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PostHog alternatives

12 tools that do a similar job, and what makes each one different.

What PostHog is

PostHog is a bundle of product tools that sit under one account, covering product analytics, web analytics, session replay, feature flags, experiments, surveys, error tracking, logs, LLM observability, a managed data warehouse and a customer data platform. Analytics starts with autocapture, which records pageviews, clicks and form submissions without per event tracking code being written first. On top of that sit funnels, retention curves, path analysis, trends, dashboards and direct SQL querying for the questions the built-in views do not answer. Incoming events can be transformed before they are stored, including IP anonymisation and hashing of personal data. Session replay has SDKs for web, React Native, iOS, Android and Flutter. Recordings can be sampled, or gated by URL or by feature flag, so that only chosen sessions are captured, and text, inputs or whole elements can be masked on the device before a recording is sent. Retention runs to 30 days on the free plan, 90 days on pay as you go, one year on Boost and Scale, and five years on Enterprise. One detail catches people out: changing the retention setting applies only to recordings captured after the change, because existing recordings keep the period they were captured under. Feature flags support percentage rollouts, targeting by individual user or by group, multivariate variants and JSON payloads. The free tier is metered monthly. It covers one million analytics events, one million feature flag requests, 5,000 session recordings, one million data warehouse rows, 10 GB of ingested logs, 100,000 tracked exceptions and 1,500 survey responses. Usage past those allowances is charged per unit, starting at 0.00005 USD per analytics event, 0.0001 USD per feature flag request, 0.0050 USD per session recording, 0.000015 USD per data warehouse row and 0.10 USD per survey response. An account with no card on file is limited to one project and one year of data retention. Adding a card raises that to six projects, seven years of data retention and email support. PostHog Cloud is offered in a United States region and a European region hosted in Frankfurt. Public event capture endpoints live at us.i.posthog.com and eu.i.posthog.com, with private management endpoints at us.posthog.com and eu.posthog.com. The API accepts personal API keys, project secret API keys and OAuth, and the public POST-only endpoints are not rate limited. Self-hosting is possible but limited. The Docker Compose deployment is released under the MIT licence and wants roughly 4 vCPU, 16 GB of RAM and more than 30 GB of storage running Ubuntu Linux, but it is officially unsupported and carries no guarantees. Paid plan features are available only on PostHog Cloud, so a self-hosted instance runs the free feature set.

Web analytics with no cookies, no consent banner and a script under a kilobyte. One page shows what most people actually check: visitors, sources, pages, countries, devices, goals. Open source and self-hostable, EU-hosted, GDPR-friendly by design. The trade-off is deliberate, no user-level tracking, so no per-person funnels.

Paid

Event analytics for questions that begin with 'how many users who'. Funnels, retention curves, cohorts and flows are the core, built on events with properties rather than pageviews. Strong at behavioural questions and weaker at the simple traffic reporting a marketing team wants, which is why it often sits beside a web analytics tool.

Freemium

Behavioural analytics built around cohorts, retention and the paths users take through a product. Comparable to Mixpanel and generally chosen for the depth of its retention and journey analysis. Experimentation and customer data tooling sit alongside. Aimed at product teams with enough volume for the analysis to mean something.

Freemium

Simple, private analytics on one screen you can read in ten seconds. No cookies, no consent banner, GDPR and CCPA compliant, and data hosted with an EU isolation option. Deliberately minimal: traffic, referrers, pages, events. For anyone who wants to know whether the post did well and nothing more elaborate than that.

Paid

Catches errors in production and tells you what you need to fix them: the stack trace with source maps applied, the release that introduced it, the browser or runtime, and how many users hit it. Groups duplicates so one bug is one issue. Performance monitoring and session replay sit alongside. Most teams install it after the outage that made the case for it.

Freemium

Postgres with the things an application needs bolted on: authentication, row-level security, file storage, realtime subscriptions and auto-generated APIs. It is a real Postgres database, so `pg_dump` and any Postgres client work and leaving is a migration rather than a rewrite. Popular as a Firebase replacement for teams that would rather own SQL than a proprietary document store.

Freemium

The ecosystem around Lottie, the format that ships vector animation as JSON. Animations stay sharp at any size, weigh a fraction of a GIF or video, and can be recoloured or controlled at runtime. The platform hosts a large library, converts from After Effects, and provides players for web and mobile.

Freemium

Daily product launches with a badge and a backlink, run transparently, the ranking rules and the code are public, which is unusual in this category. Free and premium submission paths, with the paid one skipping the queue. Positioned as an open alternative to the closed boards, and worth watching for that reason as much as the traffic.

Freemium

Open source, unlike PostHog

Open source

Notes as plain markdown files in a folder you own. Links between notes build a graph, and a large plugin ecosystem covers everything from tasks to spaced repetition. Because the files are local and open, the notes outlive the application and any company behind it. Sync and publishing are paid add-ons; the core is free.

Freemium

Open source, unlike PostHog

Open source
PostHog alternatives · AI Tools Repo