Crypto product teams face a data problem that traditional analytics platforms were never built to solve. You can track page views, clicks, and session duration with tools like Amplitude, but the moment a user connects their wallet and interacts with your smart contracts, you lose visibility. The transaction happens onchain, your analytics dashboard shows nothing, and you are left guessing whether your product actually drives the behaviour that matters.

This is the gap Formo was built to close. While Amplitude remains a gold standard for product analytics in Web2, it treats blockchain transactions as external events requiring complex custom instrumentation. Formo unifies offchain engagement and onchain activity into a single platform, giving crypto teams the complete picture without months of data engineering work.

This comparison breaks down when each platform makes sense, what you gain and lose with each choice, and how DeFi teams are solving the attribution problem that general analytics tools cannot address.

Feature Comparison at a Glance

Here is how the platforms compare across capabilities that matter for onchain product teams. Where Amplitude has a genuine advantage, this table reflects it.

What Amplitude Does Well

Amplitude has earned its reputation as consistently ranked #1 on G2 for product analytics. Over 45,000 digital products at more than 1,000 enterprise customers use it to understand user behaviour, and for good reason.

Event-Based Analytics at Scale

Event-based analytics is the practice of instrumenting your app to send named events (button clicks, page views, feature usage) that the platform aggregates into user profiles, funnels, and cohorts. Amplitude's implementation of this model is mature and best-in-class. The platform excels at answering which features drive activation, where users drop off in the onboarding flow, and what behaviours predict long-term retention.

The interface is intuitive enough for non-technical product managers while offering depth for data analysts. The AI-powered query builder lets teams ask questions in natural language rather than writing SQL.

Rich Segmentation and Cohort Analysis

Amplitude's segmentation capabilities are highly flexible. You can create dynamic cohorts based on any combination of user properties and behaviours, then compare conversion rates, feature adoption, and retention across those segments. This is where product teams find their "aha moments", discovering that users who complete a specific action within their first week have significantly higher lifetime value.

A/B Testing, Session Replay, and Experimentation

Amplitude offers session replay, experimentation (A/B testing), and feature flags as part of a broader platform. These capabilities are not available in Formo. If you need to run controlled experiments on your UI or review session recordings to diagnose drop-off, Amplitude has a mature implementation that Formo does not currently match.

Integration Ecosystem

Amplitude integrates with the standard Web2 stack: Google Analytics, Segment, mParticle, data warehouses such as BigQuery and Snowflake, and experimentation platforms. If you are running a SaaS product with a typical tech stack, Amplitude slots in cleanly.

The Learning Curve Trade-off

Multiple reviewers on Gartner Peer Insights note that while Amplitude is powerful, there is a steep learning curve for advanced features. Implementation requires careful planning around tracking plans, naming conventions, and event taxonomy. Get this wrong early, and you will spend months cleaning up inconsistent data.

Where Amplitude Hits a Wall with Crypto

The problem surfaces the moment your users start interacting with smart contracts. Amplitude has no native understanding of blockchain data. Wallet addresses, transaction hashes, gas fees, token swaps, liquidity positions, and protocol-specific actions are all invisible unless you build custom pipelines to feed that data in.

The Custom Data Pipeline Problem

To track onchain activity in Amplitude, you need to: run blockchain indexers to monitor smart contract events across multiple chains, parse transaction data to extract meaningful business metrics, match wallet addresses to user sessions so offchain and onchain behaviour connects to the same profile, transform blockchain events into Amplitude's event schema, and maintain all of this infrastructure as your protocol evolves and new chains launch.

"Using other tools with onchain data was clunky for analytics, especially in web3." One DeFi product manager's experience captures the outcome: you end up with either a fragmented view (web analytics in one tool, onchain data in another) or a massive data engineering project that pulls resources from building product.

The Identity Resolution Problem

Blockchain introduces a fundamental identity challenge. Users interact with your website using cookies and sessions, then connect a wallet that is a pseudonymous address. Amplitude cannot automatically link these identities. You need custom logic to detect wallet connection events, associate the wallet address with the user profile, and handle cases where one user has multiple wallets or multiple users share a device. Get this wrong, and your retention analysis thinks one user is three different people.

Missing Context on User Value

In crypto, the most important signal of user quality is onchain behaviour. A user who provided $50,000 in liquidity is fundamentally different from one who made a single $10 swap, but Amplitude does not know this without extensive custom instrumentation. You cannot segment by wallet net worth, transaction history across other protocols, token holdings, or DeFi engagement score without building your own wallet intelligence layer on top of the analytics platform.

How Formo Solves the Onchain Analytics Problem

Formo was built specifically for crypto teams who need the complete picture without data engineering overhead. The platform unifies web analytics, product analytics, and onchain data into a single dashboard, treating blockchain transactions as first-class events rather than external data to be manually piped in.

Unified Event Tracking Across the Full Funnel

Formo tracks the entire user journey from first website visit through wallet connection to onchain conversion. Web metrics (visitors, page views, bounce rates, referral sources), product analytics (feature usage, activation funnels, retention cohorts), and onchain metrics (wallets, transactions, volume, revenue, TVL) are not siloed views. Formo automatically connects offchain engagement with onchain activity, so you can answer questions like "which marketing channel drives the highest TVL?" or "what website behaviour predicts a user will become a liquidity provider?"

Built-in Onchain Attribution

Onchain attribution is the practice of connecting offchain marketing touchpoints (UTM parameters, referral sources, ad clicks) to onchain conversion events such as transactions and protocol revenue. Formo handles identity resolution and attribution automatically. When a user connects their wallet, Formo links that address to their web session and tracks both sides of the journey. UTM parameters and referral sources flow through to onchain conversions, giving you true marketing ROI measurement: CAC, LTV, and revenue per channel without custom data pipelines.

Wallet Intelligence Layer

Wallet intelligence is the practice of enriching a wallet address with onchain context to understand who a user is and how they behave. Formo enriches every wallet with a real-time activity feed (what users are doing across DeFi), engagement scoring (identifying high-value users by onchain behaviour), token holdings and net worth, cross-protocol activity (whether users are active in competing protocols), and social profiles (ENS names and connected social accounts).

This turns anonymous addresses into actionable personas. You can build audiences like "wallets with over $10,000 net worth who have used a competing DEX in the last 30 days" without writing a single SQL query.

Multi-Chain Support Without the Complexity

Formo supports 40+ EVM-compatible chains. You do not need separate indexers for Ethereum, Polygon, Arbitrum, Base, and every other network your users touch. The platform aggregates cross-chain behaviour into unified user profiles, showing you how users move between ecosystems.

When to Choose Each Platform

When to Choose Amplitude

You Are Building a Web2 Product with Optional Crypto Features

If blockchain is a secondary feature rather than core to your product, Amplitude's mature analytics platform may be sufficient. You can track the offchain experience in Amplitude and use separate tools for the smaller percentage of onchain activity.

You Have a Dedicated Data Engineering Team

If you already employ data engineers who can build and maintain custom blockchain indexers, Amplitude's flexibility lets you pipe onchain data into its event model. You get highly flexible product analytics with full control over your data architecture.

You Need A/B Testing, Session Replay, or Feature Flags

Amplitude's experimentation suite, session replay, and feature flag capabilities are genuine differentiators. Formo does not currently offer these. If running controlled product experiments or reviewing session recordings is critical to your team's workflow, Amplitude is the right platform.

Your User Base Is Primarily Web2

If most users never connect a wallet or interact with smart contracts, you do not need crypto-native analytics. Amplitude will serve you better than a specialised tool for a use case it was not built for.

When to Choose Formo

Onchain Activity Is Core to Your Product

If your users' most important actions happen in smart contracts (swaps, liquidity provision, NFT mints, governance votes), you need a platform that treats blockchain data as first-class. Formo gives you that visibility without custom engineering. Amplitude's lack of native blockchain support becomes a blocker, not just an inconvenience.

You Need to Measure Marketing ROI for Onchain Conversions

If you are running paid acquisition campaigns and need to know which channels drive TVL, transaction volume, or protocol revenue, Formo's attribution model connects ad spend to onchain outcomes automatically. This is the attribution model that DeFi growth teams have been building manually for years, now available out of the box.

You Want to Segment Users by Onchain Behaviour

If user quality is determined by wallet activity (net worth, DeFi engagement, token holdings), Formo's wallet intelligence provides this context without building enrichment pipelines. You can identify high-value users before they churn, target power users with governance proposals, or build lookalike audiences based on users who drive the most protocol revenue.

You Are a Lean Team Without Dedicated Data Engineers

Most crypto startups do not have the resources to build custom analytics infrastructure. Formo eliminates months of engineering work, letting product and growth teams access the data they need immediately. Kairos Swap, a DEX on Base with over $200M in volume, uses Formo to understand where users find them, how active they are across DeFi, and which social channels drive the highest-quality users.

You Operate Across Multiple Chains

If your users interact with your protocol on Ethereum, then bridge to Arbitrum, then use your Base deployment, you need unified cross-chain profiles. Formo aggregates this automatically across 40+ EVM chains. Amplitude requires separate tracking per chain and does not aggregate cross-chain behaviour natively.

Pricing Comparison

The Hybrid Approach

Some teams use both. They run Amplitude for deep product analytics on their web app and dashboard, then use Formo for onchain attribution and wallet intelligence. This works if you have the budget and can tolerate data living in two systems, but it introduces complexity around which tool is the source of truth for overlapping metrics such as retention and revenue.

For most crypto teams, especially early-stage ones, starting with Formo and evaluating whether Amplitude's experimentation and session replay features are genuinely necessary is the lower-friction path.

The Bottom Line

The Amplitude vs Formo decision comes down to a single question: is onchain activity core to understanding your product's success?

If your answer is yes, Amplitude's lack of native blockchain support becomes a blocker. You will spend months building infrastructure that Formo provides out of the box, and you will still lack the wallet intelligence layer that makes crypto user segmentation actionable. The setup time difference alone justifies evaluation: under 10 minutes to full visibility versus months of custom data engineering is not a marginal improvement.

Amplitude remains unmatched for Web2 product analytics. Its depth, maturity, and experimentation features make it the right choice for products where blockchain is peripheral. But for DeFi protocols, NFT platforms, and onchain apps where the most important user actions happen in smart contracts, Formo was built to solve this exact problem.

The CTO of Kairos Swap, which has processed over $200M in volume on Base, credits Formo with giving the team visibility they could not get from traditional analytics tools. As one growth lead described it: "exactly what I was missing while leading growth in DeFi."

More in This Series

Evaluating your Web3 analytics stack? Read the other comparisons in this series:

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the main difference between Formo and Amplitude?

Amplitude is a mature product analytics platform for Web2 with no native blockchain support. Formo is purpose-built for crypto apps, unifying web analytics, wallet intelligence, and onchain data in one place. Amplitude requires months of custom engineering to track onchain events; Formo does it automatically.

Does Amplitude support A/B testing and session replay?

Yes. A/B testing (experimentation), session replay, and feature flags are core Amplitude features. Formo does not currently offer these capabilities. If controlled product experiments or session recordings are critical to your workflow, Amplitude has a more mature implementation.

How much does Amplitude cost?

Amplitude's free Starter plan covers up to 10,000 monthly tracked users. The Plus plan starts from $49/month. Growth and Enterprise plans require contacting sales for custom pricing. Formo offers a free tier and paid plans from $159/month.

Can Amplitude track onchain transactions?

Not natively. Tracking onchain events in Amplitude requires building custom blockchain indexers, parsing transaction data, resolving wallet-to-session identity, and maintaining ETL pipelines. Formo handles all of this automatically. See how onchain attribution works in Formo.

Which platform is better for DeFi product analytics?

Formo. DeFi teams need wallet-based retention cohorts, onchain funnel analysis, and campaign-to-transaction attribution. Amplitude can approximate these with significant engineering investment, but Formo provides them natively. See our guide toDeFi marketing analytics.