a cookie banner for analytics, and the product is compliant with GDPR and CCPA. It does not follow visitors across sites or devices, and the rest of the design follows from that: there is no individual-level profile to query, so every report is an aggregate. The dashboard updates in real time and fits on a single screen. It answers the questions most site owners actually have, which pages get read, where visitors came from, which campaigns worked, and what people did before they left. Goals can be configured with custom properties to track signups, purchases, clicks and form completions, and revenue can be attributed to them. Scroll depth, file downloads and outbound clicks are tracked automatically rather than needing separate setup, and bot traffic is filtered out by default. Teams can manage several sites under one account, sort them by traffic, and control who sees which of them. Two-factor authentication is available. There is an API for reading statistics and for sending events from a server, plus integrations with Google Search Console, Google Tag Manager and WordPress. Existing Google Analytics data can be imported, so moving does not mean losing the history. Plausible is open source under the AGPLv3 licence and the code is public and auditable on GitHub. It can be self-hosted, so a team that wants its analytics on its own infrastructure can run the whole thing itself. The hosted service is based and hosted in the EU. Uku Taht started the project in December 2018 and paid subscriptions launched the following year. The company is self-funded and profitable, has no outside investors, crossed one million dollars in annual recurring revenue in 2022, and is now a team of ten serving more than twenty thousand paying subscribers. Pricing starts at four dollars a month on an annual plan and runs to ninety dollars a month, with a free trial.
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