PostHog vs Amplitude
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.
Usage-based pricing per product with a substantial free tier; most small teams stay free indefinitely.
Paid plans are quote-based on monthly tracked users and events; enterprise contracts are substantial.
Free tier
Large monthly free allowance across every product, plus free self-hosting.
Free plan with a monthly event allowance suitable for early-stage products.
Open source
MIT (core) / proprietary enterprise modules
Self-hostable
No-code authoring
Languages
Platforms
Fits teams
Adoption
Widely used
PostHog · since 2020
Category standard
Amplitude · since 2012
Strengths
- 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.
- The deepest retention and cohort analysis in mainstream product analytics.
- Good free tier for early-stage products.
- Strong data-governance tooling for event taxonomy.
Limitations
- 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.
- Requires deliberate event instrumentation — nothing works without it.
- Enterprise pricing rises steeply with tracked users.
- Replay and experimentation are newer and less mature than the analytics core.
Best for
Startups and scale-ups consolidating analytics, replay and flags into one platform.
Product teams that need rigorous behavioural analysis over time.
All of these integrate with: Segment, Snowflake, Slack.
Pricing last reviewed August 2026 and is indicative only — confirm on each vendor’s own page.