ActiveProduct analytics
Amplitude
Cloud product analytics, with an optional cookieless mode.
Script64.0 KB
FromFree
At 100kFreeevents
PostHog
ActivePostHog is a product analytics platform, open source under MIT except for its enterprise code, that runs in a US or EU cloud or on your own server and bills by events above a free monthly allowance. It keeps the user ID in a cookie and local storage by default; a cookieless mode must be switched on in both the SDK and the project settings.
Tracking script
95.3 KB compressed
305.4 KB uncompressed · measured 17 Sep 2026
Price
FromFree
At 100k eventsFree
Billed by events · checked 17 Sep 2026
Privacy and data
- Cookies
- Optional cookieless mode available
- Data location
- EU or US Cloud or self-hosted
- Self-hosting
- Available
- Source code
- Open source
Plans
- Free plan
- Yes up to 1,000,000 events a month
- Billing unit
- Events
- Sites on entry plan
- Depends on plan
- Data retention
- 7 years
Strengths
- Web analytics is included with product analytics, and the first 1 million events each month are free on both plans. Anonymous events, the web SDK’s default, cost less than identified ones.
- A cookieless mode keeps nothing in cookies or browser storage and counts users with a hash calculated on PostHog’s servers. You turn it on in the SDK and under Project Settings > Web analytics.
- The web analytics dashboard shows visitors, sessions, session duration, bounce rate, paths with scroll depth, outbound clicks, channels including AI assistants, UTM parameters and a map with countries, regions and cities.
- Projects in PostHog Cloud EU, hosted in Frankfurt, have IP data capture turned off by default, and any project can discard client IP addresses after using them for GeoIP and bot detection.
- Google Search Console data can be synced daily as a data warehouse source, and a managed reverse proxy on your own subdomain is free for PostHog Cloud users.
Watch-outs
- By default, the JavaScript library keeps a first-party cookie with the user ID for 365 days, and PostHog’s GDPR guide advises a cookie banner for logged-out visitors when cookies are used.
- On the Free plan, events above the monthly allowance are permanently dropped. A billing limit on Pay-as-you-go also stops ingestion, and the extra data is lost.
- The Free plan has one project and keeps events for one year, Pay-as-you-go has six projects and seven years, and more projects require the Boost package.
- Self-hosting is officially unsupported: the free deployment runs on a single machine, has no tagged releases and, according to PostHog, is unlikely to scale past a couple of hundred thousand events without significant work.
- Moving events from the US cloud to the EU cloud is done by PostHog’s team and only for Scale or Enterprise customers. The WordPress guide relies on third-party header plugins or theme code.
Who it suits
PostHog combines product analytics, web analytics, session replay, feature flags, experiments and surveys in one platform. Web analytics is billed as part of product analytics, and the first 1 million events each month are free. The Free plan needs no credit card and stops collecting once it reaches its limits.
Pay-as-you-go keeps the same monthly free allowance, adds projects and a longer retention period, and lets you set a spending limit for each product. PostHog Cloud runs in the US or in the EU.
The code is published under the MIT license, apart from an enterprise directory, and a free Docker Compose deployment runs on your own server without official support. That puts PostHog among the open-source tools you can self-host.
Setup
Choose the US or EU cloud at signup, then add the HTML snippet inside the head tag, or install posthog-js from npm, and initialize it with your project token and the API host of your region. The same snippet works in Google Tag Manager. On WordPress, the documentation suggests a plugin that adds code to the header, or a function in the theme’s functions.php file.
For your own server, PostHog provides a free Docker Compose deployment started by one script. It needs an Ubuntu virtual machine with about 4 vCPUs, 16 GB of RAM and more than 30 GB of storage, plus a domain whose A record points to it. PostHog issues the HTTPS certificate through Let’s Encrypt.
- Single snippet
- WordPress plugin
- First-party proxy
- Public API
- Data export
- Search Console
- Email reports
- Slack or webhooks
- Public dashboard
Moving from another tool
PostHog documents historical imports from several tools. Managed migrations pull events directly from Mixpanel or Amplitude with your API credentials, up to one year per job, or read JSONL files from an S3 bucket. Guides cover Google Analytics through its BigQuery export, as well as Heap, Matomo, Pendo and Plausible; the Plausible script is marked experimental because that export is aggregated.
Historical imports are not charged as standard ingestion, but they require a paid plan. Managed migrations do not remove duplicates, and selected events cannot be deleted later, so PostHog recommends a test batch in a separate project first.
Features
As documented on the vendor’s own pages. “Partly” means the feature has limits or is only on some plans.
Tracking & Reporting
- Pageviews & visitors: yes
- Live visitor count: yes
- Top pages report: yes
- Top referrers: yes
- UTM campaign tracking: yes
- Country & city breakdown: yes
- Device, browser, OS: yes
- Bounce / engagement: yes
- Time on site: yes
- Custom events: yes
- Goals / conversions: yes
- Funnels: yes
- Outbound link tracking: yes
- File download trackingPartly
- 404 / error trackingPartly
Pricing & Plans
- Unlimited sites on entry planPartly
Privacy & Compliance
- Cookieless by defaultPartly
- No personal data collected (vendor’s position): no
- No consent banner needed (vendor’s position)Partly
- Data hosted in EU: yes
- Data hosted in US: yes
- Self-hostable: yes
- Open sourcePartly
- Data retention7 years
- Bot & spam filtering: yes
Setup & Integrations
- Single-snippet install: yes
- WordPress plugin: yes
- Proxy / first-party domain: yes
- Public API: yes
- Data export (CSV/JSON): yes
- Google Search Console connector: yes
- Email digests: yes
- Slack / webhook alerts: yes
- Public shareable dashboard: yes
Platforms & frameworks
What the vendor documents. A platform that is not listed has no guide, plugin or package from the vendor.
- Shopify: yes
- WooCommercePartly
- Ghost: yes
- Webflow: yes
- Squarespace: yes
- Wix: yes
- React: yes
- Next.js: yes
- Vue / Nuxt: yes
- Static sites (GitHub / GitLab Pages)Partly
- Google Tag Manager: yes
- Server-side tracking: yes
Questions and answers
Does PostHog use cookies?
Yes, by default. The JavaScript library keeps its state in local storage and the user ID in a first-party cookie that lasts 365 days. In cookieless mode it stores nothing in the browser, and PostHog says the always variant of that mode needs no cookie banner unless something else on your site uses cookies; whether that holds depends on the rules that apply to you.
Does PostHog keep collecting after the free allowance runs out?
Not on the Free plan: further events are permanently dropped, so there is no charge. On Pay-as-you-go, usage above the free allowance is billed unless you set a billing limit for the product. Past that limit, PostHog stops ingesting and the extra data is lost.
Where is PostHog Cloud data stored?
In the US or in the EU, depending on the cloud you choose at signup. The pricing page lists Virginia for the US cloud and Frankfurt for the EU cloud. Moving existing events from the US cloud to the EU cloud requires a support request and is available only on the Scale or Enterprise package.
Can I self-host PostHog?
Yes, with limits. PostHog offers a free Docker Compose deployment under the MIT license, but it is officially unsupported and comes without guarantees. Some cloud features are missing there, among them dashboard subscriptions, group analytics and data pipelines, and cloud retention limits do not apply to your own server.
Sources and checks
- Status
- Active, checked 17 Sep 2026
- Prices
- Checked 17 Sep 2026 on the vendor’s pricing page ↗
- Tracking script
- Measured 17 Sep 2026: downloaded and compressed the same way for every tool
- Features
- From the vendor’s pages, checked 19 Sep 2026
- This page
- Text updated 17 Sep 2026
How each value is collected: methodology. Why tools get no overall score: our reasoning.
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