Amplitude vs Heap in 2026: Manual Instrumentation vs Autocapture Product Analytics
Amplitude asks you to define your events upfront and rewards that discipline with built-in experimentation. Heap captures everything from day one and lets you decide what matters later.
Amplitude
Heap- Heap autocaptures every click, pageview, and form submission from a single script tag, with retroactive event definition against that full history. Amplitude requires manual instrumentation before an event exists in the data.
- Amplitude includes a built-in feature-flag and A/B testing module (Amplitude Experiment) on Growth and Enterprise plans. Heap has no A/B testing or feature-flagging capability at all.
- Heap was acquired by Contentsquare in 2023 alongside Hotjar, giving it access to session replay, heatmaps, and Sense AI as add-ons. Amplitude built its session replay and AI Agents natively rather than through acquisition.
- Both tools gate their most advanced paid tiers behind a sales conversation: Amplitude's Growth and Enterprise, and every one of Heap's paid tiers (Growth, Pro, Premier).
- Amplitude's free Starter plan covers 50,000 monthly tracked users. Heap's free plan caps at 10,000 monthly sessions, a meaningfully lower ceiling.
- Heap Illuminate automatically surfaces which behaviors correlate with conversion or retention without a hypothesis. Amplitude requires analysts to build funnels and cohorts to find the same insight manually, though its AI Agents narrow that gap.
Amplitude and Heap both sit in the product analytics category and both went through the same maturation arc: start as a behavioral analytics engine, then bolt on session replay, AI features, and enterprise data governance. The difference that actually matters day to day is how each tool gets its data. Amplitude requires disciplined event instrumentation before you can analyze anything; Heap autocaptures every interaction from the moment the script loads and lets you define events retroactively against that history. Amplitude then pulls ahead on built-in A/B testing, which Heap does not have at all. Heap pulls ahead on never losing data you forgot to track.
The tools at a glance
Amplitude
AI-powered analytics platform combining behavioral data, product analytics, A/B experimentation, and session replay in a unified product intelligence suite
Amplitude is built around a behavioral graph that tracks every user action across their full lifetime in a product, which supports precise funnel, path, and retention analysis. That precision depends on getting instrumentation right: teams plan an event taxonomy, developers ship the tracking code, and the data is only as good as that upfront discipline.
What Amplitude has that Heap does not is Amplitude Experiment, a feature-flag and A/B testing system tied directly to the same behavioral data used for analysis. You can run a test, see which variant drives better retention downstream, and ship the winner without exporting to a separate stats tool. AI Agents can also be directed to run recurring analysis in natural language, reducing the manual query-building load on smaller teams.
The cost is real: Growth and Enterprise pricing needs a sales conversation, and getting trustworthy data requires the instrumentation discipline Heap's autocapture model is specifically designed to avoid.
| Feature | Starter Free | Plus $49/month | Growth Contact for pricing | Enterprise Contact for pricing |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Monthly tracked users | 50K | 1K-100K | Custom | Custom |
| Feature experimentation / A/B testing | No | No | Yes | Yes |
| Session replay | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| AI Agents | No | No | Yes | Yes |
| Data governance | No | Yes | Yes | Yes |
Heap
Autocapture product analytics that records every user interaction automatically, so you never miss data from before you knew what to track.
Heap inverts the standard product analytics workflow. Instead of defining events before you have data, a single script captures every click, pageview, and form interaction from day one, and you define which of those interactions count as a meaningful event retroactively, whenever you decide it matters.
Heap Illuminate is the platform's standout analytical feature: it runs automated analysis across the full behavioral dataset to surface which user actions correlate most strongly with conversion or retention, without requiring an analyst to hypothesize first. Since the 2023 Contentsquare acquisition, Heap also gets session replay and heatmaps as add-ons and shares the Sense AI assistant with Hotjar.
What Heap does not have is any form of built-in A/B testing or feature flagging, so teams running structured experiments need a separate tool for that half of the workflow. Every paid tier beyond the free plan also requires a sales conversation, and the free plan's 10,000 monthly session cap is tight for a production application.
| Feature | Free $0 | Growth Contact sales | Pro Contact sales | Premier Contact sales |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Monthly sessions | Up to 10k | Custom | Custom | Custom |
| Retroactive event definition | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Heap Illuminate | No | No | Yes | Yes |
| Session replay (add-on) | No | No | Add-on | Add-on |
| Data warehouse sync | No | No | Add-on | Yes |
Head-to-head feature comparison
| Feature | Amplitude | Heap |
|---|---|---|
| Instrumentation model | Manual instrumentation | Autocapture |
| Retroactive event history | No | Yes |
| Built-in A/B testing | Yes (Growth and up) | No |
| Session replay | Yes (all tiers) | Add-on (Pro and Premier) |
| Automated insight discovery | Via AI Agents (Growth and up) | Yes (Heap Illuminate, Pro and up) |
| Data warehouse sync | Yes (Plus and up) | Add-on on Pro, included on Premier |
| Free tier ceiling | 50,000 monthly tracked users | 10,000 monthly sessions |
| API access | Yes | Yes |
| Sales-gated paid plans | Growth and Enterprise only | All paid tiers |
| Starting paid price | $49/month | Contact sales |
Considering AI Peekaboo alongside Amplitude and Heap?
Amplitude has started tracking brand mentions in ChatGPT and Perplexity as an early product feature, something Heap has no equivalent of. Both tools are focused on product behavior, not brand visibility in AI answers, so neither gives a full picture of how a company shows up in AI search. AI Peekaboo tracks brand and competitor citations across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and Claude specifically, with a read and write API from $50 per month for teams that need dedicated AI visibility monitoring alongside their product analytics stack.
Read the AI Peekaboo review →Which should you choose?
AmplitudeHeapHeapAmplitudeHeapAmplitudeThis comes down to how much you trust your team to plan instrumentation correctly upfront. Amplitude rewards that planning with a tighter, more query-efficient dataset and gives you A/B testing as part of the same platform. Heap removes the planning requirement entirely by capturing everything, at the cost of a noisier dataset and no native experimentation tool. Neither approach is objectively better; they suit different team habits.
Bottom line
Choose Amplitude if your team already runs a disciplined event taxonomy and wants A/B testing built into the same platform as analysis. Choose Heap if you are tired of realizing six months later that nobody tracked the event you now need, and you are willing to run experimentation through a separate tool. Both require a sales conversation to unlock their most capable tiers, so budget for that regardless of which you pick.
Frequently asked questions
Is Heap easier to set up than Amplitude?
Yes, in the sense that Heap requires no event planning before launch: the autocapture script starts recording everything immediately. Amplitude requires you to plan and implement an event taxonomy before the data is useful, which takes more upfront developer time but produces a cleaner, more intentional dataset once it is done.
Does Heap have anything like Amplitude Experiment for A/B testing?
No. Heap has no built-in feature-flagging or A/B testing module. Teams on Heap that need structured experimentation have to run it through a separate tool and then bring the results back into Heap for behavioral analysis, whereas Amplitude Experiment on Growth and Enterprise plans keeps both in the same platform.
Which tool is cheaper to start on for free?
Amplitude's free Starter plan covers up to 50,000 monthly tracked users. Heap's free plan caps at 10,000 monthly sessions, which is tighter and can be exhausted quickly by a production app with meaningful traffic.
What is Heap Illuminate and does Amplitude have an equivalent?
Heap Illuminate is an automated data science feature that scans the full behavioral dataset and surfaces which user actions most strongly predict conversion or retention, without an analyst needing to hypothesize first. Amplitude's closest equivalent is its AI Agents, which can be directed to run recurring analysis, but Amplitude does not have an always-on automated correlation engine running in the background the way Illuminate does.
Is Heap still a separate product from Hotjar now that Contentsquare owns both?
Yes, Heap and Hotjar remain separate products under the Contentsquare umbrella, but they share the Sense AI layer and the roadmap is converging toward a unified experience intelligence platform. Session replay and heatmaps are available in Heap as add-ons drawing on the Contentsquare product.
For a startup with no dedicated data analyst, which tool needs less ongoing maintenance?
Heap needs less ongoing maintenance because autocapture means there is no event-tracking backlog to manage as the product changes. Amplitude requires someone to keep the event taxonomy updated as new features ship, which is real ongoing work without a dedicated analyst or data-minded product manager.