{"site":{"name":"Koji","description":"AI-native customer research platform that helps teams conduct, analyze, and synthesize customer interviews at scale.","url":"https://www.koji.so","contentTypes":["blog","documentation"],"lastUpdated":"2026-07-10T14:59:59.933Z"},"content":[{"type":"blog","id":"a7b8d113-2b55-44a0-bf49-e66338ad1d08","slug":"amplitude-vs-heap-2026","title":"Amplitude vs Heap (2026): Which Product Analytics Tool Wins — and the \"Why\" Both Miss","url":"https://www.koji.so/blog/amplitude-vs-heap-2026","summary":"Amplitude vs Heap in 2026: Amplitude uses Monthly Tracked User (MTU) pricing — a free Starter (~10,000 MTUs / ~2M events), a ~$49/month Plus plan, and Growth/Enterprise contracts that run roughly $40,000–$80,000/year at 100k–250k MTUs — and wins on behavioral depth, cohorts, and experimentation. Heap (acquired by Contentsquare in 2023) uses autocapture: it records every interaction retroactively with no manual instrumentation, gets teams to data in minutes, has a free tier up to ~10,000 sessions/month, and now bundles session replay. Both share one blind spot: they show what users do, not why. Koji is the AI-native why layer — AI-moderated voice interviews with adaptive follow-ups and six structured question types, themed into a one-click report, starting free then €29/month.","content":"# Amplitude vs Heap (2026): Which Product Analytics Tool Wins?\n\n**TL;DR:** Choose **Amplitude** if you want the deepest behavioral analysis, built-in experimentation, and a mature enterprise platform — priced on **Monthly Tracked Users (MTUs)**. Choose **Heap** (now part of Contentsquare) if you want **autocapture**: every click and page view recorded retroactively, so you can answer questions you didn't think to instrument, with data in minutes instead of weeks. But both tools share one blind spot: product analytics tells you **what** users did and **where** they dropped off — never **why**. To close that gap, **Koji** runs AI-moderated voice interviews at scale and themes hundreds of \"why\" conversations into a report in hours. Koji starts free, then €29/month.\n\n## Amplitude vs Heap at a glance\n\n| | Amplitude | Heap (by Contentsquare) |\n|---|---|---|\n| **Best for** | Deep behavioral analysis, experimentation | Fast time-to-value, retroactive analysis |\n| **Data capture** | Manual event instrumentation | Autocapture (retroactive, no-code) |\n| **Pricing model** | Monthly Tracked Users (MTU) | Session-based, custom quotes |\n| **Free plan** | Starter: ~10,000 MTUs / ~2M events | Free: up to ~10,000 sessions/month |\n| **Paid entry** | Plus (~$49/month) | Growth/Pro/Premier (custom, ~$3,600+/yr) |\n| **Standout feature** | Cohorts, A/B testing, predictions | Autocapture + session replay |\n| **Shared blind spot** | Tells you *what*, not *why* | Tells you *what*, not *why* |\n\n## Heap: autocapture and time-to-value\n\nHeap's whole pitch is that you shouldn't have to decide in advance which events matter. Instead of manually instrumenting each button and funnel step, Heap **autocaptures** every interaction on your site or app, then lets you define events *retroactively* — even for behavior that happened before you thought to track it. Teams consistently rate this as the standout: autocapture eliminates the event-taxonomy planning phase that typically delays a proper analytics rollout by weeks, and reviewers report getting usable data in minutes rather than the days or weeks it takes to instrument a manual tool correctly.\n\nAfter Heap was **acquired by Contentsquare in 2023**, it gained session replay and UX/experience-analytics features, positioning it as a bridge between raw product analytics and digital-experience monitoring. The free plan covers up to roughly **10,000 sessions/month**, which is generous for early validation.\n\n**Where Heap falls short:** startups often find the jump from free to paid abrupt, and advanced capabilities like data export and Connect are flagged as costly add-ons. Its statistical depth for experimentation and predictive cohorts doesn't match Amplitude's.\n\n## Amplitude: behavioral depth and experimentation\n\nAmplitude is the mature, analysis-heavy end of the market. It's built for teams that live in cohorts, retention curves, behavioral segmentation, and built-in A/B testing and predictions. If you want to ask *\"which behaviors in week one predict retention at day 90?\"* and then run an experiment against that hypothesis, Amplitude is the stronger platform.\n\nThe trade-off is **MTU pricing**. The free Starter plan is capped at **10,000 monthly tracked users and 2 million events per month**. Beyond that, cost scales with your user count — and it climbs fast. Based on aggregated deal data, contracts covering **100,000 to 250,000 MTUs typically range from $40,000 to $80,000 per year**. MTU billing is also less predictable than event- or session-based models: a single marketing campaign that inflates your user count can spike the bill.\n\n**Where Amplitude falls short:** manual instrumentation means you can only analyze what you thought to track, so late-arriving questions require new instrumentation and a wait for data to accumulate — the exact problem Heap's autocapture solves.\n\n## Head-to-head: the decision that actually matters\n\n- **Speed to first insight:** Heap wins. Autocapture means data in minutes; Amplitude's manual taxonomy can take weeks to get right.\n- **Analytical depth and experimentation:** Amplitude wins. Cohorts, predictions, and native A/B testing are more sophisticated.\n- **Pricing predictability:** roughly a wash — both use consumption-style models that get expensive at scale, and neither publishes transparent enterprise pricing.\n- **Experience analytics:** Heap edges ahead post-Contentsquare with session replay bundled in.\n\nBut notice what neither bullet resolves: **why** users behaved the way the charts show. That question doesn't live in the clickstream.\n\n## The blind spot both share: the \"why\"\n\nAmplitude and Heap are both *behavioral* tools. They observe what users did and where they dropped off with precision — but they never talk to a customer. When a funnel collapses at step three, analytics tells you *that* it happened and *how many* users it happened to. The reason lives in the customer's head: the pricing felt risky, the value wasn't clear, a competitor was already in the workflow, the copy created the wrong expectation.\n\nYou can stare at a retention curve forever and never recover that sentence. This is the structural limit of every product-analytics tool, no matter how good its autocapture or its cohorts.\n\n## Koji: the AI-native \"why\" layer\n\n[Koji](/blog) is an AI-native customer research platform built to answer exactly the question analytics can't. Instead of watching behavior, Koji **runs the conversation** — an AI moderator conducts voice or text interviews asynchronously, at the scale of a survey, and decides in real time which follow-up questions to ask. It probes like a skilled researcher (\"You mentioned the pricing felt risky — what would have made it feel safe?\"), with **no moderator bias and no scheduling**.\n\nWhat makes it a genuine research tool rather than a chatbot:\n\n- **AI-moderated voice interviews** with adaptive follow-ups — see [how AI voice interviews work](/docs/ai-voice-interviews).\n- **Six structured question types** — open_ended, scale, single_choice, multiple_choice, ranking, and yes_no — so a single study captures both the quantitative numbers your analytics already shows *and* the qualitative why it cannot.\n- **Automatic thematic analysis** that themes hundreds of conversations into patterns — the [thematic analysis](/docs/thematic-analysis-guide) that would otherwise take an analyst days.\n- **One-click reports** you can share in hours, not weeks.\n\n### The proven workflow: analytics + Koji\n\nThe highest-leverage teams don't choose between behavior and reasoning — they chain them:\n\n1. Let **Amplitude or Heap** flag *where* users drop off — the funnel step, the churned cohort, the feature nobody adopts.\n2. Let **Koji** interview the users in that cohort to learn *why* — using targeted [customer interview questions](/docs/customer-interview-questions-examples) delivered by an AI moderator.\n3. Ship the fix, then watch the same funnel in analytics to confirm it moved.\n\nAnalytics tells you where to dig; Koji tells you what you'll find. One shows the *what*; the other recovers the *why* — in the customer's own words.\n\n## A worked example: the checkout drop-off\n\nSay your funnel report shows a 38% drop between \"added payment method\" and \"completed purchase.\" Amplitude can slice that cohort by plan, device, and acquisition channel; Heap can retroactively define a \"hesitated at payment\" event you never instrumented and show you it correlates with mobile Safari users. That is genuinely useful — you now know *precisely* who is dropping and where.\n\nBut you still don't know *why*. Was it an unexpected fee? A trust gap at the card form? A comparison tab open to a competitor? A Koji study fielded to that exact cohort — \"Walk me through the last time you nearly bought but didn't\" — returns the sentence that fixes it, often within a day. The analytics narrowed the population from millions to a few thousand; Koji turned those few thousand into a reason you can act on. That is the difference between knowing your conversion rate and knowing your conversion *problem*.\n\n## Bottom line\n\n**Amplitude vs Heap** is a real decision: Amplitude for behavioral depth and experimentation, Heap for autocapture and speed to insight. But whichever you pick, you've still only measured behavior. The reason behind every drop-off, churn, and non-adoption is a conversation you haven't had yet — and that's the layer Koji owns.\n\n**Ready to hear the why behind your numbers?** [Start free with Koji](/blog) — 10 interview credits, no credit card, then €29/month. From question to insight in hours, not weeks.","category":"Comparisons","lastModified":"2026-07-09T03:25:33.656124+00:00","metaTitle":"Amplitude vs Heap (2026): Which Wins + the AI \"Why\" Layer","metaDescription":"Amplitude vs Heap compared for 2026 — MTU vs autocapture pricing, free tiers, behavioral depth, and session replay. Plus why product analytics shows what users do, not why, and how Koji's AI-moderated interviews close the gap.","keywords":["amplitude vs heap","heap vs amplitude","amplitude vs heap 2026","amplitude vs heap pricing","product analytics tools","heap alternative","amplitude alternative"],"aiSummary":"Amplitude vs Heap in 2026: Amplitude uses Monthly Tracked User (MTU) pricing — a free Starter (~10,000 MTUs / ~2M events), a ~$49/month Plus plan, and Growth/Enterprise contracts that run roughly $40,000–$80,000/year at 100k–250k MTUs — and wins on behavioral depth, cohorts, and experimentation. Heap (acquired by Contentsquare in 2023) uses autocapture: it records every interaction retroactively with no manual instrumentation, gets teams to data in minutes, has a free tier up to ~10,000 sessions/month, and now bundles session replay. Both share one blind spot: they show what users do, not why. Koji is the AI-native why layer — AI-moderated voice interviews with adaptive follow-ups and six structured question types, themed into a one-click report, starting free then €29/month.","aiKeywords":["amplitude vs heap","product analytics","autocapture","MTU pricing","behavioral analytics","AI moderated interviews","customer why"],"aiContentType":"comparison","faqItems":[{"answer":"It depends on priority. Amplitude is better for deep behavioral analysis, cohorts, experimentation, and predictions, but its Monthly Tracked User (MTU) pricing gets expensive at scale. Heap (now part of Contentsquare) is better for speed and autocapture — it records every interaction retroactively with no manual instrumentation, so you can answer questions you didn't think to track and get data in minutes. Neither can tell you why users behave the way they do — for that you need a conversation layer like Koji.","question":"Is Amplitude or Heap better in 2026?"},{"answer":"Amplitude uses MTU pricing: a free Starter plan covers ~10,000 MTUs / ~2M events, the Plus plan starts around $49/month, and Growth/Enterprise contracts commonly run $40,000–$80,000/year at 100k–250k MTUs. Heap offers a free plan up to ~10,000 sessions/month, then custom Growth/Pro/Premier tiers (reported around $3,600+/year), with data export and Connect as paid add-ons. Koji, the AI-interview alternative, starts free (10 credits) then €29/month.","question":"How much do Amplitude and Heap cost?"},{"answer":"Manual instrumentation (Amplitude) means you decide in advance which events to track and add code for each one — so you can only analyze what you thought to measure. Autocapture (Heap) records every click and page view automatically, letting you define events retroactively, even for behavior that happened before you thought to track it. Autocapture is faster to value; manual instrumentation gives tighter control over a curated event taxonomy.","question":"What is the difference between autocapture and manual instrumentation?"},{"answer":"Both Amplitude and Heap observe behavior — what users did and where they dropped off — but they never talk to a customer, so they cannot explain why. The reasoning behind a churn or a drop-off lives in the customer's head, not in the clickstream. AI-moderated interview platforms like Koji capture that why directly, in the customer's own words.","question":"What can product analytics not tell you?"},{"answer":"The proven workflow: let Amplitude or Heap flag where users drop off, then let Koji interview the users who dropped off to learn why. Analytics tells you where to dig; Koji's AI-moderated voice interviews, adaptive follow-ups, and six structured question types tell you what you'll find — themed into a one-click report in hours.","question":"How do teams combine product analytics with Koji?"},{"answer":"Yes. Contentsquare acquired Heap in 2023. Heap continues as a standalone product but has gained session replay and UX/experience-analytics capabilities from Contentsquare, positioning it between traditional product analytics and digital-experience monitoring.","question":"Did Contentsquare acquire Heap?"}],"relatedTopics":["Product Analytics","Amplitude","Heap","Autocapture","Behavioral Analytics","AI Moderated Interviews","Analytics Comparison"]}],"pagination":{"total":1,"returned":1,"offset":0}}