Heap 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
Free tier available
Free tierFree tier available
Free tierWhat drives the bill
The metric that actually scales your invoice.
Paid tiers are quote-based by session volume.
Usage-based pricing per product with a substantial free tier; most small teams stay free indefinitely.
Free tier
Free plan with a monthly session limit.
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
Contentsquare · since 2013
Widely used
PostHog · since 2020
Strengths
- Retroactive event definition eliminates 'we didn't track that' entirely.
- Very fast time to first insight — no instrumentation project required.
- Warehouse sync for teams that want the raw data.
- 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
- Autocaptured data needs governance or the event list becomes unusable noise.
- Session-based pricing on high-traffic products.
- Acquisition means overlap with Contentsquare's own products.
- 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 teams that want analytics without an instrumentation backlog.
Startups and scale-ups consolidating analytics, replay and flags into one platform.
All of these integrate with: Segment, Snowflake, Slack, BigQuery.
Pricing last reviewed August 2026 and is indicative only — confirm on each vendor’s own page.