In-depth: PostHog vs Amplitude

Jan 08, 2024

Want to know how PostHog and Amplitude compare? If you remember nothing else, remember these two things:

Amplitude is a product analytics tool built for non-technical users and data analysts.
PostHog is an all-in-one platform built for engineers that replaces Amplitude and numerous other tools.

How is PostHog different?

1. We're everything you need in one

PostHog replaces multiple tools in your data stack. You could run Amplitude for analytics, LaunchDarkly for feature flags and testing, Hotjar for session replays and surveys, or you could just use PostHog for everything. One platform, one bill, and seamless integration.

2. We're built for engineers

We support all popular (and some unpopular) SDKs, have extensively documented APIs, and a powerful SQL query builder, so you can analyze data how you want. We make it easy to test in production, conduct phased rollouts, run beta programs, and so much more.

3. We're open source and transparent

Our MIT License isn't just for show. You can read our source code, raise issues and PRs, and build your own integrations. Our company handbook is open to everyone, as is how we pay people, our strategy, and our product roadmap. Got a question about anything? Ask in our online community.

Comparing PostHog and Amplitude

Platform

Entering a credit card unlocks almost all PostHog features and you only pay for what you use. You get a generous free allowance every month and you can set billing limits to prevent surprise bills.

	PostHog	Amplitude
Product analytics Track events and conversion, analyze user behavior	✔	✔
Web analytics Easy to use analytics for marketing websites	Beta	✖
Session replay Watch real users use your product, diagnose bugs	✔	✖
Feature flags Roll out features safely, toggle features for cohorts or individuals	✔	✔
Experiments Run tests on new features, optimize conversion funnels	✔	✔
User surveys Collect and analyze feedback, run NPS and PMF surveys	✔	✖
Customer data platform Sync data with third-party tools	Beta	✔
Data warehouse A single source for all your important data	Beta	✖
Heatmaps Visualize where users click in your app or website	✔	✖
Notebooks Ad-hoc analysis and collaboration	✔	✖
Dark mode Choose between light and dark UI	✔	✖
Open source Build your own apps and contribute code	✔	✖

Product analytics

There are two key differences here:

PostHog supports autocapture, which makes it much faster to implement if you don't want to manually instrument every event. Don't want autocapture? Just turn it off and use one of our SDKs – we offer the best of both worlds.
PostHog has a SQL-based query builder for power users, which enables you to generate custom data analyses using PostHog event data. In future, our query builder will let you analyze data as you would in a business intelligence tool, like Metabase, inside PostHog.

	PostHog	Amplitude
Free usage How much free usage do you get each month?	1 million events, unlimited insights	100k monthly tracked users, 10 saved insights
Autocapture Capture events without manual logging	✔	✖
Query editor Write your own queries in SQL	✔	Add on
Dashboards Combine insights into shareable dashboards	✔	✔
Graphs and trends Build custom insights and visualizations	✔	✔
Funnels Track users through a sequence of events	✔	✔
Retention Visualize which users stay, for how long	✔	✔
User paths Track user flows and where they drop-off	✔	✔
Cohorts Combine users based on properties and events for group analysis	✔	✔
Group analytics Track metrics at a company and account level	✔	✔
Lifecycle analysis Understand who is dormant, churning, and thriving	✔	✔
Stickiness Find out what events keep users coming back.	✔	✔
Custom formulas Use formulas to calculate unique insights	✔	✔

Feature flags

Feature flags make it easy to roll out features to specific users or groups, and safely test in production. Our feature flags are also tightly integrated with other features, so you can target session replays, surveys, and more using existing feature flags. See our guide on the benefits of feature flags for more.

	PostHog	Amplitude
Free usage How much free usage do you get each month?	1 million API requests	100k tracked users
Boolean flags Simple flags returning true or flag	✔	✔
Multivariate flags Flags with multiple customizable values	✔	✔
Payloads Flags with string, number, or JSON payloads	✔	✔
Local evaluation Store flag definitions locally	✔	✔
Percentage rollouts Target percentages of a group	✔	✔
Custom targeting Target users based on user properties, custom contexts	✔	✔
Scheduling Schedule flags to turn on or off	✔	✖
Environments Manage flags for dev, stage, prod	Partial	✖
Bootstrapping Flags available on frontend application load	✔	✔
Early access Manage betas, test features	✔	✖

Experimentation

PostHog's offers a generous free 1 million A/B testing events. Amplitude's A/B testing isn't available on any self-serve plan and the price isn't disclosed. You must contact its sales team to use it.

	PostHog	Amplitude
Free usage How much free usage do you get each month?	1 million API requests	None
Custom goals Customize metrics that a test tracks	✔	✔
Secondary metrics Monitor impact on unrelated metrics	✔	✔
Split testing Split participants into groups	✔	✔
Multivariate (A/B/n) testing Test multiple variants of a change	✔	✔
Statistical significance Automatically checks for statistical significance	✔	✔
Recommended run time Calculates the recommended run time and sample size	✔	✖
Holdout testing Withhold multiple features to measure cumulative impact	Partial	✔
Statistics engine How the results of an experiment are calculated	Bayesian	Sequential

Session replay

Replays enable you watch how users experience your app, diagnose issues, improve support, and understand real user behavior in a way raw data can't. They are not video recordings of users. We reconstruct sessions by capturing Document Object Model (DOM) mutations. You have complete control over what is captured and all private and personal data is masked.

	PostHog	Amplitude
Free usage How much free usage do you get each month?	5,000 recordings	n/a
Web app recordings Capture recordings from single-page apps	✔	✖
Mobile app recordings Capture recordings in iOS and Android apps	Beta	✖
Identity detection Link recordings to user IDs	✔	✖
Console logs Capture extra content from a users' browser environment	✔	✖
Playlists Sort recordings into static and dynamic playlists	✔	✖
Performance monitoring Track network events within a session	✔	✖
Privacy masking Censor personal information from playback	✔	✖
Conditional recording Only capture the sessions you want	✔	✖
DOM explorer Explore an interactive snapshot of replays	✔	✖
Export recordings Save important recordings offline	✔	✖
Minimum duration Only record sessions longer than the minimum duration	✔	✖
Sample recorded sessions Restrict the percentage of sessions that will be recorded	✔	✖
Record via feature flag Only record sessions for users that have the flag enabled	✔	✖

Surveys

Surveys are great for tracking customer satisfaction scores like Net Promoter Score (NPS), customer satisfaction (CSAT), and customer effort score (CES). We include survey templates for all these and more helping you get started fast. Read our guide comparing NPS, CSAT and CES to see which one you should use and when.

	PostHog	Amplitude
Free usage How much free usage do you get each month?	250	n/a
Open text Free text answers and feedback	✔	✖
Product rating Rank using emojis or number	✔	✖
Single choice Select one answer from multiple	✔	✖
Multiple choice Select more than one answer from multiple	✔	✖
NPS surveys Net Promoter Score survey template	✔	✖
PMF surveys Product-market fit survey template	✔	✖
User property targeting Target users based on any of their user properties	✔	✖
Custom colors & positioning Customize the colors of your surveys to match your brand	✔	✖
Custom HTML Add custom HTML to your survey text	✔	✖
API mode Create surveys via the API	✔	✖

Integrations

PostHog and Amplitude both offer a wide range of integrations, sources and destinations. PostHog offers more integrations with developer tools, such as Sentry, Zapier and Zendesk, while Amplitude has more integrations with marketing and advertising platforms. See our data pipeline docs for a full list of PostHog integrations.

	PostHog	Amplitude
Imports Import data from data warehouses and other sources	✔	✔
Exports Export data to data warehouses other destinations	✔	✔
Segment Send events via Segment	✔	✔
Zapier Trigger Zapier automations	✔	✖
Sentry Connect to Sentry data	✔	✖
Zendesk Two-way integration for customer support	✔	✖
Slack Alerts for Slack	✔	✔
Microsoft Teams Alerts for Microsoft Teams	✔	✔
Community integrations Build your own integration	✔	✖
Google Ads Import ROI data from Google Ads	✖	✔

Pricing

PostHog charges for actual usage – i.e. product analytics events, feature flag API requests, and so on. No credit card is required to signup and use PostHog, but entering a credit card unlocks almost all features and you'll pay nothing if you stay within our generous free tier limits:

	Free usage per month
Product analytics	1 million events
Session replay	5,000 recordings
Feature flags	1 million API requests
A/B testing	1 million API requests
Surveys	250 responses

Amplitude charges based on monthly tracked users (MTUs). The cost of add owns, such as A/B testing (not available on self-serve plans), group analytics, and unlimited cohorts (self-serve plans are limited to five) isn't disclosed.

Our free tiers are for life, which means you'll always get your first 1 million events (or 5,000 replays and so on) for free every month, no matter how many you end up using.

Amplitude offers a free Starter plan, but it lacks many important features:

	PostHog	Amplitude
Free usage Free tier usage each month	1 million events	50k tracked users
Unlimited Active accounts	Users	Unlimited
Saved insights Number of you charts you can create	Unlimited	10 only
Custom events Create custom tracking events	✔	✖
Formulas Create custom insights using formulas	✔	✖
Feature flags Release and control features	✔	✖
A/B testing Run tests on users and groups	✔	✖
Billing limits Set limits to avoid surprise bills	✔	✖

We charge progressively less per event, replay, API request the more you use – e.g. we charge $0.000100 per event up to 2 million events, but all events after 10 million a month only cost $0.000025, 75% less.

Eligible companies can also get $50,000 in credit in our PostHog for Startups program.

Security and compliance

	PostHog	Amplitude
User privacy options Anonymize users, drop personal data	✔	✔
History, audit logs Manage and view flag edits and related users	✔	✔
GDPR-ready Can be compliant with GDPR	✔	✔
HIPAA-ready Can be compliant with HIPAA	✔	✔
SOC 2 SOC 2 security certification	✔	✔
2FA Enforce login with two-factor authentication	✔	✔
SAML/SSO Use SAML or single sign-on authentication	Enterprise	Enterprise

FAQ

Can PostHog also replace Google Analytics?

Yes. PostHog can replace Google Analytics for many use cases – our marketing team uses PostHog, for example. You can integrate PostHog into your website using Google Tag Manager. See our comparison of PostHog and Google Analytics 4 and an intro to PostHog for Google Analytics users for more.

Is PostHog easy to deploy?

Yes. Just paste our web snippet within the <head> tags your product or website and you're good to go in just a few minutes. This works for apps, blogs, scripts, no-code site builders, and more. See our installation documentation for more options. We support dozens of client-side and server-side SDKs.

How can I estimate my usage?

The easiest way is to sign up to PostHog, integrate our snippet, then check the projection on your billing page after a few days. Alternatively, you can guesstimate by multiplying your current monthly active users by an estimate of events generated per user – 50 to 100 per user is a good starting point. See Estimating usage & costs in our docs for more.

Does PostHog block bots by default?

Yes. See the full blocklist in our docs.

Can I use PostHog with a CDP? (Segment, Rudderstack, etc.)

Yes. See Using PostHog with a CDP in our docs.

What about ad blockers?

We recommend all users deploy a reverse proxy, which enables you send events to PostHog Cloud using your own domain. Events sent from your own domain and are less likely to be intercepted by tracking blockers, ensuring you capture the best data possible. We have reverse proxy setup guides for AWS Cloudfront, Caddy, Cloudflare, Netlify, Vercel, and more, in our docs.

How does PostHog compare to other Amplitude alternatives?

Still need some convincing? See our guide to the most popular Amplitude alternatives.

Ready to find out more?

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