Alternatives · 2026
Ranked, scored and explained. What each one does better, what you give up, and when staying put is the right call.
PostHog's free tier is generous enough that few people leave over price. They leave over weight and shape. The script is tens of kilobytes, which on a public marketing site is a measurable performance cost for reports nobody opens. It sets cookies by default, so in the UK and EU the consent banner is back and the visitors who decline vanish. And its breadth, which is the reason to choose it, also makes it easy to half-configure and never quite trust.
The other common reason is billing predictability: usage metered across a dozen product lines is harder to forecast than a fixed rung on a published ladder.
When to stay put. Keep PostHog if you are building a software product and using more than two of its product lines. Shipping a feature behind a flag, measuring its effect on a funnel, watching recordings of people failing to use it and reading their errors, in one tool, is a materially faster loop than assembling that from four vendors, and the free allowance means most teams never pay for it.
| Tool | From | Free tier | Cookies | Score |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Mixpanel | Free then usage-based | Yes, 1M events a month with unlimited seats | Yes, by default | 6.5 |
| Amplitude | Free then event-based | Yes, 2M events a month | Yes, by default | 6.4 |
| Absolutely Analytics | $9 per month | No free tier. A 30-day trial of the exact tier you picked | None, so no consent banner | 8.9 |
| Statsig | Free then usage-based | Yes, and unusually large | Yes, by default | 6.3 |
| Swetrix | Free self-hosted; hosted tiers are paid | Free self-hosting, plus a hosted trial | None | 7.1 |
| Matomo | Free self-hosted; cloud from €22 | Yes, the entire on-premise product | Optional, and it runs cookieless if configured | 7.0 |
The answer if you only wanted the analytics. Clearer funnel and retention reports, unlimited seats on every plan including free, and experiments and feature flags now included on Free and Growth.
From Free then usage-based. Yes, by default. Full review →
The answer if you wanted the analytics and more depth. 2 million events a month free, the full platform on every tier, and the strongest behavioural cohort and path analysis here.
From Free then event-based. Yes, by default. Full review →
The answer if the thing you are measuring is a website. 1,270 bytes against tens of kilobytes, no cookies, no consent banner, no event taxonomy to design, and a published price ladder you can forecast.
From $9 per month. None, so no consent banner. Full review →
The answer if experimentation was the reason you came. A stronger experimentation platform with the statistical machinery to match, plus a warehouse-native mode that computes results against your own Snowflake or BigQuery.
From Free then usage-based. Yes, by default. Full review →
The answer if you want the bundle but lighter and self-hosted. Cookieless analytics with funnels, session recording and error monitoring in one application you run yourself.
From Free self-hosted; hosted tiers are paid. None. Full review →
The answer if ownership matters more than breadth. Funnels, flows, A/B testing, heatmaps and session recording, free on your own hardware.
From Free self-hosted; cloud from €22. Optional, and it runs cookieless if configured. Full review →
Generally yes. Its script is tens of kilobytes against roughly one for a cookieless tool, it sets cookies by default so a consent banner applies, and the product questions it unlocks are ones a content site does not have. A common arrangement is PostHog inside the authenticated product and a light cookieless tool on the public site.
Statsig, if flags and experiments are the point. It was built by people who did this at Facebook, flags are free at any volume, and its warehouse-native mode computes experiment results against your own data warehouse.
Amplitude at 2 million events a month with the full platform, and Mixpanel at 1 million events with 10,000 session replays and unlimited seats. Neither matches PostHog's breadth across flags, error tracking and surveys, but both are generous.
Yes. PostHog itself is open source and self-hostable, so that may not be a reason to move. Matomo, Umami and Swetrix are all self-hostable and considerably lighter to operate, at the cost of much narrower functionality.
These are desk reviews and the ordering reflects my own weighted scoring, which is published in full. There are no affiliate links on this page and no vendor has paid to appear on it. Read the full PostHog review, or send me a correction.