Mixpanel vs PostHog
Both are analytics tools. Here is what separates them.
What Mixpanel is
Mixpanel is a product analytics platform that measures how people actually use a product. It works from an event-based data model, recording user interactions as discrete events, which is what makes questions of this shape answerable: how many users who did one thing went on to do another. The company was founded in 2009, and the platform now covers product, web and mobile analytics. Alongside the core analysis, Mixpanel provides session replay for watching individual sessions back, experiments and feature flagging with support for multiple environments, and anomaly detection for movements in metrics that nobody thought to go looking for. Because the flags and the analytics sit in the same product, an experiment's exposure and its outcome are recorded in the same event data. Warehouse connectors keep data in sync with a data warehouse, and there is an API for everything else. Custom data retention policies can be set, which matters where there are internal or legal limits on how long behavioural data may be kept. Pricing starts at $0. The free tier allows up to 1 million events per month, which is enough to instrument a small product properly rather than just sample it, and startups can qualify for a plan that is free for the first year. At the other end, the Enterprise plan is quoted at up to 1 trillion events and comes with a dedicated account manager. The gap between those two figures is the point of the pricing: the same event model is meant to hold from a side project up to a company with heavy traffic, and Mixpanel is used by small and midsize businesses as well as enterprises. Support outside the enterprise tier runs through documentation and a community, so routine troubleshooting is self-service. Mixpanel is not open source. It integrates with other platforms, and the combination of warehouse connectors and configurable retention is how teams keep a usable copy of their event data on their own side rather than only inside the analytics tool.
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.
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