Skip to content
testcritic

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 tier

From $199 per month (Cloud dedicated instance, billed hourly at $0.276)

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.

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

JavaScriptTypeScriptPythonJavaGoRubyPHPSwiftKotlin
JavaScriptTypeScript

Platforms

WebAPIiOSAndroid
WebiOSAndroid

Fits teams

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

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.