Amplitude vs PostHog for Solo Developers

Quick Comparison

Amplitude Overview

Amplitude is the enterprise-grade product analytics platform that many large product teams standardized on over the last decade. The query depth is genuinely impressive. Behavioral cohorts, pathfinder, advanced funnels, retention matrices, and predictive analytics are all polished and well-instrumented. For a serious product team with a dedicated analyst, Amplitude is a powerful tool.

The free Starter tier covers up to 10,000 monthly tracked users and up to 2 million events per month, which is enough to validate an early side project. Amplitude has since added a self-serve Plus plan at $49 per month on annual billing, covering up to 300,000 MTU or 25 million events, so the old "everything is a sales call" critique no longer fully holds. The catch is that the moment you outgrow Plus, the Growth and Enterprise tiers are custom quote only, which is where Amplitude's commercial focus still sits.

Amplitude has expanded into experimentation, CDP, and session replay over the past few years, mostly through acquisition. The integration is real but the products still feel somewhat separate. For an enterprise team that wants one vendor for everything, it works. For a solo dev, the breadth often comes with friction.

PostHog Overview

PostHog is the open-source product OS that combines event analytics, session replay, feature flags, A/B testing, surveys, error tracking, and a data warehouse into one platform. The pitch is simple, which is that one tool with one bill replaces five or six specialized products.

The free tier covers 1 million events per month across the suite. Beyond that, pricing is transparent and usage-based on the website. No sales calls, no "contact us for pricing", just numbers you can read. For solo devs evaluating tools, this transparency is itself a major feature.

PostHog can be self-hosted, which is the escape hatch enterprise tools never give you. Self-hosting on a Hetzner box is realistic for moderate-volume projects and gives you full data ownership. Most solo devs run on the cloud version for convenience, but the option being there matters.

Key Differences

Pricing transparency is still the most obvious difference, just narrower than it used to be. PostHog publishes per-unit rates for every product and you can calculate your bill to the cent before signing up. Amplitude has caught up partway with a public $49 per month Plus plan, but the next step up, Growth, is custom quote only with no published per-unit rate. PostHog never makes you pick up the phone. With Amplitude, you can self-serve until you can't, and then you are in a sales process.

Amplitude's query depth still wins on advanced analytics. Behavioral cohorts, predictive analytics, and some of the more sophisticated funnel analyses are more polished on Amplitude. If you have an analyst writing complex queries against product data daily, Amplitude has features PostHog doesn't match yet. For solo devs asking basic questions, both platforms answer them fine.

Both now bundle replay and flags, but PostHog bundles more under one meter. Amplitude's free Starter tier does include session replay and unlimited feature flags these days, so the old "Amplitude charges extra for everything" line is too strong. The real difference is breadth and metering. PostHog folds analytics, session replay, feature flags, A/B testing, surveys, error tracking, and a data warehouse into a single account with one usage bill, each product carrying its own generous free allotment. Amplitude's deepest experimentation, multi-armed bandits, and advanced replay capabilities live behind Growth and Enterprise. For a solo dev who actually needs replay plus flags plus error tracking plus analytics, PostHog covers the whole stack on the free tier.

Self-hosting is a PostHog-only option. Amplitude offers no self-host path. If your project needs to keep data on your own infrastructure for compliance, cost, or principle reasons, PostHog is the only option of the two. This matters more for some projects than others, but the optionality is real.

Onboarding speed favors PostHog. PostHog's SDK install, dashboard setup, and first event are a fifteen-minute exercise. Amplitude's onboarding involves more configuration, more decisions about taxonomy, and more setup before you see real data. For solo devs who want to install once and move on, PostHog gets out of the way faster.

By the Numbers (2026)

Here is the verified state of both tools as of May 28, 2026. All figures come from the vendors' own pricing pages and the public package registries, cited at the end.

Amplitude

• Free Starter tier covers 10,000 monthly tracked users and up to 2 million events per month, with session replay and unlimited feature flags included.
• Plus plan is self-serve at $49 per month on annual billing, covering up to 300,000 MTU or 25 million events, with pay-as-you-go overage at the same per-unit rate.
• Growth and Enterprise tiers are custom quote only and unlock advanced experimentation, multi-armed bandits, and predictive audiences.
• The browser SDK @amplitude/analytics-browser sits at version 2.42.5 and pulls roughly 1.94 million npm downloads per week.

PostHog

• Free tier covers 1 million product analytics events, 5,000 session replay recordings, 1 million feature flag requests, 100,000 error tracking exceptions, 1,500 survey responses, and 1 million data warehouse rows per month, all renewing monthly.
• After the free tier, product analytics is $0.00005 per event for the first paid band, session replay is $0.005 per recording, and feature flags are $0.0001 per request, each stepping down as volume climbs.
• The core platform is open source, MIT-licensed, and self-hostable, sitting at about 34,700 GitHub stars with 2,788 forks and Python as the primary language.
• The browser SDK posthog-js sits at version 1.376.3 and pulls roughly 6.55 million npm downloads per week, more than three times Amplitude's SDK volume.

Real Cost at Solo-Dev Scale

Numbers in isolation do not help you decide. So here is a concrete workload run through both real price lists.

Assume a solo dev with a product that has crossed early traction. Pick a steady-state month of 8 million product analytics events, 12,000 session replay recordings, and 1.5 million feature flag requests. This is well past hobby scale but still squarely a one-person operation.

PostHog at this workload

• Events: the first 1 million are free, leaving 7 million billable. The 1 to 2 million band is $0.00005 per event and the next band steps down, so the analytics line lands in the low hundreds of dollars per month rather than a flat rate. Using the published first band as a conservative ceiling, 7 million events times $0.00005 is about $350, and the real bill is lower because higher bands are cheaper.
• Session replay: the first 5,000 recordings are free, leaving 7,000 billable at $0.005 each, which is about $35.
• Feature flags: the first 1 million requests are free, leaving 500,000 billable at $0.0001 each, which is about $50.
• The combined PostHog bill at this workload is roughly $300 to $435 per month depending on how the event volume distributes across bands, and you can cap each product with a billing limit so it never surprises you.

Amplitude at this workload

• 8 million events is comfortably inside the Plus plan's 25 million event ceiling, and the workload stays under the 300,000 MTU cap as long as your active user count fits.
• That puts the analytics cost at the flat $49 per month on annual billing, with session replay and feature flags already included on the plan.
• If your active user count pushes past 300,000 MTU, or you need the experimentation depth that only Growth unlocks, you leave Plus and enter a custom quote with no published rate to plan against.

The honest read. At this specific mid-scale workload, Amplitude's flat $49 Plus plan is actually cheaper than PostHog's usage-based bill for the same event volume, which is the opposite of the lazy "PostHog is always cheaper" take. PostHog wins on the free tier, on breadth of products under one meter, on the self-host escape hatch, and on never forcing a sales call at the top end. Amplitude can win on raw price once you are paying, precisely because a flat plan absorbs heavy event volume that PostHog meters per unit. Run your own event count against both price lists before you commit, because the crossover point depends entirely on your event-to-MTU ratio.

When to Choose Amplitude

• You're working at or building for an enterprise context with budget
• Advanced behavioral cohort analysis is a core part of your workflow
• You have an analyst or dedicated PM doing serious data work daily
• Your event taxonomy is complex and benefits from Amplitude's structure
• You're already invested in the Amplitude ecosystem from prior work

When to Choose PostHog

• You're a solo developer who wants transparent pricing
• You need analytics, session replay, and feature flags in one tool
• Self-hosting flexibility might matter to you down the line
• Fast onboarding and minimal taxonomy work appeal to you
• You want a product that ships meaningful updates regularly

The Verdict

For solo developers in 2026, PostHog is the clear winner. The bundled feature set, the transparent pricing, the fast onboarding, and the self-host option together make it the right answer for almost every solo dev situation. Amplitude is built for a different customer.

Amplitude has real strengths. The query depth and the polish on certain advanced analytics views are genuinely better than PostHog's. If you're an analyst who lives in product analytics tools all day and you need every advanced feature, Amplitude is a more mature product on those specific surfaces. But that's a tiny slice of the audience, and almost none of that slice is solo devs.

The blunt take is that Amplitude isn't really competing for solo dev attention anymore. The free tier exists, the $49 Plus plan is a fair self-serve option, but the moment you outgrow Plus you're in a sales process with no published rate. That's fine if you're a 50-person product team with budget. It's not fine if you're one person trying to ship a side project who wants to know the bill in advance. PostHog made the bet that small teams and solo devs deserve enterprise-grade tools at indie prices, and they've delivered on that bet. Install PostHog, configure the free tier, get back to building.

Sources

All figures verified on May 28, 2026.

• Amplitude pricing and plan limits: https://amplitude.com/pricing
• Amplitude Plus plan billing details: https://amplitude.com/docs/faq/plus-plan
• PostHog pricing, free-tier allotments, and per-unit rates: https://posthog.com/pricing
• PostHog GitHub repository (stars, forks, language, license): https://github.com/PostHog/posthog
• posthog-js version and weekly downloads (npm registry and downloads API): https://www.npmjs.com/package/posthog-js
• @amplitude/analytics-browser version and weekly downloads (npm registry and downloads API): https://www.npmjs.com/package/@amplitude/analytics-browser