Amplitude vs PostHog

Amplitude is a digital analytics platform from San Francisco, founded in 2012 by Spenser Skates, Curtis Liu and Jeffrey Wang and listed on Nasdaq (AMPL) since its 2021 direct listing. It started as event-based product analytics for mobile apps and now helps product, growth and marketing teams see how people use their apps and websites and what drives conversion and retention.

The platform combines product and web analytics (funnels, retention, cohorts, journeys), session replay and heatmaps, feature flags and A/B testing, in-app guides and surveys (from the 2024 Command AI acquisition) and audience syncing to ad and messaging tools. AI agents can monitor dashboards, explain metric changes and answer questions, and an MCP server exposes Amplitude data to AI tools. Free covers 2 million events a month; Plus is usage-based; Growth and Enterprise are custom-priced through sales.

It fits product-led companies that need self-serve analysis for non-technical teams. Mixpanel is the closest rival with simpler pricing; PostHog is cheaper and open source with an engineering focus; Pendo is stronger on in-app guidance for B2B software; Google Analytics is free but built for marketing attribution.

In July 2026 Amplitude dropped the fixed 49 dollar Plus tier based on monthly tracked users for event-based pricing from 0 dollars, and the Free plan now includes session replay, guides and AI agents. Startups with under 20 employees and under 10 million dollars raised can apply for a free year of Growth.

PostHog is an open-source product analytics platform founded in 2020 by James Hawkins and Tim Glaser and backed by Y Combinator. Its strategy is to give engineering-led companies every product tool in one place: event analytics, web analytics, session replay, feature flags, A/B experiments, surveys, error tracking, a data warehouse and LLM observability, all sharing the same user and event data.

PostHog is built for engineers. Autocapture and SDKs for web, mobile and backend platforms collect events, HogQL gives SQL access to everything, and a CDP pipeline sends data to other tools. Replays connect to events, errors and flags, so you can watch exactly what a flagged cohort experienced. Each product is priced by usage with a generous monthly free allowance, so small teams often pay nothing, and billing limits prevent surprises; optional add-ons add support SLAs, SSO, advanced permissions and longer retention. Cloud hosting is available in the US and EU, and self-hosting is supported for small deployments.

PostHog fits startups and scale-ups that want to replace separate analytics, replay, flag and experimentation vendors with one transparent bill. The interface is dense, and costs need monitoring when many products scale at once. Amplitude and Mixpanel offer deeper analytics experiences for large product organizations, LaunchDarkly is more mature for enterprise feature management, and Plausible or Google Analytics suit marketing teams that only need website traffic reports.