Amplitude excels in product analytics with advanced behavioral cohorts and multi-touch attribution, while Heap focuses on automatic session replay and requires no implementation code. Amplitude suits data-driven product teams, whereas Heap serves companies prioritizing ease of deployment and user session understanding.
Amplitude vs Heap — Side-by-side comparison on A Versus B
Choose Amplitude if your team has strong data engineering capabilities and needs sophisticated cohort analysis, multi-touch attribution, and long-term data retention for product optimization. Choose Heap if you want immediate insights without implementation complexity, value session replay for user behavior understanding, and need a faster time-to-value with lower upfront costs.
Product analytics platform specializing in behavioral cohorts, funnels, and multi-touch attribution modeling.
Digital analytics platform with automatic session capture and visual session replay for zero-code implementation.
Structured comparison data for Amplitude vs Heap with 182 attributes.
Setup Time (implementation to first insights)
Average Setup Cost (Professional Services)
Session Recordings Per Month (Basic Plan)
Amplitude vs Heap — Attribute Category Vocabulary
Taxonomy of attribute categories used to classify comparison data for Amplitude vs Heap.
Do I need a data engineer to set up Amplitude?
Yes, Amplitude requires manual event instrumentation, meaning a technical team (data engineer or product engineer) must define and implement events in your code. Setup typically takes 4-8 weeks. Heap, by contrast, automatically captures all user interactions without code changes, making it accessible to non-technical users within 24 hours.
Which platform is better for understanding why users drop off?
Heap excels here because of its visual session replay—you can watch user recordings to see exactly where they get stuck. Amplitude requires you to manually instrument events and analyze funnel data, which is more technical but provides deeper statistical insights into user behavior patterns at scale.
Can I use Amplitude data for multi-touch attribution?
Yes—Amplitude has native multi-touch attribution with 7+ models (first-touch, last-touch, linear, time-decay, etc.), making it ideal for understanding which marketing channels and product touchpoints drive conversions. Heap lacks robust attribution features and is better suited for session-level analysis rather than cross-channel attribution.
Amplitude retains data for 25 months, allowing you to run year-over-year comparisons and analyze long-term trends. Heap retains data for 12 months, which limits historical analysis but reduces storage costs. This favors Amplitude for long-term product strategy decisions.
Which platform scales better for high-traffic applications?
Amplitude is engineered for high-volume event ingestion and handles 100M+ events/month with dedicated infrastructure. Heap handles up to 10M+ events/month at enterprise levels. If you operate a high-traffic platform (500K+ daily users), Amplitude's scalability and performance are superior.