Amplitude vs PostHog
An independent, review-free comparison compiled by the SaaSTracker editorial team. Both products are profiled in full, and neither can pay for placement here.
The short answer
Editorial assessmentAmplitude compared with PostHog
PostHog covers a similar footprint (analytics, replay, flags, experiments, surveys, error tracking) but is open source, self-hostable, priced per product with a free allowance on each, and unmistakably engineer-first. Amplitude is hosted only, more polished for non-technical users, and better at data governance. Pick PostHog if your team writes code and wants control and an EU cloud; pick Amplitude if product and marketing staff are the primary users and you want the guides and surveys layer.
Choose Amplitude if
Product-led software companies who want analytics, session replay, feature flags, experiments, and in-app guides from one vendor on an event meter rather than per seat, and who expect to stay under 70 million events a month where the self-serve Plus plan applies and no sales call is required.
Choose PostHog if
Engineering-led SaaS and product teams that want web analytics, product analytics, replay, flags, and experimentation consolidated in one usage-priced platform, and that are comfortable doing their own revenue-attribution modeling if they need it.
Side by side
13 attributes| Attribute | Amplitude | PostHog |
|---|---|---|
| Category | Product Analytics | Analytics |
| Starting price | $0 (Free, 2M events per month forever); Plus starts at $0 with the first 2M events free (free plan available) | $0 (generous monthly free tiers; pay only past the allowance) (free plan available) |
| Pricing model | Usage-based on events ingested per month across four plans. Free and Plus are self-serve with published limits, Growth and Enterprise are quoted, and add-ons on the upper tiers are priced as a percentage of the platform plan. | Usage-based pricing per product: every product has a monthly free allowance, then per-unit billing (per event, recording, flag request, survey response, or row) with steep volume discounts; optional platform packages add support and compliance features. |
| Free plan | 2 million events per month forever with no credit card, including 10,000 monthly session replays and 500 active AI visibility prompts. Behavioural cohorts are not included on the free tier. | 1M analytics events, 5K session recordings, 1M feature-flag requests, 100K exceptions, 1,500 survey responses, and 1M data warehouse rows per month, on 1 project with 1-year retention. |
| Free trial | No fixed trial; the permanent free plan is the evaluation path, and paid features can be trialled within it | Not applicable; the free tier is permanent, not a trial |
| Best for | Product-led software companies who want analytics, session replay, feature flags, experiments, and in-app guides from one vendor on an event meter rather than per seat, and who expect to stay under 70 million events a month where the self-serve Plus plan applies and no sales call is required. | Engineering-led SaaS and product teams that want web analytics, product analytics, replay, flags, and experimentation consolidated in one usage-priced platform, and that are comfortable doing their own revenue-attribution modeling if they need it. |
| Setup time | A working chart in under an hour with autocapture or a CDP connection. A properly instrumented, governed implementation across web and mobile is a two to four week project, longer than Mixpanel because there is more platform to configure and because tracking plans are worth doing properly from the start. | Minutes to first data with the JS snippet and autocapture; days to weeks to define clean custom events, dashboards, and cohorts; warehouse sources and pipelines are a separate project. |
| Learning curve | Moderate. Chart building is approachable, but the platform rewards understanding behavioural cohorts, tracking plans, and how experiments read metrics, and none of that is obvious on day one. Expect a designated owner rather than assuming everyone will self-serve. | Low for the web analytics dashboard; moderate for funnels, cohorts, and replay; high for SQL insights, warehouse modeling, and experimentation statistics. |
| Platforms | Web (browser SDK with optional autocapture and a standalone replay SDK), iOS and Android native SDKs, React Native and Flutter, Server-side SDKs across major languages, HTTP ingestion API, Warehouse import and export | Web app, JavaScript snippet and web SDK, Server SDKs (Python, Node, Go, PHP, Ruby, and others), Mobile SDKs (iOS, Android, React Native, Flutter), Self-hosted Hobby build (Docker, open source) |
| Compliance | SOC 2 Type II, ISO 27001, GDPR with a published DPA, CCPA, HIPAA available under enterprise arrangements | SOC 2 Type II, GDPR, HIPAA (BAA on Boost, Scale, or Enterprise package) |
| Founded | 2012 | 2020 |
| Headquarters | San Francisco, California, United States | Remote-first; US-incorporated (San Francisco), team distributed globally |
| Ownership | Public company, NASDAQ: AMPL | Venture-backed |
Strengths and limitations
Amplitude
Strengths
- The broadest self-serve platform in the category: analytics, session replay, feature flags, experiments, guides, surveys, and a CDP layer under one event meter.
- A permanent free plan of 2 million events a month including 10,000 session replays, and a self-serve Plus tier that stretches to 70 million events before any sales involvement.
- Behavioural cohorts are a first-class shared object rather than a per-report filter, so one definition drives charts, experiments, guides, and outbound audiences.
- Feature flags are included from the Plus tier rather than gated behind enterprise, which is unusually generous packaging.
Limitations
- Above 70 million events a month, pricing goes dark. Growth and Enterprise are quoted, and add-ons priced as a percentage of the platform plan make the cost curve steeper than it looks.
- Behavioural cohorts are excluded from the free plan and capped at 20 on Plus, which is a meaningful limit given that cohorts are the mechanism everything else depends on.
- The platform is large and there is more configuration surface than a small team needs; the tool is genuinely harder to learn than Mixpanel for a non-technical user.
- Hosted only. There is no open source edition and no self-hosted deployment, so teams with a hard requirement to keep behavioural data inside their own infrastructure are out.
PostHog
Strengths
- Breadth with real integration: analytics, replay, flags, experiments, surveys, error tracking, and a warehouse genuinely share one event stream and identity graph rather than being bolted-on acquisitions.
- The most generous free tier in the category, 1M events and 5K recordings monthly, permanently, which makes evaluation and early-stage use genuinely free.
- Open-source codebase plus a choice of US or EU (Frankfurt) cloud gives privacy and procurement teams inspectability and residency options most rivals lack.
- Usage pricing with automatic volume discounts and per-product spending caps scales from hobby project to hundreds of millions of events without a sales call.
Limitations
- No packaged B2B revenue attribution: connecting spend and touchpoints to CRM pipeline and closed-won revenue is a data-warehouse project in PostHog, not a built-in report as in Dreamdata or HockeyStack.
- Depth demands technical investment; non-technical marketers can read the web dashboard but will struggle to self-serve funnels, SQL insights, or warehouse joins.
- Usage-based billing is unpredictable without configured limits, and replay-heavy or autocapture-noisy sites can generate surprising invoices.
- The full event platform carries more GDPR surface than minimalist tools: consent, masking, and retention need deliberate configuration, where Plausible or Fathom are compliant nearly by default.
Pricing compared
Amplitude
Usage-based on events ingested per month across four plans. Free and Plus are self-serve with published limits, Growth and Enterprise are quoted, and add-ons on the upper tiers are priced as a percentage of the platform plan.
- Free$0
- PlusStarts at $0, scaling with volume
- GrowthQuoted
- EnterpriseQuoted
Amplitude's value depends almost entirely on whether you use the platform or only the charts. At 10,000 monthly users generating perhaps 300,000 events, the free plan covers you with replays included, which makes Amplitude one of the cheapest ways to run real product analytics at small scale. At 100,000 monthly users on disciplined instrumentation, roughly 3 million events, you are on Plus and paying tens of dollars a month rather than hundreds, which is aggressive pricing for what you get. If you also retire a feature-flag subscription, an onboarding tool, and a survey widget, the effective value is very strong. If you use Amplitude purely as a charting tool, you are paying platform complexity for chart value, and Mixpanel or PostHog will feel lighter. The risk sits above 70 million events, where published pricing disappears and you are negotiating with a public company that has enterprise revenue targets.
PostHog
Usage-based pricing per product: every product has a monthly free allowance, then per-unit billing (per event, recording, flag request, survey response, or row) with steep volume discounts; optional platform packages add support and compliance features.
- Free (no card)$0
- Pay-as-you-goUsage-based
- Platform packages (Boost, Scale, Enterprise)Quoted / package pricing
At small and mid scale PostHog is close to unbeatable on price: the permanent free tiers cover a real startup's entire measurement stack, and the per-unit rates undercut buying analytics, replay, flags, and experimentation separately. The honest caveat is that usage pricing shifts the budgeting burden onto you: a replay-heavy or event-noisy implementation can quietly cost more than a flat-rate point tool, and the platform packages needed for enterprise compliance are quoted, not listed. Treat it as extremely cheap by default and only as cheap as your instrumentation discipline at scale.
Editorial verdict on each
Amplitude
Category LeaderAmplitude is the most platform you can buy in this category without a sales call, and for a product-led company that would otherwise be paying for analytics, feature flags, an onboarding tool, and a survey widget separately, that consolidation is the whole argument. The free tier is real, Plus stretches to 70 million events self-serve, and feature flags being included at that level is genuinely generous packaging. Buy it if you will use the platform, not just the charts, and if you have someone willing to own tracking plans and cohort definitions. Look elsewhere if you want the lightest possible tool (Mixpanel), if you want to self-host (PostHog or Matomo), or if you can foresee crossing 70 million events, because that is where published pricing ends and enterprise negotiation begins.
Read the full Amplitude profilePostHog
Category LeaderPostHog is the default recommendation in this category for any team with an engineer on it: no rival matches the combination of a free-forever tier that covers real workloads, usage pricing that scales without a sales call, and genuinely integrated replay, flags, and experimentation on top of web and product analytics. The two honest reservations are that marketing teams without technical support will use a fraction of it, and that B2B pipeline attribution, the question GTM leaders most want answered, remains a do-it-yourself exercise on PostHog's warehouse rather than a shipped feature. Buy it as the behavioral system of record; budget separately if you need turnkey revenue attribution.
Read the full PostHog profileAmplitude profile last reviewed 2026-08-22; PostHog last reviewed 2026-08-22. Pricing is compiled from public sources and can change without notice. See our methodology.