FullStory vs PostHog
Feature checklists rarely decide anything. What decides it is the pricing metric, who has to write the tests, and which limitation you can live with.
Entry price
Quote on request
Quote onlyFree tier available
Free tierWhat drives the bill
The metric that actually scales your invoice.
Quote-based annual contracts priced by session volume. Among the more expensive tools in the category.
Usage-based pricing per product with a substantial free tier; most small teams stay free indefinitely.
Free tier
Free plan with limited monthly sessions.
Large monthly free allowance across every product, plus free self-hosting.
Open source
MIT (core) / proprietary enterprise modules
Self-hostable
No-code authoring
Languages
Platforms
Fits teams
Adoption
Widely used
FullStory · since 2014
Widely used
PostHog · since 2020
Strengths
- Retroactive analysis is a genuine capability difference, not a marketing angle.
- Excellent search: find the eleven sessions where a specific error occurred in checkout.
- Strong privacy controls with element-level exclusion rules.
- Replaces four or five separate subscriptions with one bill and one SDK.
- Free tier is large enough for real production use at startup scale.
- Open source with a credible self-hosting path.
Limitations
- Expensive, with opaque quote-based pricing.
- Capturing everything raises data-governance questions that need answering up front.
- Meaningful learning curve to use the search language well.
- Individual modules are less deep than category specialists.
- Self-hosting at scale is a serious infrastructure undertaking.
- The product surface changes fast, which means occasional churn.
Best for
Product and support organisations that need to investigate specific user problems in depth.
Startups and scale-ups consolidating analytics, replay and flags into one platform.
All of these integrate with: Segment, Slack, Snowflake, Sentry.
Pricing last reviewed August 2026 and is indicative only — confirm on each vendor’s own page.