Amplitude vs Simple Analytics

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.

Simple Analytics is a privacy-first web analytics service founded in 2018 by Adriaan van Rossum and based in the Netherlands. It collects no cookies, IP addresses or personal data and does not fingerprint visitors, so it is designed to comply with GDPR, PECR and similar laws without a consent banner, and data is stored in the EU.

The dashboard shows pageviews, visitors, referrers, UTM campaigns, countries, devices and time on page, with goals and events for conversions. Its distinguishing features are an AI assistant that answers questions about your data in plain language and builds charts, plus options to share dashboards publicly, export raw data and query everything through an API. Plans are priced by monthly pageviews: a free plan for hobby sites, a self-serve plan from 20 dollars a month for 100,000 pageviews that scales with traffic and extra users, and Enterprise with an assisted trial.

Simple Analytics fits EU companies, privacy-focused publishers and teams that want clear traffic reporting with a strong compliance story. It lacks funnels, retention cohorts and user-level product analytics, segmentation is limited, and it costs more than self-hosting a free tool such as Umami. Plausible and Fathom are the closest paid alternatives with a similar philosophy, Matomo offers a fuller feature set with self-hosting, and PostHog suits teams that need product analytics rather than website statistics.