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testcritic

PostHog vs Heap

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 tier

Free tier available

Free tier

What 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 tiers are quote-based by session volume.

Free tier

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

Free plan with a monthly session limit.

Open source

MIT (core) / proprietary enterprise modules

Self-hostable

No-code authoring

Languages

JavaScriptTypeScriptPythonJavaGoRubyPHPSwiftKotlin
JavaScriptSwiftKotlin

Platforms

WebAPIiOSAndroid
WebiOSAndroid

Fits teams

Solo / side projectStartupScale-up / mid-marketEnterprise
Scale-up / mid-marketEnterprise

Adoption

Widely used

PostHog · since 2020

Widely used

Contentsquare · since 2013

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.
  • 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.

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.
  • 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.

Best for

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

Product teams that want analytics without an instrumentation backlog.

All of these integrate with: Segment, Snowflake, BigQuery, Slack.

Pricing last reviewed August 2026 and is indicative only — confirm on each vendor’s own page.