Amplitude vs PostHog

Amplitude

Product analytics for understanding user behavior

Amplitude is a product analytics platform. Instead of counting page views, it tracks the events users perform inside a product - signing up, creating a project, inviting a teammate, upgrading - and lets teams analyse those events as funnels, retention curves, user paths and cohorts to understand what drives people to stay or leave. It is one of the two names that defined the event-based analytics category, alongside Mixpanel, and it has grown up with larger customers. Beyond core analytics it now offers experimentation for A/B tests, feature flags, session replay, a customer data platform for routing events to other tools, and AI features for asking questions of your data in plain language. The pitch is a single digital analytics platform rather than a collection of point tools. The strengths are analytical depth and governance. Behavioural cohorts, multi-step funnels with conversion windows, retention by any property, and the ability to define a taxonomy of events and enforce it across teams are what mature product organisations need. The free tier is generous enough for early startups to start properly instrumented. The costs are complexity and implementation work. Event analytics is only as good as the tracking plan behind it: deciding what to track, naming it consistently and instrumenting it correctly takes real effort, and a messy implementation produces charts nobody trusts. Pricing at scale is based on tracked users or events and can become significant for high-volume consumer products. The main alternatives are Mixpanel, which is similar in scope and often preferred for ease of use; PostHog, which is open source and bundles analytics with replay, flags and experiments for engineering-led teams; Heap, which auto-captures events retroactively; and Google Analytics 4, which is free but built around marketing rather than product questions. Choose Amplitude when product analytics is central to how you make decisions and you are willing to invest in a clean tracking plan.

PostHog

Open-source product analytics, session replay, and feature flags

PostHog is an open-source product platform that bundles product analytics, session replay, feature flags, experimentation, surveys, error tracking, and a data warehouse into one tool, available as cloud or self-hosted. The problem it targets is stack sprawl. A typical product team wires up Mixpanel or Amplitude for analytics, LaunchDarkly for feature flags, FullStory or Hotjar for session replay, Sentry for errors, and Typeform for surveys - five contracts, five SDKs, five sets of user identities that do not join up. PostHog's bet is that these are all the same data, so they belong in one product where you can watch the session replay of the user who dropped out of the funnel, behind the feature flag you shipped last week. Pricing is usage-based with a large free tier, and PostHog states that more than 90% of its customers use it for free. The monthly free tier resets every month and applies on every plan, including paid ones: 1 million analytics events, 5,000 session recordings, 1 million feature flag requests, 100,000 error tracking exceptions, 1,500 survey responses, 1 million data warehouse rows, 10,000 pipeline events, 100,000 AI observability events, and 10 GB of ingested logs. No credit card is required, and the free plan includes 1 project, 1-year data retention, unlimited team members, and a choice of US (Virginia) or EU (Frankfurt) hosting. Past the free tier, pricing is per unit and the rate falls with scale. Product analytics starts at $0.00005 per event for the first 1-2 million events beyond the free tier, dropping through $0.0000343 (2-15 million), $0.0000295 (15-50 million), $0.0000218 (50-100 million), $0.0000150 (100-250 million), to $0.0000090 per event above 250 million. Adding a card also raises the account to 6 projects, 7-year data retention, and email support. Per-product billing limits can be set so a traffic spike cannot produce a surprise invoice. Who it is for: engineering-led product teams, especially at startups, who would rather instrument once and get five tools than integrate five vendors. Self-hosting suits teams with data residency constraints, though PostHog's EU cloud region covers most of that need without the operational burden. How it compares: Mixpanel and Amplitude are more refined as pure analytics products and are the better choice if analytics is all you need. LaunchDarkly is a stronger standalone feature-flag platform with more governance. Sentry is a better error tracker. PostHog rarely wins any single category head-to-head - it wins on consolidation, price at low volume, and the fact that the tools share one user identity. Evaluate it when you are about to buy your third point solution.