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AWS CloudTrail vs Amplitude comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Mar 3, 2025

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Categories and Ranking

Amplitude
Ranking in User Activity Monitoring
4th
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
5.3
Number of Reviews
11
Ranking in other categories
Customer Data Analysis (1st), Web Analytics (1st), Mobile Marketing and Advertising (1st), AI Data Analysis (5th), AI Customer Experience Personalization (4th)
AWS CloudTrail
Ranking in User Activity Monitoring
2nd
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
6.4
Number of Reviews
16
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of January 2026, in the User Activity Monitoring category, the mindshare of Amplitude is 3.7%, up from 0.8% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of AWS CloudTrail is 7.2%, up from 7.0% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
User Activity Monitoring Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
AWS CloudTrail7.2%
Amplitude3.7%
Other89.1%
User Activity Monitoring
 

Featured Reviews

Saurav Bhattacharjee - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Business Analyst at Arcteryx
Empowers teams to build visualization-rich reports and make faster decisions using historical user behavior data
I think areas for Amplitude's improvement include data retention. The maximum data I have worked with, the clickstream data on Amplitude, is two years, whereas we rely on Tableau for historical data of at least two years. I am not sure whether it was my organization paying for lower retention or not, but having historical data would take away the reliance on Tableau. Secondly, reconciling clickstream data with Databricks or other AWS systems could help analysts spend less time verifying the accuracy of both sources, which would be really helpful. Lastly, a more focused approach on error logs is necessary. I have found that, at least with Intuit, we used Splunk more for error logs than Amplitude. Although Amplitude had the capability, developers seemed to prefer Splunk, so if that could be improved, it would be good.
CR
Principal Technical Architect at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees
Comprehensive log management streamlines workflow and enhances monitoring capabilities
For monitoring, we use Dynatrace. Dynatrace is connected with AWS CloudTrail, so AWS CloudTrail sends the notifications via SNS to Dynatrace. We get notifications, and Dynatrace will send notifications. AWS CloudTrail is a log function that will store all logs easily for whatever services we are using on Amazon. All logs will be stored in AWS CloudTrail for 15 years, as we have the service purchased for that duration. The logs will be stored in AWS CloudTrail via S3 bucket. In AWS CloudTrail, we have enabled CPU, disk, and RAM monitoring. These are three services we are monitoring from AWS CloudTrail. AWS CloudTrail will monitor and produce graphs. We have separate L1 teams for monitoring; they will monitor and share the information. Also, Dynatrace will receive the information, and if any service goes beyond the threshold limit, AWS CloudTrail will create an alert. CloudTrail and CloudWatch are sister services. Both should be preconfigured internally. We only watch the dashboards because we can't go and watch each service; there are multiple servers running and multiple services configured, so we watch only the dashboard graphs. If any graph goes beyond the normal limit, we take action. We watch the graph. If any of the graphs show abnormal activity, then immediately we dig into AWS CloudWatch and AWS CloudTrail. We check the reason by verifying the logs. The graph will show you the time period, so we go into AWS CloudWatch, filter the logs for that particular time period, and from there, we identify the cause of the issue, and then we troubleshoot. API is a main element that allows us to connect AWS CloudWatch to AWS CloudTrail and AWS CloudTrail to Dynatrace. That connection is done via API. By API, everything is integrated. The integration part is managed by the API, transferring information from one service to another. We are not working on the API; the configuration team, the cloud operations team, they take care of it.

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"Amplitude impacts my organization positively as it serves as a central point that allows everyone within the organization to speak the same language of data."
"We can create charts and bar charts for visualization purposes and check real-time data with the solution."
"Amplitude has positively impacted my organization as it allows us to make decisions based on data and iterate faster."
"Amplitude has provided a return on investment, helping us improve campaign targeting and raising personalization accuracy by almost twenty-five percent, while saving us a lot of time since I can see the analysis as quickly as possible in the dashboard, resulting in significant time and money saved."
"Amplitude has provided almost instant value to our dev team when they are deploying new trackable events and seeing how those events line up before they go out to production."
"Other areas like cohort analysis, defining key events, and user properties were also well-suited for Amplitude. It is an easy tool to use."
"Amplitude is a perfect product that will always fulfill all the data-related needs that your company has, and I would suggest anyone to go for it."
"Amplitude has impacted my organization positively in a huge way, as everyone uses it to gain insights into user behavior before implementing new features, which leads to massive positive change, data-driven development, lots of learning, and encouragement to use Amplitude in daily work for everyone in the company, not just analysts."
"AWS CloudTrail helps in accelerating incident investigation and response. It increases it because I pull out the logs to CloudTrail, and from CloudTrail watch, I'll send it to the Security Hub and do a visualization with Prometheus and Grafana."
"The management events and CloudTrail Insights are valuable."
"AWS CloudTrail is currently underutilized and has potential for many more use cases."
"In one specific scenario, we encountered a situation where a terminated employee still had access to our environment without our knowledge. With AWS CloudTrail, we could track and monitor the employees' activities, revealing that they were downloading specific files from our customer's environment. Without it enabled, we wouldn't have been aware of this."
"AWS CloudTrail integrates with AWS Config and provides custom event, security, and compliance auditing."
"The solution is good as a central logging platform for showing all cloud events."
"It is a stable solution. AWS handles it well."
"The product’s most valuable feature is monitoring. It helps us audit the changes in AWS account at the application and resource level."
 

Cons

"Amplitude could be improved by being cheaper."
"The visualization of the properties can also be enhanced. Basically, the visualization could be better, and the real-time analytics can be enhanced."
"Regarding how Amplitude can be improved, I think that dashboards and charts are ephemeral; people often create dashboards but rarely revisit them, so while a handful of dashboards might survive, the real value lies in the insight derived from them."
"I give it a nine because it is close to a perfect ten for me, but it is only useful in one layer of the project, not the other, which the tool is supposed to do."
"I think areas for Amplitude's improvement include data retention. The maximum data I have worked with, the clickstream data on Amplitude, is two years, whereas we rely on Tableau for historical data of at least two years."
"Setting up reports in Amplitude was challenging for me as a newer user."
"We have seen tagging issues with Amplitude in rare scenarios, which can be improved."
"We attempted to use their screen recording and session recording capabilities as a replacement for a previous vendor, and we found that the functionality they offered did not stack up to the previous vendor."
"Searching the logs is not very easy; it requires a lot of patience and hard work to find the right information in the log."
"More controls should be introduced in CloudTrail, especially to see the logs in CloudTrail itself without saving them in S3, as S3 starts to incur charges."
"Filtering multiple values within the console is a feature that has yet to exist in AWS CloudTrail. You can look up a user identity, service, or action, but you can't search for multiple dimensions."
"I have not experienced any challenges while using it."
"Maybe if we could do direct queries on CloudTrail without needing to export it to Athena, that'd be great."
"AWS CloudTrail should be redesigned to capture non-API calls. It would be more effective to have one tool that can perform multiple tasks instead of relying on multiple services for non-API activities."
"AWS CloudTrail could benefit from more comprehensive documentation and broader service integration."
"The solution should incorporate visibility for CloudWatch events."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Pricing is a little on the higher end, especially when considering scalability."
"The solution is free if you don't need customizations but is not expensive otherwise."
"AWS CloudTrail is free."
"AWS CloudTrail is a cheap solution."
"It is a very cheap service because management is a SaaS offering from AWS."
"CloudTrail itself is free of cost."
"AWS CloudTrail is pretty affordable, and I have to double-check, but the service is free to use. I can add logs on the console, but if I want to store logs long-term, then I have to pay a storage fee, but it's relatively inexpensive."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
10%
Insurance Company
6%
Comms Service Provider
6%
Financial Services Firm
6%
No data available
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business2
Large Enterprise9
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business5
Midsize Enterprise7
Large Enterprise3
 

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Amplitude?
I loved using Amplitude because it allowed me to dive deep into product usage and analyze different customer segments.
What needs improvement with Amplitude?
Amplitude can be improved by allowing more than a two-year look back window for most analyses. Usually, all they offer is that two-year look back window, and longer form time series analysis seems ...
What is your primary use case for Amplitude?
Amplitude is our main product insights system, and it allows us to view the activity on our website and quantify certain KPIs about how users interact with the site. We measure things such as month...
What do you like most about AWS CloudTrail?
In one specific scenario, we encountered a situation where a terminated employee still had access to our environment without our knowledge. With AWS CloudTrail, we could track and monitor the emplo...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for AWS CloudTrail?
AWS CloudTrail is categorized into management events, data events, and CloudTrail Insights. For one hundred thousand events, management costs are approximately two dollars, data events ten cents, a...
What needs improvement with AWS CloudTrail?
I do not think there could be improvements in AWS CloudTrail because I am too small to suggest anything. It is already a well-established service from AWS, and I have only been using it for the las...
 

Comparisons

 

Also Known As

ClearBrain
CloudTrail
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Nokia, Yik Yak, QuizUp, CrunchBase, Rhapsody, PlanGrid, Acquia, Patreon, SeatGeek, Etermax
HTC, British Gas, Solinor, 2C2P
Find out what your peers are saying about AWS CloudTrail vs. Amplitude and other solutions. Updated: December 2025.
879,425 professionals have used our research since 2012.