Amplitude Analytics is an analytics platform for mobile and web. It is designed to help organizations segment users and analyze funnels, retention and revenue. Amplitude Analytics helps product marketers to achieve actionable insights from customer digital journeys and uses behavioral graphs to build customer-focused products. Amplitude also optimizes digital products for increased quality engagements, increased conversion rates, and long-term customer loyalty.
$49
per month (paid annually)
Firebase
Score 8.4 out of 10
N/A
Google offers the Firebase suite of application development tools, available free or at cost for higher degree of usages, priced flexibly accorded to features needed. The suite includes A/B testing and Crashlytics, Cloud Messaging (FCM) and in-app messaging, cloud storage and NoSQL storage (Cloud Firestore and Firestore Realtime Database), and other features supporting developers with flexible mobile application development.
I would highly recommend Amplitude to people in the product and business analytics domains who have a need for deep, data-driven insights into customer behavior, accessible in a self-service platform. Amplitude stands out in its comprehensiveness and flexibility; once events are implemented, there are a multitude of options to combine, track, form journeys, and dive deeper into user behavior. Though the barrier for entry is a little bit steep, Amplitude is more friendly to non-technical users than other business insight platforms, without compromising the effectiveness of the analysis tools. Amplitude may not be best suited for web marketing analytics - traffic, page views, etc - since it is more focused on full-platform product analytics.
Firebase should be your first choice if your platform is mobile first. Firebase's mobile platform support for client-side applications is second to none, and I cannot think of a comparable cross-platform toolkit. Firebase also integrates well with your server-side solution, meaning that you can plug Firebase into your existing app architecture with minimal effort.
Firebase lags behind on the desktop, however. Although macOS support is rapidly catching up, full Windows support is a glaring omission for most Firebase features. This means that if your platform targets Windows, you will need to implement the client functionality manually using Firebase's web APIs and wrappers, or look for another solution.
It provides me great answers about my critical questionnaire, by which I can easily explore behavioral data across any chart, persona, and cohort that are simple and intuitive to understand as they have made easy segmentation.
It offers its services for SQL queries due to which I have reduced the workload and save the time that was spent in finding out the technical aspects.
Extremely robust. Has about any tool you can think of under one roof making it extremely useful as a backup platform for data analytics or small teams that need something quickly.
Intuitive and easy UI/UX. Being made and owned by Google, you expect nothing less. Very easy to use for anyone that has any marketing or analytical experience especially in Google Analytics (which I just assume all marketers do).
Safe, secure, and sturdy. Never need to worry about downtimes or misinformation as it's as clean and safe as it is being run by Google.
FREE! What else is there to say. Unless you're an extremely large application handling hundreds of thousands to millions of users, this pay as you go plan will stay free.
Firebase/Firestore has very limited support for querying more complicated items; for example, performing a simple string search is not possible.
While upfront costs are low, costs can grow quickly if you're not careful about what you are being billed for.
Dashboards have at times shown different information to what is billed, and support from Google is less than stellar and not as effective as that from Amazon or Microsoft.
Great product Good value for the cost/initiate Support docs and FAQs are great - they limit the necessity of reaching out to in-person support. So when you do call them ... it is for a legit question/issue, no just a "where is it" or a "how to I do xyz123?"
It's a fairly straightforward platform that's beginner friendly. The biggest usability hurdle is most often created by your own team, as it's imperative to know what event sources are being sent to Amplitude and what those event names are. Within being properly onboarded by a team member it can be hard to get started using Amplitude. It takes time to understand what data your company may be sending to the product, the naming conventions of events (especially if there are old or deprecated events names
Firebase functions are more difficult to use, there are no concepts of triggers or cascading deletes without the use of Firebase functions. Firebase functions can run forever if not written correctly and cause billing nightmares. While this hasn't happened to us specifically it is a thing that happens more than one realizes.
Alway up and running, or if there is a problem we can get back in the game right away. The reliability was a big selling point for me, and it was true when this company got it. Rollouts can be tough, but this was pretty seamless. Good support throughout the process, good documentation to handle questions/tips
No issues, problems, or negative remarks from us!! We had a plan, vendor support was rock solid, our data folks have experience, OCM supported as needed, and we got the rollout done on time, on budget, and with only minor hiccups. SInce the rollout, most of us have already forgotten the hiccups and generally speak highly of the product
I haven't used the Amplitude support other than their training docs so I can't speak too much to the in-person support but the docs are serviceable. Nothing too crazy but between the user tips, email notifications, and the decent number of docs I was able to get the support I needed to ramp up on the tool.
Our analytics folks handled the majority of the communication when it came to customer service, but as far as I was aware, the support we got was pretty good. When we had an issue, we were able to reach out and get support in a timely fashion. Firebase was easy to reach and reasonably available to assist when needed.
Virtual Not bad considering the timeframe and turnaround. The biggest benefit was for my end-users to hear a voice (other than mine/ours! LOL) telling them about the new features and capabilities. The in-person training was really good for having an expert that knows the answers and could refer to past experiences, problems, solutions. THey were a great resource to ease the transition ... basically a "you are gonna be okay with this change ... you got this etc.!" kinda vibe
Good enough to get strong baseline. I always make sure our our users go to and/or focus on the vebndor-provided support docs rather than any formal training. Our instructors come and go, but written policy and how-to docs live much longer in a corporate setting. That said, the online training is sufficient. I like that the training curric is stacked and progressive.
My team members all have background as data analysts, so Amp was pretty easy to for them. There was sufficient online training available. We also used the available support documents. The actual rollout went well. We did significant testing beforehand. We did a phased rollout, with partial silent rollout (part of OCM's plan) for the smallest line of business. THe silent one was "silent" b/c it was done without fanfare or public notices ... it was just a "we're doing some things, it wont impact your work or workday
Amplitude Analytics is a robust platform that can take your data reporting beyond what's currently capable in GA. Heap is a great intermediate tool, that takes data analysis a step further and is an excellent product in it's own right. Mixpanel is the most comparable both have very similar reporting/dashboarding functionality. Amplitude can often be preferred by product and data engineering teams for it's ease of setup and impressive analytics displays.
Before using Firebase, we exclusively used self hosted database services. Using Firebase has allowed us to reduce reliance on single points of failure and systems that are difficult to scale. Additionally, Firebase is much easier to set up and use than any sort of self hosted database. This simplicity has allowed us to try features that we might not have based on the amount of work they required in the past.
Like all the other grades, it was mostly an easy implementation ... we have experience people, the rollout in general is well planned, and the vendor was very supportive
Firebase has been able to help us understand reliably, the drop-off in our user flows with their funnel feature. This has made it easy for us to be able to pinpoint weaknesses in our funnel and test and optimize with data as the dependent variable.
From an economic standpoint, we don't pay for Firebase which is great, but as the saying goes "You get what you pay for" also holds true in this context. As we looked to grow and scale, we looked for a paid solution.
From a developer resource standpoint, Firebase has been extremely easy to integrate into our app. Whether it be the event tracking, dynamic links or crash reporting we have not had to waste too much developer time thanks to their well-organized developer docs.
