PostHog vs Plausible Analytics (2026)
A side-by-side comparison of features, pricing, licensing, and self-hosting.
Verdict: PostHog is a full product-analytics suite built for engineering teams — events, funnels, session replay, feature flags, A/B tests, and direct SQL querying. Plausible is a lightweight, privacy-first traffic meter built for anyone who needs clean pageview data without GDPR friction. They overlap on "web analytics" but solve fundamentally different problems.
If your question is "did this feature change retention for power users in Germany," you need PostHog. If your question is "how many people hit the pricing page today and where did they come from," Plausible answers it in three seconds from a single dashboard screen.
PostHog's free cloud tier is generous (1M events/month), and self-hosting removes the cap entirely — but the infrastructure overhead of Kafka, ClickHouse, and Redis is real. Plausible's self-host is one Docker Compose file running Elixir and PostgreSQL.
Call it: product and engineering teams building instrumented software, running experiments, or needing session-level debugging should choose PostHog. Content sites, SaaS landing pages, and teams migrating off Google Analytics primarily for GDPR and data-ownership reasons should choose Plausible.
PostHog
Open-source product analytics suite with events, funnels, session replay, feature flags, and A/B tests.
Pros
- Single platform replaces GA, Hotjar, LaunchDarkly, and parts of Segment
- Generous free cloud tier — 1 million events per month at no cost
- Full self-host option with no event-volume or feature restrictions
Cons
- Self-hosting at scale requires Kafka, ClickHouse, and Redis — significant ops burden
- Cloud pricing grows quickly for high-volume products beyond the free tier
Plausible Analytics
Lightweight, cookieless web analytics that is GDPR-friendly out of the box.
Pros
- No cookies means legally simpler GDPR/CCPA compliance without a consent flow
- Sub-1 KB tracking script with no measurable page-weight impact
- Clean, single-page dashboard readable by non-technical stakeholders
Cons
- No session replay, heatmaps, or multi-step funnel visualization
- Less granular than GA4 for product analytics or A/B testing
PostHog vs Plausible Analytics: spec comparison
| Spec | PostHog | Plausible Analytics |
|---|---|---|
| License | MIT | AGPL-3.0 |
| Open source | Yes | Yes |
| Self-hostable | Yes | Yes |
| Starting price | Free / self-host | from $9/mo |
| Pricing model | open-core | open-core |
| Language | Python | Elixir |
| Platforms | web, ios, android, self-hosted | web, self-hosted |
| Founded | 2020 | 2019 |
| GitHub stars | 24,000 | 21,000 |
FAQ
PostHog vs Plausible Analytics: which is better?
Neither is universally better. PostHog (Free / self-host) suits Product and engineering teams that want unified analytics, session replay, and experimentation in a single self-hostable platform.; Plausible Analytics (from $9/mo) suits Content sites, SaaS landing pages, and blogs that want accurate privacy-first traffic data without GDPR cookie-consent friction.. The spec table above breaks down the differences.
Is PostHog or Plausible Analytics cheaper?
PostHog starts lower at Free / self-host vs from $9/mo.