Posthog vs Plausible: Quick Breakdown (2025)

Are you trying to decide between Posthog and Plausible for your website analytics? Then you have come to the right place.

Both tools offer privacy-focused analytics, but they address different needs.

Plausible gives you a single, clear dashboard that protects visitor privacy by default and loads incredibly fast.

Posthog, on the other hand, provides a full suite of tools for tracking user behavior across your entire product, not just your website.

This guide will show you how that difference will affect the work your team does, your budget, and your long-term goals. You’ll learn which questions each tool can help you answer and how its pricing models scale as your team or traffic grows.

If you’re part of a small team, run a digital product, or just want to keep your analytics stack lean and effective, this guide will help you make a confident decision for your online business.

Let’s get started.

What is PostHog?

PostHog is an open-source platform that helps you understand how users interact with your digital product.

Unlike tools that only track website traffic or specific errors, PostHog focuses on the entire user journey from their first visit to ongoing feature engagement.

Its core purpose is to give you a full picture of how people use your product and help you make better decisions about your website or app.

Key Features of PostHog

PostHog provides several features for understanding user behavior and experimenting with your product. Such as:

• Autocapture and Product Analytics: It can record user actions, such as page views and clicks, in real time, so you don’t have to track each action in code. You can analyze these events to see trends, track user retention, and understand which features keep users coming back.
• Session Replay: This feature lets you watch video recordings of real user sessions. You can see exactly what a user saw and did when they encountered a problem.
• Funnels and Paths: Funnel analysis helps you identify where users drop off in a multi-step process, like a user sign-up flow. Path analysis shows the actual paths users take through your product, revealing where they get stuck.
• Feature Flags and A/B Testing: You can roll out new features safely to a small group of your users. It allows you to test the impact of changes with minimal risk and run A/B tests to decide what works best.
• Surveys: You can deploy in-app surveys, such as NPS (Net Promoter Score) or customer satisfaction surveys, to understand user behavior. These can be targeted to specific user groups based on their behavior.
• Data Warehouse and SQL Access: PostHog includes a data warehouse that lets you combine your product data with data from other sources, such as your CRM or payment system, using a custom SQL dialect called HogQL. You can use PostHog AI to generate HogQL queries and get the data you need.

Pros of PostHog

• All-in-One Platform: It combines analytics, session replay, experiments, and surveys into one platform, so you don’t have to manage multiple tools, and you can get a more complete view of user behavior.
• Data Ownership and Privacy: PostHog is open source, so that you can self-host it on your own infrastructure. It gives you complete control over your data, which is critical for companies with strict data privacy and security needs.
• Customization: PostHog’s wide range of features and open-source nature make it highly adaptable to specific business needs. You can audit code, contribute to the roadmap, and build integrations for your particular workflow.
• Generous Free Tier: PostHog’s free tier offers up to 1 million events per month, making it accessible for teams of all sizes. You only pay when you exceed the free tier limits. For example, product analytics events cost $0.00005 each after the first million. This plan increases data retention to 7 years and allows for more projects.

Cons of PostHog

• Learning Curve for Beginners: The platform’s extensive capabilities and flexibility can be overwhelming, especially for non-technical users. For purely simple website traffic analytics, it might be more than you need.
• Technical Overhead and Setup: PostHog requires more setup and technical expertise than simpler analytics tools. Depending on how you scale and host/self-host, you’ll have to manage infrastructure, event tracking, and data cleaning.

What is Plausible?

Plausible is a privacy-focused website analytics tool that provides essential insights into your website traffic without compromising your visitor’s privacy or your website’s performance.

Key Features of Plausible

Plausible includes all the essential features for website analytics:

• Core Website Metrics: It tracks unique visitors, total page views, bounce rate, and visit duration. All data is presented in a clear, visual graph and is updated in real time.
• Traffic Source Analysis: You can see where your visitors are coming from, including referral websites, social media platforms, and search engines. You can also analyze campaigns using UTM parameters.
• Automatic Scroll Depth Tracking: Plausible automatically tracks scroll depth for all pages without needing complex setup or tag managers.
• Audience Insights: Find out the country, devices, browsers, and operating systems your audience uses.
• Goal Conversions: Track specific actions that matter to you, such as file downloads, link clicks, and form submissions. You can set up funnels to see how users move through a series of pages toward a conversion and where they drop off.
• Sharing and Teamwork: You can make your stats public via a secure link or embed the dashboard directly into your website. It also allows you to invite team members and set up automated reports via email or Slack.

Pros of Plausible

• Privacy by Default: Plausible Analytics collects data anonymously without using any cookies. It means no personal data collection, no unique identifiers, and no cross-site or cross-device tracking. It is fully compliant with regulations like GDPR, CCPA, and PECR, and your website likely won’t need a cookie consent banner.
• Simplicity: The entire dashboard is a single page with no complex menus or need for custom reports. It makes analytics accessible to everyone without a steep learning curve.
• Lightweight and Fast: The tracking script is under 1 KB, which is smaller than many Plausible alternatives. This minimal size means it has a negligible impact on your website’s loading speed.
• More Accurate Data: Because it doesn’t use cookies, Plausible is less likely to be blocked by browser extensions and privacy-focused browsers, often resulting in more complete traffic data than Google Analytics.
• Open Source and Self-hostable: You can host Plausible on your own servers using the open-source version.

Cons of Plausible

• Fewer Advanced Features: Plausible is primarily designed for tracking website traffic. It lacks product analytics features like session replays, user behavior analysis, and deep funnel exploration.
• Not Free for Hosted Service: While you can self-host for free, the managed cloud service is a paid product. However, many find its pricing to be reasonable and transparent.

Which One Should You Choose: PostHog vs Plausible?

Consider your analytics requirements before deciding which tool is best for you.

Choose PostHog if:

• You are building a complex web application or SaaS product.
• Your team needs to understand user behavior, run A/B tests, and control feature rollouts with flags.
• You have the technical resources to manage a more complex setup.

Choose Plausible if:

• You run a blog, a content site, or a small business site.
• You value visitor privacy, site performance, and a simple dashboard.
• You want to quickly see traffic sources and key conversions without dealing with cookies or consent banners.

Vemetric: A PostHog and Plausible Alternative

If you are looking for a privacy-first, cost-effective solution that combines essential web and product analytics into a single platform, Vemetric is a great choice.

• Unified Web and Product Analytics: It gives you the full picture, from how users find your website to how they interact with your app, all within a single dashboard. It means you won’t need separate tools for marketing pages and your core product.
• Privacy-First Design: Like Plausible, Vemetric uses cookieless tracking by default and is designed to be GDPR-compliant, with servers hosted in the EU.
• Open Source and Lightweight: Vemetric’s open source core and lightweight script give you full transparency and control without slowing down your site.

Final Words

Your choice should depend on whether you require simple privacy protection for your website or powerful insights for your complete product.

Choose the tool that best suits your specific goals and your team’s way of working.

If you like this article, check out our other guides:

• Plausible vs Google Analytics
• PostHog vs Google Analytics
• PostHog vs Mixpanel

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