GA4 vs Amplitude: Which to Pick in India
GA4 is free and answers acquisition questions; Amplitude answers person-level behaviour questions and meters on users. Which one Indian teams should actually buy.
Pick GA4 if your job is acquisition — which channel, campaign and landing page to act on this week — because the standard property is free, it connects to Google Ads and Search Console, and it is the right default for almost every Indian D2C, services and mid-market marketing team. Pick Amplitude if your job is product behaviour — retention, cohorts, which first action predicts a repeat purchase — and your monthly tracked user count sits near or under its free ceiling of roughly 50,000, which is the shape of seed-stage B2B SaaS and subscription products rather than high-traffic stores. If you are a marketer choosing one tool and one only, it is GA4.
Free
Standard GA4 property. Our India measurement cost comparison lists in-platform attribution tools, GA4 included, as free.
The short answer
Pick Google Analytics 4 if your question is where buyers come from and what to do about it next week: the standard property is free, it already feeds Google Ads, and it is the right default for nearly every Indian marketing team. Pick Amplitude if your question is what individual people do inside a product over weeks and months, and your monthly tracked user count is small enough to sit near its free ceiling of roughly 50,000 — the profile of seed-stage B2B software-as-a-service (SaaS) and subscription products.
For a marketing team choosing one tool, it is GA4. Amplitude earns its place as a second, behavioural layer — usually because a product team is already running it.
How they differ on cost
These are the bands we have published for Google Analytics 4 and Amplitude. Where a tier says “not published”, we have not costed it — that is a gap in our research, not a hint about the price.
| Tier | Google Analytics 4 | Amplitude |
|---|---|---|
| Starter | Free. Standard GA4 property, including raw event export to BigQuery. | ₹0, free to roughly 50,000 monthly tracked users (MTUs). No raw data export; limits on seats and saved charts. |
| Growth | Not published. GA4 itself stays free; the spend goes on tooling around it. We have costed paid attribution tools in India at roughly ₹1–5 lakh a year as a category, but that is not a GA4 price. | From about ₹4,300 a month (~$49), the entry paid step. Everything above that starting point is quoted, not published. |
| Enterprise | Not published. Analytics 360 is quoted by Google’s sales team on a negotiated contract and we have not costed it. | Not published. Amplitude quotes it directly; we have published no rupee or dollar figure. |
What actually drives the bill is different on each side. With GA4, the licence is free and the cost sits in the work around it — a paid attribution tool, incrementality tests, analyst time to keep tagging honest. With Amplitude, the licence is the variable: MTUs count one identified person seen at least once in a calendar month, however little they do. Run our arithmetic from the three-way comparison with Mixpanel: a B2B product with 8,000 monthly active users firing 40 events each generates about 320,000 events and 8,000 MTUs — comfortably free. An Indian store with 60,000 monthly visitors at 1.3 sessions and 12 actions each produces roughly 936,000 events but 60,000 MTUs, which is already over the cap.
Two India-specific line items: Amplitude bills in US dollars, so add 18% Goods and Services Tax (GST) on imported services plus a 2–3.5% cross-currency card markup. GST-registered businesses reclaim the tax as input credit; unregistered ones absorb it. GA4’s standard tier has no such arithmetic.
Where Google Analytics 4: Pricing, Fit and Limits (India) wins
Price at any scale. The free property does not have a user ceiling that a festive-season traffic spike can blow through. For a D2C brand on Flipkart Big Billion Days or a Diwali push, that difference is the whole decision.
The Google connections. Audience export into Google Ads, Search Console alongside it, campaign and traffic-source reporting built on UTM tags, and raw event export to BigQuery on the free tier. Amplitude has no native equivalent of the ad-platform link.
Operational guardrails. Campaign diagnostics flag missing aggregate identifiers when tagging breaks, and custom conversion attribution windows arrived in 2026. GA4 also lets you isolate referral sessions from chatgpt.com, perplexity.ai, copilot.microsoft.com and gemini.google.com — a thin but high-intent view of AI-assisted discovery.
Consent and deletion controls that matter as India’s Digital Personal Data Protection (DPDP) Act, passed in 2023, moves into enforcement.
Everyone can already drive it. You can hire for GA4 in Bengaluru, Delhi or Mumbai without a premium. That is not a feature, but it is a real cost.
Where Amplitude: Pricing, Review & India Fit wins
Person-level questions. Amplitude stitches behaviour to a person across visits, not to a session. Retention curves and cohort analysis answer who came back in month three; GA4 reports aggregated behaviour and does not.
Funnels you can re-slice after the fact, without re-tagging the site or app. For a product team iterating weekly, that alone justifies the tool.
A genuinely usable free tier for the right shape. At 8,000 monthly active users you are inside the free plan on either meter, so you can choose on usability rather than price.
Depth, and session replay plus warehouse connections sitting next to the core analytics. Amplitude carries more analytical surface area than GA4 for behavioural work — and more to learn, which is the trade.
Incumbency. If your product manager logs in daily, adding marketing events to that workspace beats standing up a second tool and a second event naming convention.
Which to pick at your stage
- One to five marketers, pre-Series A. GA4 plus Google Search Console is a reasonable entire stack. Below roughly ₹1 crore of annual media spend, there is little to gain from anything heavier.
- Seed-stage B2B SaaS or subscription, under ~50,000 MTUs. Amplitude free, GA4 free alongside it for acquisition. This is the one case where you should set both up on day one.
- D2C spending around ₹5 lakh a month upward. GA4, clearly. High-traffic, low-engagement sites are exactly the profile the MTU meter punishes, and ₹4,300 a month is only the entry step.
- Above ₹1–2 crore in annual media across three or more channels. Keep GA4 as the operational layer and move budget splits to marketing mix modelling — our guide to attribution, MMM and incrementality sets out when each earns its keep.
- Mid-market India, one to twenty lakh monthly active users. If the gap is “we cannot message the people who dropped off”, neither tool is the buy. An engagement platform bundling analytics with push, WhatsApp and email is — bands are in our India CDP pricing comparison.
What neither does well
Neither proves that marketing caused anything. Both describe paths through trackable events. Add GA4, Meta Ads Manager and Google Ads conversions together and the total will exceed the orders in your commerce backend, because each counts the same buyer on a different window. Branded search is the most over-credited line in most Indian D2C accounts, and nothing here will flag it. Only an experiment — a matched-city lift test — settles causation.
Neither sees media without a click. Television, print, IPL sponsorships, out-of-home and most influencer activity are structurally invisible to both.
Neither can act on a person. GA4 tells you 40% abandon the cart; Amplitude can tell you which cohort did. Neither sends the message.
Both fail quietly. Privacy-safe measurement breaks silently when tagging is wrong, and a large share of Indian traffic is app-and-web mixed on low-end Android devices with patchy connections. Dropped events look identical to genuine drop-off in a funnel. Test event collection on a bad network before you trust either tool. Android being around 95% of Indian mobile usage insulates you from some signal loss, but not from this.
And you cannot budget either top tier from us. Analytics 360 and Amplitude Enterprise are both quote-only, and we have costed neither.
Frequently asked questions
Is GA4 or Amplitude cheaper in India?
GA4, in almost every case. Its standard property is free with no user ceiling, including raw event export to BigQuery. Amplitude is free to roughly 50,000 monthly tracked users, then starts at about $49 a month (around ₹4,300), billed in US dollars with 18% GST and a 2–3.5% card markup on top. Both vendors’ enterprise tiers are quote-only and LearnMarketing has published no figure for either.
Can Amplitude replace GA4?
No. Amplitude answers person-level questions — which cohort retained, which first action predicted a repeat purchase. GA4 answers acquisition questions and connects to Google Ads and Search Console in ways Amplitude does not, at a price Amplitude does not match. The standard lean-team setup is GA4 for acquisition plus one product analytics tool for behaviour, sharing a single agreed event naming convention across both.
Which should an Indian D2C brand pick?
GA4. Amplitude’s meter counts users, not engagement, and D2C traffic is high-volume and low-engagement: roughly 60,000 monthly visitors is 60,000 monthly tracked users, already past the free cap, even though the same traffic is under a million events. A festive-season spike adds visitors who fire three events each and still count fully. Spend the Amplitude budget on an incrementality test instead.
When is Amplitude worth paying for over free GA4?
When retention is your core metric and you have exhausted the free tier — typically a subscription or B2B SaaS product past roughly 50,000 monthly tracked users where cohort retention, not traffic source, decides the roadmap. If a product team already runs Amplitude, use their workspace rather than buying a second licence. If nobody but the analyst can drive it, it stops being the team’s source of truth within a quarter.