PostHog vs Matomo
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 tierFrom $29 per month (Cloud, 50k hits; annual billing gives 2 months free)
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.
Self-hosting is free but plugins such as heatmaps and A/B testing are paid add-ons. Cloud scales with hits.
Free tier
Large monthly free allowance across every product, plus free self-hosting.
Self-hosted Community edition is free forever with unlimited users and hits; premium plugins are paid.
Open source
MIT (core) / proprietary enterprise modules
GPL-3.0
Self-hostable
No-code authoring
Languages
Platforms
Fits teams
Adoption
Widely used
PostHog · since 2020
Widely used
InnoCraft · since 2007
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.
- 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.
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.
- 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.
Best for
Startups and scale-ups consolidating analytics, replay and flags into one platform.
Public sector, healthcare and European organisations with strict data-residency requirements.
All of these integrate with: Zapier.
Pricing last reviewed August 2026 and is indicative only — confirm on each vendor’s own page.