An all-in-one toolkit billed by usage against a product analytics specialist. Both have real free tiers now.
| PostHog | Amplitude | |
|---|---|---|
| Scope | Analytics, replay, flags, experiments, surveys, error tracking, warehouse | Product analytics depth, replay, experimentation, governance |
| Free tier | 1M events, 5K web replays, 1M flag requests, 1,500 survey responses per month | 2M events per month plus 10K session replays |
| Pricing model | Pay per use, published rates, self-set billing caps | Free, then Plus by volume; Growth and Enterprise are custom contracts |
| Event pricing | From $0.00005 per event, falling to about $0.000009 at 250M+ monthly | Not published per event; Plus scales to 70M events per month |
| Seats | Not billed by seat | Unlimited seats on all plans |
| Open source | Yes, with a self-hosted option (cloud recommended for production) | No, SaaS only |
| Session replay | Included, from $0.005 per recording after the free 5K | Included by tier quota, from 10K free up to 50K on Enterprise |
| Experimentation | Included, billed with feature flag usage | Limited on free, expands on paid tiers |
| Enterprise controls | Available as platform add-ons | SSO and permissions at Growth, RBAC and data access controls at Enterprise |
From the official pricing pages as of August 2026. PostHog gives every account a monthly free allowance: 1 million analytics events, 5,000 web session replays, 1 million feature flag requests, and 1,500 survey responses. Past that you pay published unit rates that fall with volume, from $0.00005 per event down to roughly $0.000009 per event above 250 million a month, and from $0.005 per replay down to $0.0015 at high volume. You can set a hard billing limit per product, which matters more than it sounds.
Amplitude's free plan now includes 2 million events per month with product analytics, session replay (10,000 per month), and limited experiments and surveys. The Plus plan starts at $0 with the first 2 million events free and scales by event volume up to 70 million events a month, adding custom formulas, behavioral cohorts, and 2-year data retention. Growth and Enterprise are custom-priced contracts that add advanced behavioral tools, SSO, higher replay quotas, and access controls. All plans have unlimited seats.
Pick PostHog if you would otherwise be buying three or four tools. Analytics plus replay plus flags plus experiments from separate vendors costs real money and, worse, scatters your product data across systems that do not share a user ID. PostHog's bundle keeps one identity graph under everything, and for an engineering-led team that is the feature.
It is also the transparent-cost option. Every rate is on the pricing page, volume discounts are automatic, and billing caps let you bound the downside before an instrumentation mistake becomes an invoice story. If you have ever been surprised by an analytics bill, that cap alone is a reason to look.
The open-source angle is real but narrower than the marketing suggests: the code is open and a self-hosted option exists, but PostHog itself points production users to its cloud. I would treat self-hosting as an escape hatch and a compliance option, not the default plan.
Pick Amplitude if product analytics is a discipline in your company rather than a dashboard someone checks. Its behavioral cohort tools, retention analysis, and exploration workflows are deeper than PostHog's, and analysts and product managers tend to be noticeably faster in it. Unlimited seats on every plan also means you can put the whole company in front of the data without a per-seat negotiation.
Amplitude also fits organizations that need governance: data taxonomy management, permissions, SSO, and access controls are mature and clearly tiered. If your event schema is maintained by a data team and consumed by dozens of people, that structure earns its cost.
The free tier makes trying it easy in a way that was not true a few years ago. Two million free events a month is a higher ceiling than PostHog's free analytics allowance, so a small product can run Amplitude for free for a long time before any contract conversation.
The stale claim is that Amplitude is the expensive one. At small scale that is now backwards: Amplitude's 2 million free monthly events beat PostHog's 1 million, and Plus covers substantial volume. The real difference appears later, in how you pay. PostHog publishes its rates all the way up the volume curve and lets you cap spend, so costs stay a math problem. Amplitude moves you into sales-quoted Growth and Enterprise contracts, where the price depends on negotiation. Some teams prefer a negotiated contract; I mostly do not.
The other missed point is instrumentation discipline. Usage-billed tools like PostHog make every autocaptured click a line item, so a busy site can burn through allowances on events nobody analyzes. Whichever tool you choose, deciding what not to track is the highest-leverage cost decision, and no comparison table shows it.
For startups and engineering-led teams, I would pick PostHog: the consolidation is genuinely useful, the pricing is honest, and billing caps remove the main risk of usage billing. For a company with dedicated PMs or analysts who live in behavioral data, and a data team that wants governance, Amplitude is the stronger analytics tool and its free and Plus tiers make the entry cheap. The wrong reason to choose either is a price assumption from 2023; both moved, and Amplitude moved the most.