PostHog vs Mixpanel

Free tier available

From $24 per month (indicative, Growth by event volume)

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

Event-volume pricing with an unusually generous free tier for early products.

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

Free plan with a large monthly event allowance.

Widely used

PostHog · since 2020

Category standard

Mixpanel · since 2009

• 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.

• 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.

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

Product teams that want fast, self-serve behavioural reporting.