Head to head
PostHog vs Mixpanel
One tool for everything, or one tool done properly. Scored on ten weighted measures, with every price read on the same day.
PostHog
7.1/10
No. 6 of 30
Mixpanel
6.5/10
No. 14 of 30
Both are product analytics platforms with generous free tiers, and both will answer the core behavioural question of who did what and whether they came back. The difference is philosophy. PostHog wants to be the only tool you install: analytics, session replay, feature flags, experiments, error tracking, surveys and a data warehouse behind one signup. Mixpanel has spent sixteen years making funnels, retention and cohort analysis as clear as they can be, and has resisted becoming a platform.
The verdict
It depends on whether you want breadth or clarity, and both answers are defensible.
Take PostHog if the alternative is buying four tools. Shipping a feature behind a flag, measuring its effect on a funnel, watching recordings of people failing to use it and reading their errors, without leaving one product or filing four procurement requests, is a materially faster loop. It is open source, self-hostable, and its free allowance is large enough that the company says 97 per cent of its customers never pay.
Take Mixpanel if the thing you actually need is for everyone in the company to read a funnel correctly. Its reports are clearer than PostHog's, it has been refining them since 2009, and unlimited seats on the free plan means nobody is ever locked out of the dashboard by a licence conversation. That matters more than feature lists suggest, because the analytics that change decisions are the analytics people open.
Mixpanel has narrowed PostHog's lead by including experiments and feature flags on its free and Growth plans, which removes what used to be the clearest reason to prefer PostHog.
Side by side
| PostHog | Mixpanel | |
|---|---|---|
| Overall score | 7.1 / 10 | 6.5 / 10 |
| Rank on this list | No. 6 of 30 | No. 14 of 30 |
| From | Free then usage-based | Free then usage-based |
| What that buys | 1M events, 5,000 session replays and 1M feature flag requests free every month, forever | 1M events and 10,000 session replays a month on the free plan, with unlimited seats |
| Free tier | Yes, and it is the most generous on this list | Yes, 1M events a month with unlimited seats |
| Cookies | Yes, by default | Yes, by default |
| Script size | Tens of kilobytes | Tens of kilobytes |
| Hosting | US or EU cloud, or self-hosted | US or EU |
| Trading since | 2020 | 2009 |
| Free allowance | 1M events, 5K replays, 1M flag requests, monthly | 1M events, 10K replays, unlimited seats |
| Feature flags and experiments | Core to the product | Now included on Free and Growth |
| Session replay | 5,000 recordings free monthly | 10,000 recordings free monthly |
| Error tracking | 100K exceptions free monthly | Not offered |
| Self-hosting | Yes, open source | No |
| Report clarity | Broad, less refined | The clearest funnels and retention here |
| Data warehouse | Included | Export only |
The ten measures, scored
| Measure | PostHog | Mixpanel |
|---|---|---|
| Insight quality | 8 | 8 |
| Privacy architecture | 5 | 4 |
| Value for money | 9 | 8 |
| Setup and time to data | 5 | 5 |
| Script weight | 3 | 3 |
| Analytical depth | 10 | 9 |
| Behaviour tooling | 9 | 7 |
| Data ownership | 9 | 8 |
| Accuracy | 6 | 6 |
| Vendor conduct | 8 | 7 |
| Weighted overall | 7.1 | 6.5 |
Higher is better. The overall figure is the weighted mean, relative to the 30 tools on this list. How this works.
Which one should you pick
Choose PostHog if
You would otherwise buy separate tools for flags, experiments, replay and error tracking, or you need to self-host.
Choose Mixpanel if
Your priority is that everybody in the company can read a funnel without training, with unlimited seats and no licence conversation.
Common questions
Which has the better free tier?
They are close and differently shaped. PostHog gives 1M events plus flags, error tracking and surveys. Mixpanel gives 1M events, more session replays at 10,000, and unlimited seats. If seat count matters, Mixpanel; if breadth matters, PostHog.
Can either replace Google Analytics on a marketing site?
Neither should. Both are heavy, both set cookies by default and both require a consent banner in the UK and EU. For a marketing site a cookieless tool answers the real questions in a fraction of the payload.
Which is easier to set up?
Neither is quick. Both want a designed event taxonomy, which is a planning exercise before it is an engineering one. PostHog's autocapture gets you started faster at the cost of a noisy event stream you will later have to tidy.
Does Mixpanel still lack experiments?
No, that gap has closed. Mixpanel now includes experiments and feature flags on its Free and Growth plans, which removes what was previously the clearest argument for choosing PostHog instead.
Both entries above are desk reviews written from published evidence, and every judgement is my opinion rather than a statement of fact. Read the full reviews for PostHog and Mixpanel, or tell me where I have got something wrong.