Heap

Heap Review: Product Analytics Without the Instrumentation Tax

Heap's founding insight was that the biggest bottleneck in product analytics is not analysis — it is instrumentation. With event-based tools like Amplitude and Mixpanel, every question that requires a new metric requires an engineering sprint to add the corresponding event tracking. Heap's bet was that capturing everything automatically removes this bottleneck entirely, enabling analytical teams to ask questions about data that was never explicitly instrumented.

How Auto-Capture Works

Heap installs a single JavaScript snippet. From that point, every user interaction with the web application — every click, every form submission, every page view, every hover — is captured as a raw interaction with its full DOM context. Elements are identified by their structure in the page (tag, text, CSS class, position), not by a developer-assigned event name.

When an analyst wants to understand how many users clicked a specific button last month, they use Heap's visual labelling tool to point at that button on the page. Heap retroactively applies the label to all historical interactions matching that element, going back to whenever the snippet was first installed. No code change required. No engineering ticket. No sprint cycle.

This retroactive capability is Heap's most distinctive feature. Product managers routinely face the situation where a stakeholder asks about a metric that wasn't tracked. With Amplitude or Mixpanel, the honest answer is "we can't answer that for historical data." With Heap, the answer is often "we can pull that right now."

Analysis Quality

Once events are defined, Heap's analysis capabilities are competitive with Amplitude for core use cases: funnel analysis with step-by-step conversion rates, retention curves, path analysis showing what users do between defined events, and session replay (through the separate Heap Sessions product). The query interface is cleaner than Amplitude's for analysts without prior event analytics experience, and the dashboard builder covers standard PM reporting needs.

For advanced behavioural cohorting and experimentation, Amplitude's feature depth is greater. Heap's cohort builder is capable but less flexible in edge cases. For most growth-stage product teams, the difference is not meaningful.

Data Volume and Privacy Considerations

Auto-capture is a double-edged sword. The same comprehensiveness that enables retroactive analysis also means Heap captures form field inputs, URL parameters, and UI interactions that may contain PII. GDPR and CCPA compliance requires careful configuration of Heap's privacy settings to ensure sensitive inputs are excluded from capture. This is manageable but requires deliberate setup that event-based tools — where only explicitly tracked events are captured — don't require by default.

Data volumes are also significantly higher than event-based tools, since Heap captures raw interactions rather than purpose-defined events. This is primarily a Heap infrastructure concern (priced per session, not per raw event), but it is worth understanding at scale.

Pricing Gap

Heap's pricing has a notable cliff: the free plan supports 10,000 sessions/month, which is adequate for early-stage evaluation but insufficient for most growing products. The first paid tier (Growth) starts at $3,600/year ($300/month). There is no $49/month intermediate option. For teams that outgrow the free tier, the jump to $300/month is immediate and significant. Amplitude's Plus plan at $49/month and PostHog's usage-based pricing are more graduated alternatives.

Verdict

Heap is the strongest choice for product teams where engineering bandwidth is limited and retroactive analytical capability is valued over maximum feature depth. The auto-capture model genuinely reduces time-to-insight for teams that have been blocked by instrumentation backlogs.

Score: 8.3/10 — Retroactive analysis is a genuine differentiator; free tier restrictions and pricing cliff are real adoption barriers.