10 reasons smart companies choose Pendo over Amplitude

The Agentic Era is here: How can your company stay competitive?

Every company has been through at least one digital transformation initiative. Some have been through so many that they should get frequent transformer miles. 

But now there’s a new imperative: AI transformation. Enterprises are embracing agents, intelligent systems, and automation. These tools and platforms have the potential to cut costs, grow revenue, and improve agility … provided they’re strategically implemented and successfully deployed. 

The problem is that AI is also making it easier for anyone to design and deploy software. Expect a massive influx of new options to evaluate, each with its own steep learning curve. 

This leaves you with a new set of challenges:

• Managing dozens of new tools (and the budget that goes with them)
• Trying to unify disconnected data
• Offering a consistent user experience
• Measuring the impact of AI tools that don’t have built-in feedback loops 

In the agentic era, enterprise software is no longer just about shipping and deploying features. It’s definitely not about fancy dashboards that just give you vanity metrics on clicks and tricks. It’s about delivering real outcomes. 

Software experience is becoming the frontline for customer satisfaction, retention, new revenue opportunities, and even employee engagement. Companies cannot survive without a data-driven strategy to ensure their products work for the people who use them.

But being data-driven doesn’t mean a process that begins and ends with collecting data. It means using the data to:

• Analyze user behavior
• Surface insights and act on them
• Continuously improve the software experience 

Achieving all of the above takes a dedicated software experience management (SXM) platform. When the CEO is asking you to prove ROI on software spend, your IT teams are swamped in support tickets, and your R&D roadmap is headed off a cliff, partial solutions and stitched-together tech stacks won’t cut it. 

If you’re evaluating tools like Pendo and Amplitude, you’re likely looking for one platform to help you:

• • Understand how users interact with your product
  • Uncover why users behave the way they do
  • Engage and guide users to drive adoption and satisfaction
  • Close the loop on a perpetual cycle of analysis and optimization

And you want something to handle it all without creating new headaches for your IT team.

Spoiler alert: Pendo is the one platform that can do all of the above in a single, no-code solution. Over 14,000 companies—including United Airlines, Okta, and Salesforce— choose Pendo over Amplitude. 

Here’s why.

1. Pendo is built for action, not just analysis

Both Pendo and Amplitude can show you what happened with your software in the past. But only Pendo shows you the what and why. Even more critically, Pendo is designed to empower you to act on these insights immediately. 

We’re all familiar with “analysis paralysis,” that feeling of having too much data and not enough clarity. You may have beautiful data visualizations, charts, and graphs galore, but you’re still left wondering what to do.

Pendo is built to show you specific insights, based on your data, that inform a plan of action. Pendo Listen, Pendo Surveys, Pendo NPS, and Pendo AI sentiment analysis bring different types of data together to drive these insights.

Customers switch from Amplitude to Pendo to get:

• Integrated qualitative, quantitative, and visual feedback to uncover the “why”
• AI-powered sentiment and theme detection with Pendo Listen
• Seamless prioritization of insights into product roadmaps

“We started with Amplitude, but needed a complete solution—not a Frankenstein stack. Pendo gave us insights and action in one.”
— Okta Product Leader

2. Pendo gives you the ‘why,’ not just the ‘what’

Behavioral data only tells one part of the software experience story. Pendo connects the dots with qualitative feedback and sentiment, giving teams context behind every click. Customers choose Pendo for:

• Centralized user feedback collection with tools like Pendo Listen
• AI-powered sentiment analysis and feedback theme extraction
• The ability to tie qualitative insights directly to product usage patterns

Imagine 80% of your users were failing to complete an onboarding process. Both Amplitude and Pendo can tell you the number of people who successfully and unsuccessfully onboard. Only Pendo makes it easy to analyze why people drop off. And, of course, only Pendo offers the tools to fix the problem on the same platform, without writing a single line of code. 

“Amplitude told us what happened. Pendo helped us understand why—and what to fix. That’s what actually drove results.”
— VP Product, Mid-Market HR Tech

3. Pendo guides users across their entire journey

Pendo is the only integrated software experience management (SXM) platform designed from the ground up with built-in analytics and listening, plus engagement tools like guides, surveys, email, in-app communications, and feedback centers.

We’ve always believed that to improve the software experience, teams need a single pane of glass to utilize across the full user journey. That single solution must integrate product analytics, feedback, contextual communications, and action. This has been our founding vision since day one.

How do we know our big idea is the right idea? Other vendors are scrambling to replicate it. It’s great to see that Amplitude has acquired CommandAI in order to retrofit their solution to be more like ours. We’re excited to see them start this journey to turn their analytics offering into something more actionable and impactful. 

But while others are playing catch-up, Pendo is the only fully mature platform that offers:

• In-app and website guides, NPS surveys, resource centers, and email communications—all powered by an AI-ready data set
• Personalization and targeting  grounded in behavioral data
• Support for onboarding, feature adoption, and upsell moments in one flow

“Amplitude gave us great charts, but we had to guess what to do next. With Pendo, we guide users immediately—no delays, no development bottlenecks.”
— Director of Digital Experience, B2B SaaS

4. Pendo is built to empower everyone, not just analysts and data scientists

We know that great data + the ability to act = digital transformation that works. Amplitude is a powerful analytics tool … if you’ve got a data science degree (or headcount for a dedicated data science team). But for everyone else, there’s Pendo. With Pendo, teams across the org—from product managers, to marketers, to IT and revenue teams—can tag features, launch guides, and analyze results with zero coding experience.

We’ve always believed in democratizing access to powerful analytics, not just limiting it to the data science team. It’s another bold idea that other solutions resisted—until they didn’t.

Pendo gives teams of all types:

• No-code tagging and retroactive analytics tagging
• Drag-and-drop visual guide builder with A/B testing
• Easy segmentation and usage analytics with pre-built dashboards

“Pendo decreased time to production by 50% and cut engineering effort by 75%.”
— iRobot 

5. Pendo is a mature platform built from a consistent vision

Pendo has been building a vision of Software Experience Management for over a decade. It’s not just a set of features designed for individual business outcomes. 

Our platform is the embodiment of our mission statement. We help organizations build better software that drives sustainable product impact and innovation at scale. 

Amplitude is a marketing analytics platform, and a fine one. But even as they pivot toward in-app guidance and experimentation, they’re years behind in integration. What’s more they’re reacting to a changing market, not proactively driving that change as Pendo has. Their focus is on optimizing digital marketing, not helping organizations build better software.  

Pendo’s level of maturity and sophistication set it apart:

• We are one platform built for analytics, feedback, and action from the start
• The founding team is still leading product direction and innovation
• Todd Olson, co-founder and CEO, has led the product-led movement and literally wrote the book on it 
• Pendo is trusted by 14,000+ globally represented brands, with nearly a billion users reached

“Pendo has become the backbone of our efforts to improve customer health, drive adoption, and boost retention.”

— Talegent

6. Pendo gets you from insights to action in one platform

Amplitude users often need other tools—or custom development!—to act on what they’ve learned. 

Pendo makes taking action easy with native in-app guides, surveys, and email campaigns. With Pendo, you can see where and why users are experiencing friction with your product or software—and fix the problem on the same platform.

Pendo makes it simple to:

• Create native in-app guides, tooltips, walkthroughs, and resource centers in a user-friendly environment
• Launch personalized onboarding or in-context announcements without code
• Close the loop between data, insights, and action 

7. Pendo gets you to value faster

With Amplitude, it can take weeks to set up events and start seeing ROI. Pendo begins collecting data on day one, with retroactive tagging and no-code instrumentation. 

Kickstart your SXM program and begin maximizing ROI out of the box with:

• Immediate behavioral data visibility from installation
• Retroactive analytics that unlock historical context
• Intuitive, no-code setup that empowers product teams

“We reached time to value in minutes—not months.”
— UX Director, Technology

8. Pendo gives end-to-end visibility into your software’s impact

The software experience spans a broad range of tools you build and buy, across various form factors, including mobile apps and intranet portals. Software leaders need comprehensive visibility to discover actionable insights at each of these touchpoints. 

Amplitude gives you tunnel vision instead of a panoramic view. It lacks the ability to assign qualitative data to behavioral cohorts or view the user experience in context with targeted session replays. 

Pendo is the only complete platform designed to ensure you can deliver personalized experiences across web, mobile, email, and even internal applications. From embedded guides and cross-platform to NPS, session replay, and email campaigns, Pendo equips you with the insights and tools to engage with users throughout their journey: 

• Unified platform for experiences across iOS, Android, web, and internal tools like your CRM and HRIS
• Comprehensive cross-platform coverage for session replay, user guidance, and feedback
• Designed for scale across enterprises with 10K+ employees, with enterprise-grade security and privacy standards

“Pendo helped us reduce mobile error rates by 80%. Engineers could act fast with precise data.”
— Yahoo DSP

9. Pendo is built for the SaaS + AI era

The AI-driven landscape demands a dynamic, automated, and self-healing approach to software experience. Amplitude is primarily focused on digital marketing analytics and the customer journey. Although they’re expanding their scope and retrofitting solutions, they’re not yet ready to meet the moment.

Pendo takes a platform-agnostic approach to SXM by design. It can seamlessly ingest and activate data across your entire stack. And it empowers teams to proactively anticipate user needs, resolve friction, and create continuously improving software experiences, all with no code.

Pendo is ready for the agentic era. In fact, we’re helping build it:

• Pendo supports AI-ready data structures and analysis 
• Our team is pioneering agentic protocols like Model Context Protocol (MCP) and Agent-to-Agent workflows

10. Pendo is more than just a platform—it’s a community

You’ve seen what Pendo can do in comparison to Amplitude. But Pendo is more than a platform. We consider it our mission to improve the world’s experience with software. We’re proud to bring together a network of over 50,000 like-minded product managers, builders, and software leaders.

Our team is dedicated to upskilling your team and connecting you with the brightest minds in software. We’re proud to offer resources like the Pendomonium and PendomoniumX events, the Mind the Product community, and the courses at Pendo Academy to uplevel knowledge and advance careers. 

When you choose Pendo, you get more than just the world’s only comprehensive SXM platform:

• Pendo Academy training: Explore our extensive library of 150+ on-demand courses (142,000 courses were enrolled in 2024 alone)
• Pendo certification courses: These free courses are designed to deepen your expertise and bring new ideas to your organization. 
• World-class success and support: Ongoing partnership with professional services and support teams, earning a 97% CSAT rating from our customers
• Robust content and community: always-on, high-quality content including 13 Pendo User Groups (PUGs) and growing. 

Getting returns on your software investment: The ROI case for Pendo

Software experience management is crucial for enterprise organizations to get the full value from their software investments. When you adopt SXM, you can navigate complexity and uncertainty to gain a competitive edge, increase revenue, reduce risks, and lower costs. 

These aren’t just dazzling marketing promises. Pendo customers have proven to outperform their peers:

396% ROI | < 6 months payback | $3.6M+ in quantified value

Want further proof?  A recent Forrester Total Economic Impact (TEI) study quantified the impact of Pendo and found that an average enterprise customer sees:  

• $1.2M saved from streamlined product team collaboration
• $1.1M in onboarding savings through self-service education and embedded help
• 50% increase in the speed of software adoption
• $1.3M in productivity gains by continuously improving based on user feedback
• 80% fewer support tickets through proactive in-app education

To learn more about how Pendo helps drive positive business outcomes, download the Forrester Total Economic Impact™ Study.

You need more than analytics. You need a platform built for action.

Choosing the right product analytics and experience platform is no longer a tactical decision; it’s a strategic one. As software becomes central to how companies operate, compete, and serve customers, the need for actionable, integrated, and intelligent systems has never been greater.

Pendo offers a mature, unified platform that enables teams to:

• Understand both behavior and intent
• Engage users across the entire journey
• Move faster with no-code tools
• Drive measurable ROI
• Prepare for the AI-powered future of software

To see more about how Pendo delivers and why customers are switching from Amplitude, check out this resource page.