Heap 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 assessmentHeap compared with PostHog
PostHog offers autocapture too, plus session replay, feature flags, experiments, and surveys in one bill with fully published usage pricing and a generous free tier, and it can be self-hosted. That combination undercuts Heap badly on transparency and breadth for a small team. Heap answers with a more refined analysis layer, Illuminate, account-level B2B analytics, and enterprise governance that PostHog is still building out. Price-sensitive startups increasingly start on PostHog; Heap wins where analysis sophistication and B2B account rollups matter more than the invoice.
Choose Heap if
Product and growth teams at small to mid-sized software companies who want analytics that answer questions retroactively without a tracking-plan project, and who value not having to negotiate engineering time for every new metric.
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 | Heap | PostHog |
|---|---|---|
| Category | Product Analytics | Analytics |
| Starting price | Free up to 10,000 monthly sessions; the Growth tier is commonly reported at around $3,600 per year (free plan available) | $0 (generous monthly free tiers; pay only past the allowance) (free plan available) |
| Pricing model | Session-based subscription, billed on monthly sessions rather than seats or events. Four tiers: Free, Growth, Pro, and Premier. Only the free plan has a published limit; Growth gives a self-serve estimate after you install the snippet, and Pro and Premier are quoted by sales against your session volume on an annual commitment. Session replay, additional projects, and extra years of data retention are separately priced add-ons. | 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 | Up to 10,000 monthly sessions, 6 months of data history, core charts, unlimited enrichment sources, and SSO, with no technical support | 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 | Free plan rather than a time-limited trial; paid-tier trials arranged through sales | Not applicable; the free tier is permanent, not a trial |
| Best for | Product and growth teams at small to mid-sized software companies who want analytics that answer questions retroactively without a tracking-plan project, and who value not having to negotiate engineering time for every new metric. | 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 | Under an hour to install the snippet or mobile SDK and begin capturing. The real work starts afterwards: defining the virtual events that matter, wiring identify calls, and connecting enrichment sources typically takes a week or two of part-time effort before dashboards are trustworthy. | 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 | Low to start, moderate to do well. Building a chart is easy; writing virtual event definitions that stay correct through front-end changes is a skill, and so is resisting the urge to define an event for every interaction now that doing so is free. | Low for the web analytics dashboard; moderate for funnels, cohorts, and replay; high for SQL insights, warehouse modeling, and experimentation statistics. |
| Platforms | Web (JavaScript snippet), iOS and Android SDKs, React Native, Google Tag Manager, Server-side libraries | 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 | GDPR, CCPA, SOC 2 Type II, HIPAA (with BAA on qualifying plans), ISO 27001 | SOC 2 Type II, GDPR, HIPAA (BAA on Boost, Scale, or Enterprise package) |
| Founded | 2013 | 2020 |
| Headquarters | San Francisco, California, United States | Remote-first; US-incorporated (San Francisco), team distributed globally |
| Ownership | Acquired by Contentsquare; deal announced September 2023 and completed December 2023 | Venture-backed |
Strengths and limitations
Heap
Strengths
- Autocapture removes the single biggest failure mode in product analytics, which is discovering that the event you need was never instrumented.
- Retroactive event definition means a new metric has months of history on the day it is created, rather than starting a clock.
- Non-technical users can define events visually on the live site, so analytics work does not queue behind engineering.
- Illuminate genuinely surfaces findings nobody queried for, which is rare in a category where most tools only answer what you already thought to ask.
Limitations
- Autocapture produces a very large and noisy raw surface; without ongoing governance the event list becomes unusable and teams end up doing the taxonomy work they hoped to avoid.
- Virtual events defined against CSS selectors break silently when the front end is refactored, and a definition that is too loose quietly overcounts across all historical data at once.
- Paid pricing is opaque: Growth requires installing the snippet before you see a number, and Pro and Premier are sales-quoted with no published anchor.
- Data retention caps at twelve months on standard tiers, so year-over-year comparison requires paying for extra retention or exporting to a warehouse.
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
Heap
Session-based subscription, billed on monthly sessions rather than seats or events. Four tiers: Free, Growth, Pro, and Premier. Only the free plan has a published limit; Growth gives a self-serve estimate after you install the snippet, and Pro and Premier are quoted by sales against your session volume on an annual commitment. Session replay, additional projects, and extra years of data retention are separately priced add-ons.
- Free$0
- GrowthQuoted after snippet install (commonly around $3,600 per year)
- ProCustom session pricing
- PremierCustom session pricing
The free plan is one of the better deals in product analytics: 10,000 monthly sessions with full autocapture, SSO, and six months of history is enough to run a real early-stage product. The step above it is where the value question gets harder. Growth at roughly $3,600 a year is competitive with Mixpanel and Amplitude for a small team, but Heap's opacity means you cannot compare on a spreadsheet without contacting sales, and the features a growing B2B team most wants (account analytics, the engagement matrix, warehouse sync) sit on quote-only tiers with add-ons stacked on top. Judged purely on capability per dollar the product is strong; judged on procurement friction for a five-person company, it is the least small-business-friendly part of an otherwise small-business-friendly tool.
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
Heap
Heap made a genuinely good bet: that the expensive part of product analytics is not the charts but the instrumentation decisions you have to make before you know what you need. Autocapture plus retroactive event definition solves that better than anything else in the category, and Illuminate turns the resulting data mass into findings rather than just storage. For a small product team without analytics engineering, the free plan at 10,000 monthly sessions is one of the strongest starting offers available. The reservations are commercial and structural. Paid pricing is quote-only above a Growth tier that will not even show you a number until the snippet is installed, session replay and retention are add-ons that inflate the real cost, and the twelve-month history ceiling undercuts the very promise of retroactive analysis. Add the Contentsquare acquisition folding Heap into a larger platform and the long-term shape of the standalone product is uncertain. Start free and stay there as long as the volume allows; before upgrading, get a written quote that includes replay and retention, and compare it honestly against PostHog and Mixpanel, both of which will tell you their price without a phone call.
Read the full Heap 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 profileHeap profile last reviewed 2026-08-23; PostHog last reviewed 2026-08-22. Pricing is compiled from public sources and can change without notice. See our methodology.