Heap and Amplitude are the two product-analytics platforms a Customer Success or growth team weighs when it wants product-usage signal without buying a full experience suite. The old routing rule — Heap autocaptures everything and defines events after the fact, Amplitude makes you plan a taxonomy first — no longer holds. Amplitude ships Autocapture, and its Visual Labeling defines events retroactively against data already collected. The dividing line moved to the meter. Heap bills sessions, Amplitude bills events, and that one choice decides what each platform bothers to capture, how far back you can look, and whether you can buy it without a sales call.
Where Heap wins
The session meter does not punish capture breadth. Heap records every click, pageview, and form interaction, and a dense interface costs the same as a sparse one because the bill counts sessions, not interactions. Amplitude’s Autocapture is selective on purpose: its docs say the default excludes clicks on blank areas and text highlighting “to ensure you don’t pay for low-value user behaviors.” When a retroactive question lands on an interaction Amplitude declined to keep, the data is not there to label.
It is cheaper at the negotiated contract. Vendr reports an average and median annual contract value of $41,220 for Heap across 191 purchases, against $64,724 for Amplitude across 416. The observed floor is the wider gap: Heap’s lowest recorded contract is $13,000, Amplitude’s is $24,625.
Seats stop being a line item at the second tier. Heap’s Growth plan includes unlimited users and reports, so analysts, CSMs, and PMs all get logins without a licence conversation.
Warehouse sync and behavioral targeting ship inside the top tier. Premier includes Heap Connect for warehouse export, Activate for behavioral targeting, unlimited projects, advanced user permissions, and region-specific storage. At Pro, Activate is a paid add-on.
Illuminate ranks friction you did not think to query. Heap describes it as the data-science layer that pinpoints unknown friction — the question a CS lead has before knowing which chart to build.
Where Amplitude wins
A free tier you can run a product on. 2M events per month with no expiry, unlimited seats, 1,000 session replays per month, plus AI Agents and MCP. Heap’s Free plan stops at 10k monthly sessions, holds six months of history, and carries no AI — Sense begins at Growth.
You can price it and buy it without talking to sales. Plus starts at $0 and scales on event volume to a published ceiling of 70M events. Heap publishes no number above Free: Growth asks you to install the snippet to get an estimate, and Pro and Premier both read “Custom Session Pricing.”
MCP on every plan, with no metered call budget. Amplitude includes MCP and AI Agents on Free, Plus, Growth, and Enterprise alike. Heap’s agent path runs through Contentsquare’s MCP server, which is metered against Contentsquare’s own plan ladder — 300 tool calls a month on Free, then 36,000, 72,000, and 108,000 a year on Growth, Pro, and Enterprise. The allowance is pooled across the whole account and only admins can configure the integration.
The retention window is longer on the tier you can self-serve. Amplitude’s Plus carries two years of data retention. Heap’s Pro and Premier both stop at one year, with further years sold as an add-on. Retroactive analysis reaches only as far as the history behind it, which puts Heap’s core advantage on a shorter leash than its positioning implies.
Session replay is bundled, not a second line item. Every Amplitude tier carries a replay quota, from 1,000 a month on Free to 50,000 on Enterprise. Heap sells Session Replay and Heatmaps as paid add-ons, available from Pro upward and absent below it.
Pricing reality
The two meters produce different bills from the same product. Heap counts sessions, so cost tracks how many distinct visits your audience makes and stays flat as you instrument more of the interface. Amplitude counts events, so cost tracks instrumentation density and climbs when you capture more per visit. A low-traffic app with a dense interface is cheaper on Heap. A high-traffic app with a lean tracking plan is cheaper on Amplitude.
At the negotiated level the gap is roughly 1.6x — $41,220 median ACV for Heap against $64,724 for Amplitude, with Heap buyers taking 21% off list on average and Amplitude buyers 16%. The ceilings diverge further, $154,798 against $370,790, which reflects Amplitude’s enterprise footprint more than a per-unit premium. Below the contract level the comparison inverts. Amplitude’s free tier is a working product and its Plus tier self-serves to 70M events; Heap’s free tier is an evaluation and everything above it is a quote. If the budget is zero for the next two quarters, only one of these is a real option.
Neither figure includes the CS platform the data feeds. Both are the signal source, not the place the health score or the renewal play lives.
The Contentsquare question
Contentsquare completed its acquisition of Heap in December 2023, and its own comparison page states that Heap “no longer operates as a standalone company or competitor” and is “an integral part of the Contentsquare group,” pointing buyers who came looking for Heap toward Contentsquare instead. heap.io still sells four Heap plans and the product is still shipping, so this is not a sunset. It does put two items on the table. The vendor’s marketing routes you toward a larger suite than the one you asked to price, and the AI roadmap arrives through Contentsquare rather than Heap — Sense is labeled “Contentsquare’s AI” on Heap’s own pricing page, and the MCP server is documented in Contentsquare’s help center while appearing nowhere in Heap’s plan table. Ask what renewal looks like if the Heap SKU gets folded into a platform contract.
Verdict
Pick Heap when the interface is dense and the traffic is not, when you want every interaction captured without negotiating a tracking plan first, when the purchase is a negotiated annual contract anyway, or when journey and experience analysis are also on the list and the Contentsquare suite reads as a benefit rather than a risk.
Pick Amplitude when you need to start at $0 and prove the value before there is a budget line, when you want MCP and agents inside the tier you already hold, when experimentation and feature flags belong in the same platform, or when the analysis has to reach back more than a year.
Pick neither when your CS platform already captures the usage you need — check Gainsight PX or Vitally’s built-in tracking before signing a second instrumentation contract. If you want a published per-event rate you can budget from without running an estimator, Mixpanel prints one. If the question is why users abandon rather than what they did, the Contentsquare platform proper is the honest answer, not Heap on its own.
Choosing without those conditions, pick Amplitude. It is the one you can price, deploy, and run to real volume without a sales cycle, and the retroactive-labeling gap that used to justify Heap’s premium has closed. Move to Heap when the negotiated contract is happening regardless and capture breadth, not history depth, is the constraint that keeps biting.
Heap and Amplitude are the two product-analytics platforms a Customer Success or growth team weighs when it wants product-usage signal without buying a full experience suite. The old routing rule — Heap autocaptures everything and defines events after the fact, Amplitude makes you plan a taxonomy first — no longer holds. Amplitude ships Autocapture, and its Visual Labeling defines events retroactively against data already collected. The dividing line moved to the meter. Heap bills sessions, Amplitude bills events, and that one choice decides what each platform bothers to capture, how far back you can look, and whether you can buy it without a sales call.
Where Heap wins
Where Amplitude wins
Pricing reality
The two meters produce different bills from the same product. Heap counts sessions, so cost tracks how many distinct visits your audience makes and stays flat as you instrument more of the interface. Amplitude counts events, so cost tracks instrumentation density and climbs when you capture more per visit. A low-traffic app with a dense interface is cheaper on Heap. A high-traffic app with a lean tracking plan is cheaper on Amplitude.
At the negotiated level the gap is roughly 1.6x — $41,220 median ACV for Heap against $64,724 for Amplitude, with Heap buyers taking 21% off list on average and Amplitude buyers 16%. The ceilings diverge further, $154,798 against $370,790, which reflects Amplitude’s enterprise footprint more than a per-unit premium. Below the contract level the comparison inverts. Amplitude’s free tier is a working product and its Plus tier self-serves to 70M events; Heap’s free tier is an evaluation and everything above it is a quote. If the budget is zero for the next two quarters, only one of these is a real option.
Neither figure includes the CS platform the data feeds. Both are the signal source, not the place the health score or the renewal play lives.
The Contentsquare question
Contentsquare completed its acquisition of Heap in December 2023, and its own comparison page states that Heap “no longer operates as a standalone company or competitor” and is “an integral part of the Contentsquare group,” pointing buyers who came looking for Heap toward Contentsquare instead. heap.io still sells four Heap plans and the product is still shipping, so this is not a sunset. It does put two items on the table. The vendor’s marketing routes you toward a larger suite than the one you asked to price, and the AI roadmap arrives through Contentsquare rather than Heap — Sense is labeled “Contentsquare’s AI” on Heap’s own pricing page, and the MCP server is documented in Contentsquare’s help center while appearing nowhere in Heap’s plan table. Ask what renewal looks like if the Heap SKU gets folded into a platform contract.
Verdict
Choosing without those conditions, pick Amplitude. It is the one you can price, deploy, and run to real volume without a sales cycle, and the retroactive-labeling gap that used to justify Heap’s premium has closed. Move to Heap when the negotiated contract is happening regardless and capture breadth, not history depth, is the constraint that keeps biting.