Happy Valley

Neon vs PostHog

Neon and PostHog are both developer tools tools. Neon is aimed at developers, while PostHog is aimed at developers and small businesses. Both have a free plan.

Neon

Serverless Postgres with branching

PostHog

Open-source product analytics, replays and flags

PricingFreemiumFreemium
Starting priceNot publishedNot published
Free planYesYes
Free trial——
Built forDevelopersDevelopers, Small businesses
Platformswebweb
CountryUS · 2021US · 2020
Rating——

Choose Neon if

Developers who want elastic Postgres with branching and are comfortable assembling the rest of the stack.

  • Branching changes development workflows
  • Pay only for compute you use
  • Fast provisioning, great for AI agents and previews

Look elsewhere if: Teams wanting an all-in-one backend (Supabase) or steady high-throughput workloads where reserved instances are cheaper.

Choose PostHog if

Engineering-led startups and scale-ups that want analytics, replay, flags and experiments without three vendors.

  • Several products in one with shared data
  • Generous free allowances; usage-based beyond
  • Open source and engineer-friendly

Look elsewhere if: Marketing-only web analytics (Plausible) or large enterprises standardized on Amplitude.

Neon vs PostHog pricing

Neon

  • Free$0100 CU-hours and 1 GB storage per project, 100 projects
  • Launch$0.106/CU-hourUsage-based, no minimum; storage $0.35/GB-month; 7-day restore
  • Scale$0.222/CU-hourUsage-based; 30-day restore; SOC 2, HIPAA, SLA

PostHog

  • Free$01M events, 5K recordings, 1M flag requests, 1,500 survey responses/mo
  • Pay-as-you-gofrom $0.00005/per eventPer product after free tier, as low as $0.000009/event; billing limits
  • Boost$250/moPlatform package: unlimited projects, SSO enforcement, HIPAA BAA
  • Scale$750/moPriority support, SAML; includes Boost
  • EnterpriseCustomRBAC, dedicated support, training

Neon · Key features

  • Serverless Postgres with scale-to-zero and autoscaling
  • Instant database branching for previews and testing
  • Point-in-time restore and time travel queries
  • Postgres extensions including pgvector
  • Connection pooling and HTTP driver for edge runtimes
  • API for programmatic project and branch creation

Cons

  • Cold starts after autosuspend
  • Costs can surprise at sustained high compute
  • Database only; bring your own auth and storage

PostHog · Key features

  • Product analytics: funnels, retention, paths, trends, lifecycle
  • Session replay with console and network logs
  • Feature flags and multivariate experiments
  • Surveys and in-app feedback
  • Data warehouse, HogQL SQL and CDP destinations
  • Error tracking and LLM observability

Cons

  • UI can feel dense; analytics UX trails Amplitude
  • Costs need monitoring across many products
  • Self-hosting only recommended for small scale

Neon vs PostHog: FAQ

Do Neon and PostHog have a free plan?

Yes, both Neon and PostHog have a free plan; paid plans add more usage and features.

Which is better for small businesses, Neon or PostHog?

PostHog lists small businesses as a core audience, while Neon is aimed more at developers.

Not sure yet?