PostHog vs Mixpanel
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.
Growth now starts at $0 and scales with event volume up to 20M events a month, with the first million free; annual billing saves around $480 a year. Enterprise is quote-based. Event-volume pricing stays generous for early products but climbs with a chatty event schema.
Free tier
Large monthly free allowance across every product, plus free self-hosting.
Free forever, up to 1M events a month.
Open source
MIT (core) / proprietary enterprise modules
Self-hostable
No-code authoring
Languages
Platforms
Fits teams
Adoption
Widely used
PostHog · since 2020
Category standard
Mixpanel · since 2009
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.
- Genuinely self-serve — product managers build their own reports without help.
- Large free tier that carries an early-stage product a long way.
- Fast query performance on large event volumes.
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 disciplined event instrumentation and naming.
- Weaker on user-level qualitative investigation than replay tools.
- Costs scale with event volume, which grows faster than user count.
Best for
Startups and scale-ups consolidating analytics, replay and flags into one platform.
Product teams that want fast, self-serve behavioural reporting.
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.