Matomo vs PostHog

From $29 per month (Cloud, 50k hits; annual billing gives 2 months free)

Free tier available

Self-hosting is free but plugins such as heatmaps and A/B testing are paid add-ons. Cloud scales with hits.

Usage-based pricing per product with a substantial free tier; most small teams stay free indefinitely.

Self-hosted Community edition is free forever with unlimited users and hits; premium plugins are paid.

Large monthly free allowance across every product, plus free self-hosting.

Widely used

InnoCraft · since 2007

Widely used

PostHog · since 2020

• Complete data ownership with no third-party processing — the strongest GDPR position available.
• No sampling, unlike free tiers of hosted analytics.
• Can be configured to run without cookies or consent banners.

• 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.

• Self-hosting requires PHP and MySQL operations, including performance tuning at scale.
• The interface is less refined than modern product analytics tools.
• Advanced features are paid plugins even on the free self-hosted edition.

• 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.

Public sector, healthcare and European organisations with strict data-residency requirements.

Startups and scale-ups consolidating analytics, replay and flags into one platform.