Plausible vs PostHog
Both are analytics tools. Here is what separates them.
What Plausible is
Plausible Analytics is a web analytics tool that reports how many people visit a site and what they do there, without cookies and without collecting personal data. It is built as a direct alternative to Google Analytics for site owners who want the numbers but not the tracking. The tracking script is under 1 KB, small enough that it does not meaningfully affect how fast a page loads. Because it sets no cookies and stores no personal data, a site running it does not need a cookie banner for analytics, and the product is compliant with GDPR and CCPA. It does not follow visitors across sites or devices, and the rest of the design follows from that: there is no individual-level profile to query, so every report is an aggregate. The dashboard updates in real time and fits on a single screen. It answers the questions most site owners actually have, which pages get read, where visitors came from, which campaigns worked, and what people did before they left. Goals can be configured with custom properties to track signups, purchases, clicks and form completions, and revenue can be attributed to them. Scroll depth, file downloads and outbound clicks are tracked automatically rather than needing separate setup, and bot traffic is filtered out by default. Teams can manage several sites under one account, sort them by traffic, and control who sees which of them. Two-factor authentication is available. There is an API for reading statistics and for sending events from a server, plus integrations with Google Search Console, Google Tag Manager and WordPress. Existing Google Analytics data can be imported, so moving does not mean losing the history. Plausible is open source under the AGPLv3 licence and the code is public and auditable on GitHub. It can be self-hosted, so a team that wants its analytics on its own infrastructure can run the whole thing itself. The hosted service is based and hosted in the EU. Uku Taht started the project in December 2018 and paid subscriptions launched the following year. The company is self-funded and profitable, has no outside investors, crossed one million dollars in annual recurring revenue in 2022, and is now a team of ten serving more than twenty thousand paying subscribers. Pricing starts at four dollars a month on an annual plan and runs to ninety dollars a month, with a free trial.
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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