PostHog vs OpenReplay
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 $199 per month (Cloud dedicated instance, billed hourly at $0.276)
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 costs only infrastructure and is the main reason to pick OpenReplay. Managed cloud is an instance you rent rather than a per-session rate, though a usage-based serverless option also exists.
Free tier
Large monthly free allowance across every product, plus free self-hosting.
Self-hosted community edition is free and unlimited.
Open source
MIT (core) / proprietary enterprise modules
ELv2
Self-hostable
No-code authoring
Languages
Platforms
Fits teams
Adoption
Widely used
PostHog · since 2020
Established
OpenReplay · since 2021
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.
- Full data sovereignty — recordings stay inside your infrastructure.
- Developer-focused feature set comparable to LogRocket.
- No volume-based pricing when self-hosted.
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 session replay is a non-trivial operational commitment, including storage.
- Smaller community and fewer integrations than the commercial tools.
- Analytics and funnel features are thinner.
Best for
Startups and scale-ups consolidating analytics, replay and flags into one platform.
Privacy-constrained or high-volume teams that cannot use a hosted replay vendor.
All of these integrate with: Slack, Sentry.
Pricing last reviewed August 2026 and is indicative only — confirm on each vendor’s own page.