Plausible Analytics vs PostHog
| Tagline | Lightweight, privacy-first web analytics without cookies | All-in-one product analytics, session replay, feature flags, and A/B testing |
| Category | Product & Web Analytics | Product & Web Analytics |
| Replaces | Google Analytics | Mixpanel, Amplitude, Hotjar, Google Analytics |
| GitHub stars | 28k | 37k |
| Language | Elixir | Python |
| License | AGPL-3.0 | MIT |
| Self-host difficulty | 3/5 Moderate | 5/5 Advanced |
| Deploy options | Docker Compose Manual | Docker Compose Kubernetes Manual |
| Managed hosting | ||
| Last updated | 2 days ago | 2 days ago |
| View repo | View repo |
Where each falls short
The honest trade-offs — what you give up with each, versus the proprietary tools they replace.
Plausible Analytics
- Intentionally simple: no heatmaps, session recordings, or user-level product analytics.
- The self-hosted Community Edition lags behind the paid cloud on some features and updates.
- ClickHouse dependency makes the stack heavier than a single-binary tool despite the simple feature set.
PostHog
- Self-hosting the full ClickHouse + Kafka + Postgres + Redis stack is heavy; the project actively steers smaller users toward PostHog Cloud.
- Some enterprise features live under a separate proprietary
eelicense, not pure MIT. - The all-in-one breadth means it is more complex to operate than a focused tool like Mixpanel.
Bottom line
Choose Plausible Analytics if you want the lower-effort setup; choose PostHog for the larger community and ecosystem. Open each guide below for deploy steps and the full feature gap.
PostHog
All-in-one product analytics, session replay, feature flags, and A/B testing