PostHog vs Plausible Analytics

PostHog and Plausible serve fundamentally different audiences despite both being analytics tools. Plausible is website analytics — it answers "how many people visited, where did they come from, what pages did they view?" It does this with a sub-1KB script, no cookies, full GDPR compliance out of the box, and a dashboard so simple a non-technical founder can understand it in 30 seconds. If your goal is traffic insight without bureaucracy, Plausible delivers that faster than any competitor.

PostHog is product analytics — it answers "what are users actually doing inside my product, where do they drop off in the funnel, which cohorts retain better, does feature X increase activation?" The difference is scope. Plausible sits at the edge of your site; PostHog embeds deeply into your product, tracking events, user properties, sessions, and behavioral patterns across the full lifecycle. PostHog also ships session replay, feature flags, A/B experiments, and surveys — tools that have no equivalent in Plausible.

The pricing structure also diverges sharply. Plausible starts at $9/month and scales by pageview volume — you always pay, even at small scale. PostHog offers a free cloud tier up to 1 million events per month, making it genuinely free for most early-stage products. Both are open source and self-hostable, which is unusual in this space and a meaningful option for teams with data residency requirements or a philosophical commitment to open source infrastructure.

The right choice depends on your role and what questions you need answered. Marketing and content teams tracking a public website will find Plausible's simplicity perfect — it takes 10 minutes to set up and requires zero training to use. Engineering and product teams building SaaS products need the depth PostHog provides: funnels, retention curves, cohort analysis, and session replay to debug UX problems. Many teams run both: Plausible on the marketing site, PostHog inside the product.