What's amplitude for and how is it different from google analytics?

Head of Product

The most useful framing is that Google Analytics and Amplitude are trying to answer different questions, aimed at different audiences, about different subjects — and understanding that distinction makes the choice between them much more obvious. Google Analytics was built to measure website and marketing performance. Its native units are sessions, pageviews, traffic sources, and conversion events measured against goals. The primary audience has historically been marketing teams and growth teams asking questions like: where is our traffic coming from, how are our campaigns performing, and what percentage of visitors are completing a goal. Universal Analytics and GA4 have evolved, but that orientation toward web traffic and marketing attribution remains the core. Amplitude was built to measure product behavior. Its native units are users, events, and sequences of events over time. The primary audience is product teams, growth engineers, and analysts asking questions like: what are users doing inside the product after they sign up, where do they drop off in an onboarding flow, and which behavioral patterns correlate with users who retain versus users who churn. The product has always been designed for the period after the first pageview — what happens inside the application, not how the user arrived. Amplitude's core analytical frameworks reflect this orientation. Funnel analysis in Amplitude is typically measuring a sequence of in-product actions — a user opened the product, created a project, invited a teammate, published a result — rather than a web conversion funnel. Retention analysis shows cohorts of users by their first use date and tracks how many are still active at various intervals, which is one of the central metrics for subscription and SaaS products but not something Google Analytics surfaces cleanly. Behavioral cohorts let you group users by something they did in the product and then compare their downstream behavior against users who didn't take that action, which is how teams investigate what separates power users from churned ones. The event taxonomy in Amplitude is something your engineering or product team defines and instruments. Unlike Google Analytics where pageviews are captured automatically and events take some configuration, Amplitude is almost entirely event-driven by custom instrumentation. That means the richness of what you can analyze is directly determined by what your team has defined and tracked. This is a strength in terms of flexibility and a real setup cost in terms of initial investment. For marketing teams focused on campaign attribution and traffic source performance, Google Analytics is still typically the more natural tool. For product teams trying to understand whether features are being used, where users are getting stuck, and what behavioral signatures predict long-term retention, Amplitude is designed for exactly those questions in a way that Google Analytics is not.