KISSmetrics vs Amplitude

Amplitude is an analytics platform built for large product teams. It does a lot of things: event analytics, experimentation, session replay, feature flags, customer data platform capabilities, and AI-powered insights. For organizations with 50-person product teams and dedicated data engineers, that breadth can be valuable.

But most mid-market companies do not have 50-person product teams. They have 3 to 10 people who need to answer specific questions about customer behavior, revenue, and growth. They do not need a platform. They need answers.

Amplitude is a platform for 50-person product teams. You have 5 people. You need answers, not a platform.

This page breaks down the real differences — pricing, capabilities, implementation, and where each tool is the better fit. No spin. Just the information you need to make a decision.

The real cost of Amplitude

Amplitude’s free tier is one of the most generous in analytics. For small teams just getting started, it is a legitimate option. The problem starts when you outgrow it — and the pricing cliff is steep.

Moving from Amplitude’s free plan to a paid plan often means jumping from $0 to $25K+ per year. Mid-market contracts typically land between $30K and $60K annually, and enterprise deals regularly exceed $120K. None of these numbers include the cost of actually implementing Amplitude properly — which, for most companies, requires either an external consultant or significant internal engineering investment.

That savings range accounts for both the license difference and implementation costs. When you add up Amplitude’s mid-market software price ($30K to $60K) plus implementation ($15K to $30K), your first-year total ranges from $45K to $90K. KISSmetrics is $7,500, fully implemented. The math is not subtle.

Feature-by-feature comparison

This comparison focuses on the analytics features mid-market teams use regularly. We are not comparing every feature in Amplitude’s platform — that would be misleading, because most mid-market teams do not use most of those features.

Count the green checkmarks on the Amplitude side. Now ask yourself: how many of those features does your team actually use on a weekly basis? If the answer is funnels, cohorts, retention, and maybe user profiles, you are paying for a platform to use it as a tool.

Person-based analytics: architecture, not a feature

Both KISSmetrics and Amplitude track events and associate them with users. The architectural difference is in how each product was designed from the ground up.

Amplitude was built as an event analytics platform. Events are the primary object, and users are a property attached to events. This works well for high-volume product analytics — understanding which features are used most, how users navigate between screens, and where drop-offs occur at scale.

KISSmetrics was built as a person analytics platform. People are the primary object, and events are the history of what each person has done. This architecture is specifically powerful for businesses where individual customer value matters — e-commerce, SaaS, and any model where revenue ties to identified users.

When you want to answer “what is the lifetime value of customers who came from our Facebook campaign in Q3?” or “which acquisition channel produces customers with the highest 90-day retention?” — a person-centric architecture gives you that answer directly. An event-centric architecture requires you to build it from components.

KISSmetrics has been refining person-based analytics for 15 years. We pioneered this approach when the industry was still focused on pageviews. That depth of experience shows in how we handle identity resolution, cross-device tracking, and retroactive attribution — the hard problems that only surface at scale.

E-commerce native, not e-commerce compatible

Amplitude is a horizontal platform. It serves gaming, fintech, media, healthcare, and enterprise software companies. The benefit is flexibility — Amplitude can be configured to work for almost any use case. The cost is that nothing is purpose-built for your specific use case.

KISSmetrics is purpose-built for e-commerce and SaaS. Revenue is not a custom event you have to configure — it is a first-class concept in the product. Customer lifetime value is not a formula you build — it is a native metric. Campaign attribution does not require a third-party integration — it is built into how KISSmetrics tracks users from first touch to purchase and beyond.

The practical difference: an e-commerce team using Amplitude needs an analytics engineer to set up revenue tracking, LTV calculations, and attribution models. An e-commerce team using KISSmetrics opens the product and those reports are already there, populated with their data, ready for decisions.

Who Amplitude is still better for

Who should switch to KISSmetrics

KISSmetrics is not for everyone. It is specifically designed for a profile of team that we serve exceptionally well:

Mid-market teams paying $30K+ for Amplitude with fewer than 20 active users. If your analytics bill is five or six figures but only a handful of people log in regularly, you are dramatically overpaying. KISSmetrics gives those users everything they need at $7,500 per year.

E-commerce companies that need revenue as a first-class metric. Amplitude can track revenue, but it requires custom configuration and ongoing maintenance. KISSmetrics was built around revenue. Campaign attribution, customer lifetime value, and purchase behavior are native to the product — no setup required.

Teams without dedicated analytics engineers. Amplitude assumes you have someone who understands event taxonomies, user properties, group analytics, and data governance. If that person does not exist on your team — or if they have higher-priority work — you will never realize Amplitude’s full potential. KISSmetrics includes implementation and ongoing support, effectively providing that expertise as a service.

Companies frustrated by time-to-value. If you have been paying for Amplitude for months and still feel like you are not getting the insights you expected, the problem may not be your team — it may be the tool. KISSmetrics is designed to deliver actionable insights from day one, not after a multi-month configuration project.

Teams approaching contract renewal with doubts. If your Amplitude renewal is coming up and you are questioning whether you are getting $40K, $60K, or $100K of value, trust that instinct. Schedule a 30-minute call with us. We will give you an honest assessment of whether KISSmetrics covers your use cases — and if it does not, we will tell you that too.

15 years of person-based analytics

KISSmetrics has been in the analytics space since 2008. We were one of the first products to advocate for person-based tracking over session-based pageview counting. The concepts that are now standard in product analytics — identity resolution, cohort analysis, funnel conversion tracking tied to individual users — we helped pioneer them.

That history matters because analytics is not just about features. It is about how well a product handles the hard problems: merging anonymous and identified users, attributing revenue to the right touchpoints, maintaining data accuracy over years of product changes. These are problems you only solve well with experience, and KISSmetrics has 15 years of it.

We are not a startup trying to displace Amplitude with a cheaper clone. We are a mature analytics product that has been serving e-commerce and SaaS teams for over a decade. The $7,500 price reflects our focused approach, not a lack of capability.