Amplitude Digital Analytics Platform

What do you like best about the product?

I think Amplitude Analytics is really great for getting quick answers to data. I really like how simple it is to use and that there's a lot of options for how to display data. It covers most of the use cases I could use data for. It's very easy to organize, and the layout is quite easy to understand. It's also relatively easy to create events for web events, which helps me make quick day-to-day decisions based on how users react. It streamlines my ability to pull events without having to depend on engineers once they've been established.

What do you dislike about the product?

I find troubleshooting issues with Amplitude Analytics challenging. Sometimes, I'm not sure if the problem is with Amplitude not tracking things correctly, but often it turns out to be a technical issue with the company's data. It's a bit complex to understand and use Amplitude to its full potential, and I need to get a lot of information from internal engineers. Mobile tracking could be improved, but this might also reflect how my company's data lake is structured, making it harder to pull mobile events.

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

I use Amplitude Analytics to understand user behavior across features, enabling quick data-driven decisions without relying on engineers. It facilitates viewing page views and event sequences, making it easier to track user interactions and streamline my workflow.

What do you like best about the product?

Amplitude stands out for its depth and the strength of its interlinking features. I can track usage not only by volume but also by time spent, and then connect this data to specific events, which helps me gain a broader understanding of user behavior.

Another aspect I appreciate is the ability to create both static and dynamic cohorts, allowing me to tailor my investigations based on what I want to explore.

What do you dislike about the product?

Amplitude presents a somewhat steeper learning curve compared to other platforms I have used, mainly because of its extensive range of features. It takes a bit more time to become familiar with everything it offers.

Additionally, I find the customization options for both charts and dashboards to be limited. In my experience with Looker, I was able to create dashboards with greater flexibility and freedom, such as adding pre-defined filters. When it comes to charting and visual customization, Looker also provides a wider variety of options.

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

Amplitude is providing us with deeper insights into not only which sections of our website and app our users are engaging with most, but also how they are interacting with them. We can now determine whether specific user groups are following certain patterns, such as spending more time in particular areas on certain days of the week, which is important since our user base tends to follow routines. This information allows us to identify which products will be most beneficial to specific cohorts and how we can tailor these offerings to their needs. For example, we might introduce more user-friendly beginner features for some groups, or more advanced options for others, depending on their preferences.

My main use case for Amplitude  is user behavior analysis within products.

For user behavior analysis within my products using Amplitude , I can see how users are interacting with the product, specifically how they're using it, splitting them up into different cohorts to find out which users are converting to paid subscribers and which users are not, and identifying the behaviors of those that are converting to paid subscribers to understand the behavior to drive in the overall user base to increase conversion rate.

In addition to user behavior analysis, my main use case with Amplitude includes finding bugs in a system and conducting cohort analysis, using it to AB test feature flags and various features in a product to identify how the subscription rate, or conversion rate, has increased based on different variants, along with sending out surveys to users and analyzing that data, creating audiences of data for advertising purposes and reselling it as well. I have used Amplitude at many different companies as a data or director leader over the last seven years across 10 different products.

The best features of Amplitude are that it's a database with a visualization layer on top of it; at a foundation level, that's what it is. You can do anything with that, and there's a whole toolkit available. One feature worth noting is abnormality detection, which can detect abnormalities in metrics over time and can trigger alerts or emails to notify the necessary parties when an issue arises, such as a spike in users trying to log in but failing, indicating potential failures in the authentication part of the product.

The abnormality detection feature helps my team respond to issues or improve our product by alerting us to critical failures in the application that might otherwise go undetected; while ARM tools may catch more technical failures, some failures are only detectable through user behavior analysis. Amplitude impacts my organization positively as it serves as a central point that allows everyone within the organization to speak the same language of data.

Regarding how Amplitude can be improved, I think that dashboards and charts are ephemeral; people often create dashboards but rarely revisit them, so while a handful of dashboards might survive, the real value lies in the insight derived from them. I believe Amplitude should bypass the whole dashboard approach and proactively surface insights instead.

I have been using Amplitude for seven years.

Amplitude is stable.

Amplitude's scalability is fine; I have millions of active users, tens of millions, with high throughput, and it performs great.

Amplitude customer support is responsive.

Negative

I have used other solutions including Power BI, Heap , Mixpanel , Grafana , Looker , and DataDog.

I have seen a return on investment with Amplitude, saving about 120 man hours per month for a specific report that needs to be created and generating revenue by creating a product where Amplitude is the foundation.

My experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing involved lots of negotiation, but the setup cost was negligible.

Before choosing Amplitude, I evaluated all the options I just mentioned.

The advice I would give to others considering Amplitude depends on the person; if they know what they're doing, I would suggest doing event-based pricing because it provides more control versus user-based pricing.

I could go down any path, and I understand you may have some script that you want to follow, but if there's something more specific that you're after, then I would have some insight. I have used Amplitude in nearly every way possible, even in ways that they don't advertise because Amplitude doesn't know you can use it that way. I have worked closely with the founders to get features off the ground for Amplitude, and I have alpha tested every feature, or beta tested, whatever you call it, so I know it inside and out. My overall rating for Amplitude is eight out of ten.

Private Cloud

Amazon Web Services  (AWS )

What do you like best about the product?

I appreciate Amplitude Analytics for its remarkable speed, particularly in generating charts and processing the daily event stream. These features provide me with immediate insights, allowing me to quickly assess user interactions and the performance of various features within my app. The speed of the charts means I don’t have to wait long to get critical data, which helps me make timely decisions. Additionally, the daily event stream offers substantial visibility into daily app usage patterns, giving me a detailed understanding of user behavior. This real-time insight is crucial for optimizing app performance and enhancing user experience. The onboarding process with Amplitude Analytics was also a pleasure, as it was quite easy and breezy, allowing for a smooth transition. I am so pleased with the product that I would rate it a 10 out of 10 in terms of recommending it to friends or colleagues. The decision to switch from Clevertap to Amplitude Analytics was primarily driven by the latter’s speed and efficiency, which significantly surpassed its predecessor.

What do you dislike about the product?

The plans get too expensive after a point for me

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

I use Amplitude Analytics to gain visibility into my app's daily usage and feature conversion, with speed and insights from the event streams and fast charts.

My main use case for Amplitude  is to set up analytics dashboards for monitoring and understanding user behavior and spotting issues and bugs when we release software.

A quick specific example of how I used Amplitude  for monitoring user behavior or spotting issues is when we want to release feature A and have the user stories that incorporate events, which pop up on the Amplitude dashboard. From that perspective, I could see the adoption, see if expected users have expected features, and if we see some spikes or drops, then we understand something went wrong. From the technical perspective, we monitor our API endpoints, seeing both successful and error responses, and we can set up alerts if something goes wrong to track down details and figure out what went wrong.

My main use case is very useful for exploratory testing, understanding user behavior, and feeding back into testing techniques and the software development life cycle. Things that we could miss during planning, things we are not aware of, we feed back, implement them, and see how it goes moving forward.

The best features Amplitude offers are useful dashboards that I set up easily from a user journey perspective, as well as a single point to understand one event. I appreciate how it integrates with other systems and all the insights you can drill into, giving you a lot of information for one of the users. You can see not only how they use the product but also which platforms they are on and which areas they are using. All those details help a lot to understand users from a holistic point of view.

The dashboard setup is easy to discover for a newbie; although sometimes over time, it gets complicated. Last year's release or UI redesign got a bit more confusing on how to make one or the other dashboard. In general, you have user paths, so there are two or three main paths to go through, which was good to understand. For integrations, we integrate with tools such as Slack and other monitoring tools as well as our SDK for our apps, allowing us to send events from our applications to Amplitude.

Amplitude offers a lot of features. I'm not an analyst to use all of them; I'm a quality software engineer, so I'm sure I didn't use all of them. For me, it was enough. From my perspective, the simpler, the better, so I can quickly leverage the features. Analysts might do more complicated things, and it was also useful; I remember you can use different queries if you need to find information very quickly, which was useful.

Amplitude has impacted my organization positively in a huge way. Everyone uses Amplitude if they want to have some learnings before implementing new features. It is used during software implementation to gain insights into understanding user behavior, which is massive for debugging issues. You can find the user, see where they're coming from, and what went wrong. So it is absolutely the same as on monitoring. Everyone in the business adopts data-driven development, and Amplitude is one way to understand that data and user behavior, which backs up everyone's work. This leads to a massive positive change, positive attitudes, lots of learning, and encouragement to use Amplitude in daily work for everyone in the company, not just analysts.

A specific outcome and metric that show Amplitude's impact is when I have a dashboard monitoring users logging into an iOS app for a particular release. I want to monitor, hypothetically, and it is useful if the chart is going smooth and the adoption of the new version is going up, which means things are going well for users. The version is out there, downloaded, and people can log into the app. If we can see previous app behavior, it indicates that if people downloaded the new app version, the previous one is going down. If things aren't going well, such as people can't log in or aren't adopting the version much, we drill down to understand what happened. Mostly, we monitor new feature adoption or existing core parts of the business functionality on a daily basis, having Slack channels notify us if anything goes beyond the threshold. This helps us spot lots of bugs, such as personalization that we thought some segments of people would get, but they were not getting it, allowing us to fix our personalization because we had insights and understood what segment of people did not get what we expected.

I would improve Amplitude by making it as clear and easy to use as possible. The feature discoverability could be simpler. I think AI could help in building queries and dashboards based on data, assisting people in learning about the tool, whether they're new or not analysts, helping them discover what they can do more. Additionally, insights on monitoring, identifying potential issues, and suggesting areas to look at to better understand trends on that dashboard would be appreciated. I realize that every context matters, but making it less confusing would be my main approach.

I choose nine because, lately, when I was using it, the more people wanted to improve, the more complex things got—not in a good way, but confusing. If I were using it right now without prior knowledge, I wouldn't know where to start. It matters when an expert is in the room and when new users want to do some things. I wouldn't know where to start; that would be my main concern—how you help people who are not data analysts or who want to discover their data to get into Amplitude.

I have been using Amplitude in my previous job for about two or three years.

My advice to others looking into using Amplitude is to understand what you want to get, what your main goal is because Amplitude can offer a lot.

I have a very positive experience with Amplitude. I enjoyed it a lot in my work. I don't use it now, but I hope to have a chance to use it in the future. I would rate my overall experience with Amplitude a nine out of ten.

Amazon Web Services  (AWS )