Plausible Analytics 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.
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The short answer
Both sides assessedPlausible Analytics compared with PostHog
Plausible measures your marketing site; PostHog measures your entire product with web analytics as a free side dish. If you need funnels over in-app behavior, replay, or experiments, Plausible cannot follow and PostHog's free tier is the obvious start; if you need simple, consent-banner-free traffic stats with nothing to maintain, Plausible is lighter, calmer, and easier to defend to a DPO.
PostHog compared with Plausible Analytics
Plausible is a single lightweight dashboard for marketing-site traffic; PostHog is a full event platform where web analytics is one module of ten. Choose Plausible when you want cookie-free simplicity, a sub-1KB script, and nothing to maintain; choose PostHog when the website is the top of a product funnel you intend to analyze end to end.
Choose Plausible Analytics if
Site owners, SaaS marketing teams, agencies, and publishers who want credible traffic and conversion reporting with the lightest possible privacy and compliance footprint, and who do not need user-level product analytics.
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 | Plausible Analytics | PostHog |
|---|---|---|
| Category | Analytics | Analytics |
| Starting price | $9/mo (Starter at up to 10k monthly pageviews) (free plan available) | $0 (generous monthly free tiers; pay only past the allowance) |
| Pricing model | Subscription tiered by feature set (Starter, Growth, Business) with the price scaling by monthly pageview volume; a 30-day free trial and a custom Enterprise tier on top. | 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 | No free hosted plan; the open-source Community Edition is free to self-host. | 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 | 30 days, no credit card required | Not applicable; the free tier is permanent, not a trial |
| Best for | Site owners, SaaS marketing teams, agencies, and publishers who want credible traffic and conversion reporting with the lightest possible privacy and compliance footprint, and who do not need user-level product analytics. | 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 | Minutes: add one script tag or the WordPress plugin and data flows immediately; goals take a few more minutes each, and a GA history import runs in the background. | 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 | Near zero for the dashboard; funnels and the Stats API are the only features that need documentation time. | Low for the web analytics dashboard; moderate for funnels, cohorts, and replay; high for SQL insights, warehouse modeling, and experimentation statistics. |
| Platforms | Web app (cloud, EU-hosted), Self-hosted Community Edition (Docker, open source), WordPress plugin | 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, ePrivacy/PECR, CCPA (no personal data sold or collected) | SOC 2 Type II, GDPR, HIPAA (BAA on Boost, Scale, or Enterprise package) |
| Founded | 2018 | 2020 |
| Headquarters | Remote; legal entity Plausible Insights OU, registered in Tartu, Estonia | Remote-first; US-incorporated (San Francisco), team distributed globally |
| Ownership | Bootstrapped; independent, no outside investors | Venture-backed |
Strengths and limitations
Plausible Analytics
Strengths
- Genuinely lightweight and simple: a sub-1KB script and a one-page dashboard that non-analysts read correctly on first contact.
- The cleanest privacy story in the category: cookie-free, no personal data, EU-owned hosting, Estonian entity, and open-source code backing every claim.
- Bootstrapped, profitable, and 21,000+ subscribers strong, so there is no acquisition-or-shutdown risk of the usual VC variety.
- Business-plan funnels, user journeys, and ecommerce revenue attribution push it past bare pageview counting into real marketing measurement.
Limitations
- No user-level analytics by design: no sessions per user, no retention cohorts, no replay, and funnels are aggregate only, so product analytics questions are out of scope.
- Attribution stops at the website: revenue attribution covers on-site ecommerce events, not CRM pipeline, offline conversions, or ad-platform sync.
- Daily-rotating visitor hashing means returning-visitor and multi-day journey measurement is structurally limited compared to cookie-based tools.
- Key features (funnels, revenue, API) are gated to the Business plan, making the effective entry price for marketing teams $19+ rather than $9.
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
Plausible Analytics
Subscription tiered by feature set (Starter, Growth, Business) with the price scaling by monthly pageview volume; a 30-day free trial and a custom Enterprise tier on top.
- StarterFrom $9
- GrowthFrom $14
- BusinessFrom $19
- EnterpriseCustom
For pure web analytics, Plausible's pricing is honest and low: a typical small SaaS site pays less per month than a single GA4 consultant hour, and the Business tier at $19+ undercuts most attribution-lite competitors while including funnels and revenue tracking. The catch is scaling: because price tracks pageviews, high-traffic publishers should model their real slider price before assuming Plausible stays cheap, and anyone needing user-level analysis is buying the wrong tool at any price.
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)$250 / $750 / $2,000
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 add a fixed $250 to $2,000 a month. Treat it as extremely cheap by default and only as cheap as your instrumentation discipline at scale.
Editorial verdict on each
Plausible Analytics
Plausible is the best-reasoned product in the privacy-first analytics niche: every limitation traces back to a principled refusal to collect personal data, and what remains is a fast, honest, inexpensive dashboard that most marketing teams will actually read. The Business plan's funnels and revenue attribution cover more measurement ground than its minimalist reputation suggests, and the bootstrapped, open-source structure removes whole categories of vendor risk. Just be clear about the boundary: this is website analytics done extremely well, and nothing beyond it, so product analytics and B2B pipeline attribution belong to different tools.
Read the full Plausible Analytics profilePostHog
PostHog 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 profilePlausible Analytics profile last reviewed 2026-09-27; PostHog last reviewed 2026-09-27. Pricing is compiled from public sources and can change without notice. See our methodology.
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Frequently asked questions
6 questionsWhat is the difference between Plausible Analytics and PostHog?
Plausible measures your marketing site; PostHog measures your entire product with web analytics as a free side dish. If you need funnels over in-app behavior, replay, or experiments, Plausible cannot follow and PostHog's free tier is the obvious start; if you need simple, consent-banner-free traffic stats with nothing to maintain, Plausible is lighter, calmer, and easier to defend to a DPO.
Is Plausible Analytics or PostHog cheaper?
Plausible Analytics starts at $9/mo (Starter at up to 10k monthly pageviews) (free plan available). PostHog starts at $0 (generous monthly free tiers; pay only past the allowance). The billing models differ, so the entry price is rarely the whole cost. Plausible Analytics pricing model: Subscription tiered by feature set (Starter, Growth, Business) with the price scaling by monthly pageview volume; a 30-day free trial and a custom Enterprise tier on top. PostHog pricing model: 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.
Does Plausible Analytics or PostHog have a free plan?
Plausible Analytics has a free plan. No free hosted plan; the open-source Community Edition is free to self-host. Trial terms: 30 days, no credit card required. PostHog has a free plan. 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. Trial terms: Not applicable; the free tier is permanent, not a trial.
Who should choose Plausible Analytics?
Site owners, SaaS marketing teams, agencies, and publishers who want credible traffic and conversion reporting with the lightest possible privacy and compliance footprint, and who do not need user-level product analytics.
Who should choose PostHog?
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.
What are the best alternatives to Plausible Analytics and PostHog?
SaaSTracker profiles 16 products in GTM Analytics. The Summer 2026 awards in the category went to Google Analytics 4 (Category Leader), Umami (Best Value), HockeyStack (Momentum). Every profile is compiled from primary sources, so a shortlist can be built from pricing, limitations, and fit rather than from star ratings.
