AppGlance vs Amplitude
Amplitude is a digital-analytics platform in the fullest sense: analytics, session replay, experimentation, surveys and AI tooling, sold to product teams and loved by them. This page is for the mobile developer wondering whether that is the tool their two apps need, or whether it is a container ship for a fishing trip.
Amplitude gives away more than we do: 2M free events a month, the biggest free tier in the category, with replay and experiments included. What it does not give you is smallness: it is a platform you log into and learn, built for teams with questions, and its privacy posture is a configuration project rather than a default.
Pick Amplitude to run product analytics like a product team. Pick AppGlance to know your app is alive from your lock screen, with nothing to configure and nothing personal collected.
Who wrote this: we make AppGlance. Amplitude is an independent product and we do not speak for it. The details below were checked in August 2026 and products move, so verify anything decision-critical at amplitude.com. If we have got something wrong, tell us and we will fix it.
What Amplitude actually is
Amplitude has been the reference answer to "what do serious product teams use" since the mid 2010s. The platform covers behavioral analytics, session replay, A/B experimentation, feature management, user surveys and a growing layer of AI assistance, and in 2026 its free tier is remarkable: two million events a month, forever, no card. If you want one platform to carry a product organization from seed to IPO, this is a defensible choice at every step.
The cost is not money at indie scale, it is weight. Amplitude assumes an organization on the other end: projects and taxonomies, governance, seats, saved analyses. It rewards the team that invests in it. One person with two apps on the App Store tends to open it less and less, not because the answers are wrong but because the questions it is built for are a team's questions.
The real difference: a platform you operate vs a pulse you feel
Amplitude's unit of value is the analysis: a chart someone builds, saves and shares. AppGlance's unit of value is the moment: someone is in your app right now, someone in Italy just bought, and your phone told you so. One tool answers "what happened last quarter and why"; the other answers "is my app alive right now", instantly, from your pocket.
Neither replaces the other, and that cuts both ways. If you outgrow six numbers and need cohort analysis with a data taxonomy, we will honestly point you at a platform like Amplitude. Until then, a platform mostly costs you the habit of checking; a pulse builds it.
Which one to pick
Pick Amplitude if…
- A team, present or planned, will ask questions of the data every week.
- You want replay, experiments, surveys and analytics in one governed platform.
- Two million free events a month is the deciding number for you.
- You are building the analytics muscle you will still use at a hundred people.
Pick AppGlance if…
- You are the whole team, and the dashboard has to earn seconds, not meetings.
- You want a push on your own phone the moment someone buys or installs.
- You want privacy by default: no ATT prompt, no consent banner, labels generated.
- You want a tool whose entire pricing page fits in a sentence.
Side by side
| AppGlance | Amplitude | |
|---|---|---|
| What it is | A live dashboard and an iPhone app: active right now, today hour by hour, the feed, funnels, retention, per-user stories, push alerts. | A digital-analytics platform: behavioral analytics, session replay, experimentation, surveys, AI-assisted analysis, governance. |
| Free tier | 100,000 events a month, every dashboard panel, alerts and webhooks, no credit card. Presence pings and user labels never count. | The biggest in the category: 2M events a month, forever, with replay and experimentation included. No credit card. |
| Paid pricing | Flat plans: $4.99/mo for 1M events, $14.99 for 2.5M, $39 for 7M, $99 for 18M, in USD before tax. No sales call at any tier. Subscribe during the beta and your price stays. | Plus scales usage-based from $0 up to 70M events a month; Growth and Enterprise are custom quotes. Event-based pricing throughout (they moved off MTU billing). |
| Identity | A random install id by default, nothing personal. identify is one optional call, and the
dashboard previews what it does to your App Store label before you ship it. |
Built around identified users and cross-device identity resolution: user ids, device ids, merging. Powerful, and the core of how it models behavior. |
| Consent and App Store labels | The default setup collects nothing linked to a person: no ATT prompt, no GDPR banner to show, and the exact App Privacy questionnaire ticks are generated for you. | Configurable, and your responsibility: identity resolution, replay and enrichment put you in consent-flow and privacy-policy territory, with good docs and a DPA, but the homework is yours. |
| Live presence | "Active right now" is the headline number, per app, powered by a never-billed ping. | Real-time charts exist; the product's center of gravity is analysis over time, cohorts and journeys, not who is in the app this second. |
| Alerts | A push on any signal to your own phone: the iPhone app (in beta), ntfy, Discord, or a signed webhook to your server. | Monitors and anomaly alerts to email and Slack: threshold-shaped, team-shaped, not a buzz per purchase. |
| Asking your own questions | Fixed panels: funnels, retention, sessions, versions, countries, per-user pages, CSV export. Deliberately small. | Far deeper. Segmentation, journeys, custom charts, saved and shared analyses, experiments, AI assistance. This is the product. |
| SDK | Swift and Kotlin, two-line setup, zero dependencies, ~300 KB compiled on iOS and a 114 KB AAR on Android (measured), plus an HTTP API for anything else. | Official SDKs across platforms plus warehouse-native options and a large integration catalog. We have not measured its binaries, so we make no size claim. |
| Track record | New, and says so: in public beta, with our own apps running it in production. | Since 2012, public company, enormous installed base. |
Where Amplitude is the better pick
- The free tier. 2M events a month free is twenty times our allowance, with replay and experiments thrown in. If free volume decides it, Amplitude wins outright.
- Depth and breadth. Journeys, cohorts, experimentation, surveys, AI analysis: we do not compete with any of it, on purpose.
- Session replay. Sometimes watching a session is the only way to understand a drop-off. We do not have it and are not building it.
- Growing into a team. If you expect to hand analytics to a PM or a data person within a year, starting on the platform they will use is a fair call.
- Enterprise credibility. Procurement, SSO, governance, compliance reviews: that world is theirs, not ours.
Where we think we are better
- The pulse. A native iPhone app with a push the moment someone buys. No platform login, no saved chart, just your phone buzzing because your app did something.
- The privacy default. Nothing personal collected unless you flip a switch, no ATT prompt, no consent banner, and the App Store questionnaire answered for you. On a big platform this is your homework; here it is the starting state.
- Sized for one person. Six numbers, one screen, a two-line setup, and a paste-in prompt that lets an AI agent do the integration and the tracking plan.
- Presence is free. "Active right now" runs on a ping that never counts, so the number you glance at most costs you nothing on any plan.
- Attention. Support goes to the person who wrote the SDK, usually the same day. During the beta, early accounts shape the roadmap directly.
Questions people ask
Does Amplitude have a bigger free tier than AppGlance?
Yes, the biggest in the category: 2,000,000 events a month, with session replay and experiments included. We give 100,000 billable events and do not offer replay or experiments at all. On raw generosity this is not close, and we would rather say so than hide it.
Why would I pick AppGlance over a free 2M-event platform?
Because breadth is not free in every currency. Amplitude is a platform you log into and learn, built for teams with questions, and its privacy posture is a configuration project rather than a default. AppGlance is one line of code, a 300 KB dependency-free SDK, no advertising identifier anywhere, and a screen you read in ten seconds from your lock screen.
Does Amplitude collect more personal data than AppGlance?
It can, depending on how you configure it, which is the real difference. AppGlance has no advertising identifier in the SDK at all, needs no ATT prompt, and requires no consent banner in a standard setup, so there is no configuration to get wrong. With a platform of Amplitude's breadth, the privacy outcome is something you have to actively design.
The fastest way to compare is to look
The demo is the real dashboard on sample data from four apps. No account, nothing to uninstall.
Also worth reading: all the comparisons, how this compares with Mixpanel, how this compares with Firebase Analytics, what privacy-first analytics actually means, and the free App Store privacy label tool.