Zenith vs Amplitude
The website answer to an enterprise product-analytics tool
Amplitude is built for product teams with analysts, an instrumentation plan and questions about user behaviour inside an application. If your question is how a website is performing, most of that machinery is weight you carry without using.
Zenith vs Amplitude, feature by feature
Including the rows Zenith loses. Where Amplitude has something behind a paid tier or a plugin, the table says so rather than pretending it is missing.
| Feature | Zenith | Amplitude |
|---|---|---|
| Privacy & compliance | ||
| Cookie-free tracking | Yes | No |
| No cookie banner required | Yes | No |
| GDPR compliant by default | Yes | Requires configuration |
| No personal data collected | Yes | No |
| You own the raw data | Yes | No |
| Open source | MIT | No |
| Self-hosting | Yes | No |
| Analytics features | ||
| Real-time dashboard | Yes | Delayed |
| Visitors, pageviews, sessions | Yes | Via events |
| Bounce rate & visit duration | Yes | Via events |
| Custom events | Yes | Yes |
| UTM & campaign tracking | Yes | Yes |
| Funnel analysis | No | Yes |
| Cohort analysis | No | Yes |
| Session replay | No | Higher tiers |
| Heatmaps | No | No |
| A/B testing | No | Yes |
| Feature flags | No | Yes |
| Agency & client work | ||
| Unlimited sites per deploy | Yes | Per project |
| Cost per extra client site | Nothing | Counts toward your events |
| Dashboard on the client's own domain | Yes | No |
| Client never sees a third-party tool | Yes | No |
| Automatic monthly client emails | Yes | Scheduled reports |
| Per-client logins | Yes | Team seats |
| SEO | ||
| Built-in SEO audits | Yes | No |
| Core Web Vitals from a real render | Yes | No |
| SEO report emails | Yes | No |
| Setup & usability | ||
| Install | Script tag or npm | SDK + event design |
| Learning curve | Minutes | Weeks |
| Tracking script size | ~1 KB | ~60 KB |
| API access | Yes | Yes |
| Unsampled data | Yes | Plan dependent |
| Hosting & pricing | ||
| Hosting | Self-hosted | Cloud only |
| Pricing model | Free, open source | Subscription |
| Price scales with | Nothing | Events and seats |
| Every feature included | Yes | Higher tiers for more |
Weight you do not need
Amplitude's strength is behavioural depth: cohorts, retention, pathfinding, experimentation. Reaching it takes a taxonomy, disciplined event naming and usually someone whose job includes owning it. For a marketing site or a client's site, that investment buys answers nobody asked for. Zenith's whole surface is six numbers, five breakdowns and an SEO score.
Who reads the dashboard
Amplitude is built for analysts. Zenith is often read by the client — a restaurant owner, a solicitor, a founder — which sets a hard ceiling on how complicated it may be. Zenith puts their analytics on a page of their own site, password-gated, with no new tool to learn and no login to a platform they have never heard of.
Data ownership and consent
Amplitude is cloud-only and identity-based, which means cookies and a consent flow in the EU and UK, and an agreement between your client and a vendor they did not choose. Zenith is self-hosted and cookieless: the raw events sit in a file on your server, and there is no identifier to ask permission for.
Choose Amplitude if
You are running experiments, measuring feature adoption or modelling retention across a real product, and you have the team to use it. That is a genuinely different job from the one Zenith does, and Zenith would be a poor substitute. It is common and sensible to run Zenith on the marketing site and a product analytics tool inside the app.
Own your clients’ analytics.
One deploy, every site you build, no consent banner and no per-site cost. It is MIT licensed and it runs on one server.