PostHog
From Hogpedia, the free encyclopedia
PostHog is an open-source platform for building software products. It combines product analytics, session replay, feature flags, experiments, error tracking, surveys, web analytics, a data warehouse, and a customer data platform in a single tool.[4] The company of the same name was founded by James Hawkins and Tim Glaser on 23 January 2020.[1]
PostHog is built for engineers who make product decisions themselves, a role the company calls a product engineer. Its core is open source and can be self-hosted, and it also sells a hosted cloud service with a free monthly allowance on every product.[8]
Overview[edit]
A product team usually buys one tool to measure behavior, a second to record sessions, a third to control feature releases, and a fourth to run tests. Each holds a separate copy of the user data, so a question that crosses two of them is hard to answer.
PostHog puts those tools on one event database. The same user can be counted in a funnel, watched in a replay, targeted by a flag, and enrolled in an experiment with no data export in between. This is the company's main argument for itself.[4]
History[edit]
PostHog was its founders' sixth idea. Their first was a tool to help engineers manage technical debt.[1]
The company entered Y Combinator's W20 batch and released its first version on Hacker News four weeks after the first line of code. More than 300 self-hosted deployments followed within days, and the GitHub repository passed 1,500 stars two weeks later.[1]
PostHog has raised six rounds, approximately $194m in total as of October 2025. Investors include Y Combinator's Continuity Fund, GV, 1984 Ventures, Tapas Capital, Formus Capital, Stripe, and Peak XV Partners.[1][2] The two PostHog sources disagree on the dates of the early rounds, and History of PostHog sets out the disagreement rather than resolving it.
Products[edit]
PostHog groups its products by the question each one answers.
| Product | What it answers |
|---|---|
| Product analytics | How do people use the product? |
| Web analytics | Where does the traffic come from? |
| Session replay | What did this person actually do? |
| Feature flags | Who can see this feature? |
| Experiments | Did the change work? |
| Error tracking | What is broken, and for whom? |
| Surveys | What do people say? |
| Data warehouse | What do the other systems know? |
| CDP | Where else must this data go? |
| AI observability | What are the model calls doing? |
The current list, with prices, is on the products page.[4]
Philosophy[edit]
PostHog states its mission as equipping every developer to build successful products.[3] Three positions follow from it:
- The engineer makes the decision. The tools sit together because one person uses all of them.
- Prices are published, and cut. PostHog publishes its pricing and has reduced it more than once.[8]
- Write it down. Decisions are recorded in public, in the handbook.[5]
Open source[edit]
The PostHog application is open source and the repository is public.[7] A team can run it on its own infrastructure, which was the original reason people adopted it: the first release attracted self-hosted deployments, not cloud sign-ups.[1]
The paid product is the hosted service. The code is free; running it is what costs money.
Company culture[edit]
PostHog has been fully remote since it was founded, and writes decisions down rather than holding meetings about them.[5] Work is organized into small teams, defined in the handbook as strictly two to six people, each owning a product area.[6]
The company also treats being strange as a value in its own right, under the name "Do more weird". For what that produces, see Category: Hog lore.
See also
References
- ^PostHog handbook, "How we got here"
- ^PostHog press kit, funding history
- ^PostHog handbook, "Why does PostHog exist?"
- ^PostHog products
- ^PostHog handbook, "Culture"
- ^PostHog handbook, "Small teams"
- ^PostHog on GitHub
- ^PostHog pricing
External links
This page was last modified on October 2, 2026.
Hogpedia is part of the posthog.com repository. Hedgehogs are PostHog brand assets – read the brand guide before reusing one.
Main Page · About · Donate · posthog.com