Posthog vs Google Analytics: Pricing, Features, Pros and Cons (2025)

September 19, 2025

Selecting an analytics tool is a significant investment that reflects your company’s values and data usage.

Posthog and Google Analytics are two popular platforms in this field, but they have different cost structures and approaches to data collection.

Google Analytics is a powerful tool that provides an in-depth picture of your website’s traffic and marketing performance.

In contrast, Posthog bases its system on product-led growth, providing teams with a comprehensive toolkit for understanding how individual users interact with each feature.

This guide breaks down the main differences between them, the total cost of ownership, and the types of insights you can expect from each.

Keep reading to see which analytics tool best fits your goals, team size, and financial resources, without unnecessary complexity or hidden expenses.

Let’s get started.

What is PostHog?

PostHog is an open-source product analytics platform that helps businesses understand user behavior on their websites or applications.

It provides a suite of tools for tracking user interactions, analyzing data, and improving product performance.

PostHog supports both cloud-based and self-hosted deployments, emphasizing data ownership, privacy, and customization, which makes it popular among developers and product teams.

Key Features of PostHog

Core Metrics: It tracks essential website metrics like visitors, pageviews, sessions, bounce rate, and traffic sources like channels, referrers, and UTMs. You can create custom attribution channels for detailed insights and monitor Google’s Core Web Vitals to improve your site.
Event Tracking: PostHog automatically captures user interactions such as clicks and pageviews, and identifies key factors influencing conversion and retention rates. You can create funnels to see where users drop off and use correlation analysis to figure out what makes them convert.
Session Replays and Heatmaps: Record and replay user sessions to visualize navigation patterns and pinpoint areas of pain. You can also get deeper insights into user behavior using heatmaps, scrollmaps, clickmaps, and custom SQL queries.
Feature Flags: You can release new features, display components, and control access for specific users or groups. This lets you test changes without pushing code. For example, you can A/B test variations of features or content, such as the pricing section, onboarding flows, or seasonal promotions, to see which performs better based on key metrics.
Surveys: Build in-app popups to collect qualitative feedback directly from users.
Cohorts and Group Analytics: Segment users into dynamic groups for targeted analysis, especially useful for B2B contexts.

Pros of PostHog

Unified Platform: PostHog combines product analytics, session replays, feature flags, and other features into a single platform, eliminating the need for multiple tools and lowering subscription costs.
Data Privacy and Ownership: Self-hosting option provides full data control and compliance with regulations like GDPR and HIPAA.
Transparent Pricing: PostHog offers a generous free tier (up to 1 million events per month) and usage-based pricing for scaling needs. There are no licensing costs for the open-source version.
Developer-Centric: It is designed for technical teams with SQL access for advanced analysis, as well as extensive APIs and integrations across web, mobile, and backend frameworks.

Cons of PostHog

Steep Learning Curve: Can be overwhelming for non-technical users due to its breadth of features and configuration complexity.
Resource-Intensive: Self-hosting requires significant hardware and maintenance effort, which may challenge smaller teams.
Limited Marketing Focus: Less emphasis on acquisition analytics compared to tools like Google Analytics.

What is Google Analytics?

Google Analytics (GA4) is a free web analytics tool that collects data about user behavior, traffic sources, and conversions, providing valuable insights to improve online presence and marketing strategies.

The platform is widely used by businesses, marketers, and content creators to make data-based decisions, with a focus on event tracking, cross-platform integration, AI-powered insights, and integration with Google’s advertising ecosystem.

Key Features of Google Analytics

Event-Based Tracking: Instead of only counting sessions and pageviews, GA4 treats clicks, purchases, video plays, funnels, and other actions as events you can measure. That gives more flexible answers about user behavior.
Real-Time Reporting: Use built-in reports and explorations for custom analysis. Monitor active users on your site instantly, including the pages they view and their source locations. This is useful for tracking campaigns or events as they happen. You can also create custom reports to focus on the metrics that matter most to your business.
Audience Insights: Understand your visitors’ demographics, interests, devices, and geographic locations. This makes it easier to track conversions and create audiences for marketing efforts.
Cross-Platform Tracking: GA4 unifies data from websites, apps, and other platforms, providing a full view of the customer journey.
AI-Powered Insights: It uses machine learning to predict trends, detect anomalies, and suggest opportunities for improvement.
Integration with Google Ecosystem: Works with Google Ads, Search Console, and BigQuery for enhanced marketing and analysis capabilities.
Privacy Controls: GA4 includes features like IP anonymization and consent mode to help comply with data protection regulations.

Pros of Google Analytics

Cost-Effective: The standard version is entirely free, making it ideal for small to medium-sized businesses.
Raw Data Access: The BigQuery export provides access to raw events and user-level data for advanced analysis and investigation.
Scalability: It grows with your business, from the free version to the enterprise-level GA4 360 for larger needs.

Cons of Google Analytics

Privacy Concerns: Not fully compliant with some data protection laws like GDPR due to data storage on U.S. servers.
Shorter Built-in Retention: Standard GA4 properties allow you to retain user-level data for either 2 or 14 months. You can upgrade to GA360 to get access to higher limits. If you need long-term historical data, you must export it to BigQuery.
Data Sampling: Unlike PostHog, GA4 samples data for high-traffic websites, which can reduce report accuracy.

Which One Should You Choose: PostHog vs Google Analytics?

Choose PostHog if:

You prioritize data privacy and ownership.
You need product analytics features like session replays, feature flags, and A/B testing.
Your team has the technical expertise to manage self-hosting or customize the platform.

Choose GA4 if:

You focus on marketing and acquisition analytics.
You rely heavily on Google’s ecosystem.
You need a free, easy-to-use tool for basic web analytics.

Vemetric: A Google Analytics and PostHog Alternative

If you want a privacy-first, cost-effective alternative to PostHog and Google Analytics, Vemetric is a great choice.

It is an open-source analytics platform that combines web and product analytics into a single dashboard, providing a unified view of the entire user journey. This eliminates the need for separate tools, such as Google Analytics for marketing and PostHog for product insight.

Unlike GA4, Vemetric uses cookieless tracking by default and stores data on EU-based servers for GDPR compliance without requiring complex configurations.

You can also view anonymous and logged-in user paths across sessions and devices with interactive heatmaps and funnel analysis.

While PostHog offers similar features, Vemetric’s interface is designed to be simple, reducing the learning curve for non-technical teams.

Final Words

Both PostHog and Google Analytics are powerful tools, but they serve different needs.

Choose the tool that best meets your specific use case, budget, privacy, and technical requirements.

FAQs

PostHog provides direct SQL access to its underlying data and easy export options to data warehouses for full ownership and flexibility. Google Analytics restricts access to raw data unless it is integrated with the paid BigQuery service, which can be a significant limitation.

GA4’s free tier works up to a certain usage limit. You might run into restrictions on data retention or sampling as your business grows. PostHog’s usage-based pricing means a traffic spike directly translates to a higher cost due to the increased number of events tracked. However, you can optimize your infrastructure when self-hosted, which can be more cost-effective than paying for high-tier Google services.

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