If you have decided to integrate a ready-to-use product analytics system into your product, you will be choosing among several options and one of them might be Amplitude. However, are you really willing to overpay for the brand name? Why working with large corporations can be tricky in many ways? And why do many projects choose devtodev as a flexible alternative that covers 100% of developers' needs?
Why take devtodev as an alternative to Amplitude?
Why do developers sometimes choose Amplitude without considering other options? As we see, there are many myths based on emotions rather than facts. Let's look at some of them:
Myth #1. Amplitude has been in business for longer than devtodev therefore we can trust it.
Indeed, Amplitude was founded in 2012. But devtodev was established in 2013. Not a big difference, isn't it?
For nine years the devtodev team has been working in the best interests of game and app developers, year after year improving functionality and providing daily technical support (including weekends and holidays). In our last NPS survey we scored 73 and we take it as a reliable indicator of trust!
Myth #2. Amplitude is more suitable for apps, while devtodev - for games.
Right, devtodev portfolio includes many famous game developers. But it doesn’t mean that the system is not suitable for apps too.
App developers use virtually the same devtodev tool set except from the game reports section (Smart view > In-game analysis). Funnels, basic metrics (DAU, ARPU, etc.), custom event reports, SQL, push notifications - all of them can be used for both game and app analysis.
Myth #3. I chose Amplitude analytics because it’s a large company.
It’s a big myth that working with large companies is all plain sailing. In fact, it’s the opposite because working with big brands can potentially put your business at risk. They are bureaucratic, sluggish, inflexible and they are unable to provide your company with tools that are tailored to its specific environment. It’s unlikely that it has sufficient resources to provide quality support because it manages multiple projects and focuses on tier 1 clients.
devtodev’s team is just over 100 people which allows us to be flexible, listen to each and every of our customers and implement their wishes within the shortest period of time possible. A personal account manager and 24 hour support team can solve all arising problems. You don’t need to search forums or chats for an answer to your question or ask the crowd for help.
Myth #4. Amplitude has 27 companies of the Fortune 100 as customers - this is a sign of a high-quality system.
In fact, if you are a Fortune 100 company then indeed you need to consider Amplitude as your product analytics provider. But if you don’t run a company like Burger King or Ford, research the instruments used by the companies of similar size in your niche. For example, devtodev works with companies like TinyBuild, GameInsight, Kefir Games, Planner5D, SketchAR, Fitingo.
Functionality Comparison of the Two Systems
Now let’s move away from emotions and focus on facts. Below we will compare the functionality of devtodev and Amplitude by key parameters.
It’s worth noting that Amplitude has three pricing options: Starter (free), Growth and Enterprise. So, the result of the comparison will depend on the price plan we choose. Their Starter (free) option significantly differs from the other two because it lacks the most important tools and has a cap on the volume of data that can be analyzed.
devtodev is very easy to work with - there is a single price option that includes all necessary instruments. Our free plan (up to 10k Monthly Active Users) allows you to use all of them too.
devtodev vs Amplitude Free
What are the free Amplitude pricing option restrictions?
One of the most frustrating limitations of Amplitude’s free pricing option is a cap on the volume of data that can be collected. Moreover, Amplitude sums up events from all your projects integrated with them and you reach the limit very fast.
What happens when you accidentally cross the 10M event limit? You lose access to all your reports and dashboards until the end of the month. In other words, you completely lose control over the situation: you can’t get information about critical problems that may cause drop in user activity, you can't even deploy a planned update because you have no tools to evaluate its performance.
devtodev vs Amplitude Growth & Enterprise
Premium Amplitude price options, indeed, provide very powerful and flexible tools. But there are a few “pitfalls” that you need to be aware of before signing a contract (spoiler: high price is only one of them).
- First up, the fact that you have to sign a contract, to some extent, violates your freedom of choice. In fact, if you want to use a product analytics platform, you don’t need to sign a one-year (or even two-year) contract and continue to make payments even if you don’t use its services anymore.
devtodev, for example, will charge you for analytics only at the end of the month and after you’ve paid the bill you can stop using the system (even after the first month).
- Flexibility of Amplitude tools has its drawbacks - very slow progress along the learning curve. Your team will spend months to master the system - do you have this time? And even after that many non-analysts will still be clueless about the secrets of Amplitude.
We at devtodev are trying to perfectly balance flexibility and ease of use. It’s important for us to enable non-analysts to answer their questions by making just a few clicks in our readily available reports while analysts and data scientists can answer difficult questions without leaving the devtodev interface.
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If your app has subscriptions then you won’t be able to thoroughly analyze them with Amplitude. You will need to either buy additional tools for subscription analysis or ultimately suffer with obtaining subscriptions data via stores' API, transferring it to your own servers and somehow visualizing it with additional tools to make sense of it.
With devtodev you can track subscriptions, subscription renewals, refunds right from the app stores and automatically turn raw data into beautiful and easily readable dashboards.
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Issues with ad monetisation analytics is another drawback of the Amplitude architecture. The majority of the developers who work with mediation platforms want to duplicate their ad revenue data from the platforms to their analytics solution. However Amplitude doesn’t allow for integration with mediation platforms.
To eliminate this pain point, devtodev is offering direct integrations with the IronSource and MAX (Applovin) mediation platforms. The most important thing here is that devtodev is able to collect ad revenue data on every user rather than aggregated metrics data.
If you don't use IronSource or MAX, we have alternative ways to send ad revenue to devtodev - get in touch with our manager to learn more.
- As you can see from the two previous points, devtodev is the only analytics platform on the market that enables collecting revenue data from all three sources: IAP, advertising and subscriptions, and forecast LTV based on these data.
What's more, thanks to Machine Learning technologies that lie at the core of our forecasting model, our predictions adapt to each specific project and result in an accuracy of around 90%.
- The basic feature set of Amplitude also raises many questions. If you are meticulous to details and use the analytics system on the daily basis, the table below is for you:
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Imagine, that you can collect an unlimited amount of data on your users - every action, every click - and not be afraid of going beyond the limit. With devtodev this is not a dream - this is reality. While Amplitude has limitations on the number of transferred data points even in its premium options, devtodev allows you to track “every breath you take, and every move you make…”.
- Another important aspect when choosing the perfect system is your budget. If you can complete all tasks using devtodev and receive all the support you need, why pay more for a brand name and an office in San Francisco then?
Here is a review from a developer who was going to integrate with Amplitude at first but gave it a thought and chose devtodev. We are happy to help developers open a very convenient, fully-functional and democratic product analytics system. If you are still having questions and would like to discuss them, simply click any convenient time slot in the calendar.