PostHog vs Plausible for Solo Developers

Quick Comparison

PostHog Overview

PostHog is the all-in-one product analytics platform that has eaten most of its competition over the past few years. You get event tracking, funnels, retention analysis, session replay, heatmaps, feature flags, A/B testing, and a product CDP all from one install. The free tier covers a real amount of usage, and the platform is open source if you ever want to self-host.

The unified data model is the real win. Every event, every user, every session, and every flag exposure lives in one place, so you can build funnels that include UI clicks, server-side events, and feature flag evaluations together. For a solo developer trying to understand whether a new feature is being used, PostHog answers in one query what other stacks need three tools for.

The cost of all that power is a heavier script in your frontend and a steeper learning curve than a simple pageview tool. You also have to think about event taxonomy from day one if you want clean data later. PostHog is a real product analytics platform, with all the upside and ceremony that implies.

Plausible Overview

Plausible is the privacy-first analytics tool that exists to be the opposite of Google Analytics. The script is tiny, around 1kb, it sets no cookies, it does not track users across sites, and the dashboard tells you what you actually need to know without burying it under nine layers of menus. The whole product fits on one screen.

The feature set is intentionally narrow. You get pageviews, unique visitors, sources, top pages, locations, devices, and a few goal types. There is no session replay, no event funnels in the PostHog sense, and no heatmaps. That is the point. Plausible is for understanding what is happening on your site, not for diagnosing why a user dropped off step three of an onboarding flow.

For solo developers running blogs, marketing sites, documentation, or simple SaaS landing pages, Plausible is often all you need. The pricing is honest, the team is independent, and the dashboard loads instantly even on slow connections. It is one of the rare products that respects both your users and your time.

Key Differences

Scope is dramatically different. PostHog is a product analytics platform that includes feature flags, session replay, A/B tests, and surveys. Plausible is a privacy-first pageview tool. Calling them competitors is a stretch in some ways. They overlap on pageview tracking and source attribution, but the rest of their feature sets barely touch.

Script weight and performance are not close. Plausible's script is around 1kb gzipped. PostHog's is in the tens of kilobytes depending on features enabled. For a marketing site that lives or dies on Core Web Vitals, the difference is meaningful. For an authenticated SaaS dashboard where the user already loaded React, it is noise.

Privacy posture is genuinely different. Plausible is fully cookieless and built around aggregate data, which means no cookie banner required in most jurisdictions. PostHog can be configured to respect privacy, but the defaults capture more user-level data, and you almost always need a consent banner. For solo developers operating in the EU, this distinction has legal weight.

Pricing models reward different shapes. Plausible is a flat subscription that scales with pageviews. PostHog is usage-based with a generous free tier, and costs rise sharply once you start using session replay heavily or sending tens of millions of events. For a content site, Plausible is more predictable. For an app, PostHog often comes out cheaper because the free tier handles a lot.

The teams behind them are different sizes and styles. PostHog is a venture-funded startup shipping huge amounts of product every month. Plausible is an indie company run by a small team with no outside funding, which is reflected in the deliberate pace and narrow scope. Both are healthy businesses, just with very different DNA.

When to Choose PostHog

• You are building a product where understanding user behavior matters
• You need feature flags, A/B testing, or session replay alongside analytics
• You want one unified data model across product, web, and feature exposures
• You can invest the time to design a clean event taxonomy upfront
• Your free tier usage fits comfortably or you are happy with usage-based pricing

When to Choose Plausible

• You are running a marketing site, blog, or documentation
• You want a tiny script and no cookie banner
• You want a dashboard your future self can read in five seconds
• You value supporting an indie team with a sustainable business model
• You do not need funnels, replays, or user-level event analysis

The Verdict

For most solo developers running a single SaaS product, the smartest setup in 2026 is actually both. Use Plausible for your public marketing site and blog, where you want a tiny script, no cookie banner, and clean source attribution. Use PostHog for the authenticated app, where you need funnels, retention, replay, and feature flag exposure analysis to actually understand what users do.

If you can only pick one, the answer depends on what you are building. For a content site or simple landing page funnel, Plausible is the right tool and adding PostHog would be overkill. For a real product where you need to know which features get used and which onboarding steps lose people, PostHog is in a category of its own and replacing five other tools at once.

What you should not do is install Google Analytics. Both PostHog and Plausible respect users more, give you more useful data, and have better dashboards. Pick whichever fits your product shape and move on. The hour you spend choosing is better spent designing the events you actually want to measure.