Amplitude vs Counter

Amplitude is a digital analytics platform from San Francisco, founded in 2012 by Spenser Skates, Curtis Liu and Jeffrey Wang and listed on Nasdaq (AMPL) since its 2021 direct listing. It started as event-based product analytics for mobile apps and now helps product, growth and marketing teams see how people use their apps and websites and what drives conversion and retention.

The platform combines product and web analytics (funnels, retention, cohorts, journeys), session replay and heatmaps, feature flags and A/B testing, in-app guides and surveys (from the 2024 Command AI acquisition) and audience syncing to ad and messaging tools. AI agents can monitor dashboards, explain metric changes and answer questions, and an MCP server exposes Amplitude data to AI tools. Free covers 2 million events a month; Plus is usage-based; Growth and Enterprise are custom-priced through sales.

It fits product-led companies that need self-serve analysis for non-technical teams. Mixpanel is the closest rival with simpler pricing; PostHog is cheaper and open source with an engineering focus; Pendo is stronger on in-app guidance for B2B software; Google Analytics is free but built for marketing attribution.

In July 2026 Amplitude dropped the fixed 49 dollar Plus tier based on monthly tracked users for event-based pricing from 0 dollars, and the Free plan now includes session replay, guides and AI agents. Startups with under 20 employees and under 10 million dollars raised can apply for a free year of Growth.

Counter is a free, open-source web analytics service at counter.dev that focuses on the essentials: page views, unique visits, referrers, countries, devices, browsers, screen sizes and time-of-day patterns. It runs from a single lightweight script, does not use cookies and does not track individual users across sites, which keeps pages fast and avoids most of the privacy problems that come with traditional analytics.

There are no paid tiers in the usual sense. The service is free to use and funded by voluntary pay-what-you-want contributions, and the source code is public so technically minded users can inspect how data is collected. Setup takes a minute: create an account, paste the snippet and the dashboard starts filling in. The dashboard shows a short set of charts on one page rather than dozens of reports.

Counter is a good fit for personal blogs, portfolios, documentation sites and side projects where the owner only wants to know whether people visit and where they come from. It is not built for businesses: there are no custom events, goals, funnels, conversion tracking, segments or team features, and support is community level. GoatCounter is a similar free and minimal option, Cloudflare Web Analytics is free for sites on Cloudflare, and Plausible, Fathom or Umami are the next step when you need events and goals with a privacy-first approach.

Because it is so minimal, Counter works well alongside other tools rather than as a long-term analytics stack for a growing company.