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We picked PostHog over Mixpanel and Amplitude for our early-stage startup. Here's why.

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My team just went through choosing an analytics tool for a pre-launch product. We found out "which tool to use" is turn out to be "what stage are you". Here are four tools we seriously evaluated:

  • PostHog — Pros: generous free tier is awesome, session replay is a powerful feature. Cons: dashboards feel rough at small sample sizes, and the all-in-one breadth means some features are shallower than dedicated tools.

  • Mixpanel — Pros: best-in-class funnel and retention analysis, clean UI makes non-technical teammates to easily use. Cons: gets expensive fast past the free tier, no session replay natively, event taxonomy needs discipline upfront.

  • Amplitude — Pros: the most powerful behavioral cohorting, built for scale. Cons: you'll spend more time configuring than learning, and pricing is unacceptable for startup.

  • GA4 — free and everyone has it, but it's built for marketing attribution, not product behavior. Fine as a complement, painful if you use it as the main lens.

Conclusion: if you only have dozens to hundreds of users, the tool choice matters less but the price matters more. We went with PostHog because replay and event in one place fits our stage. Curious what others picked at the earliest stage?

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Amplitude does have a free plan, but it is limited to 2 million events per month. You can limit the events you are sending by setting it up in Google Tag Manager so you can, for example, track only paying customers. But yes, it is a huge learning curve.

Plus PostHog has a cool mascot :)

 Hadn't thought of the GTM filtering. It is genuinely useful, thanks!

It's amazing how versatile PostHog is. The killer feature for us has been the built-in AI assistant. Setting up analytics properly can get time consuming, so being able to ask it something like “Which features are used most often by people who keep coming back after their first week?” and get an answer straight away feels great.

The AI analytics are also quite useful, though we are still exploring them. And the free tier is just generous, especially when you are starting up.