PostHog vs Plausible for Solo Developers

Comparing PostHog and Plausible for solo developers. Full product analytics versus privacy-first page tracking. Features, pricing, and which to install.

Quick Comparison

Feature	PostHog	Plausible
Type	Full product analytics platform with session replay and flags	Lightweight privacy-first web analytics
Free tier	1M events, 5K session recordings, 1M flag requests per month, forever	30-day trial, no card, then paid
Entry pricing	$0/mo pay-as-you-go after the free allowances	$9/mo Starter (10k pageviews, 1 site)
Script size	Tens of KB, slim bundle available	2.5KB, about 54x smaller than GA4
Open source	Yes, MIT-based with extra terms, 34,750 GitHub stars	Yes, AGPL-3.0, 26,603 GitHub stars
Learning Curve	Moderate	Easy
Best For	Solo developers building products that need funnels and events	Solo developers running marketing sites and blogs
Solo Dev Rating	9/10	9/10

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 2.5KB by Plausible's own measure and roughly 54 times smaller than the 135KB gzipped GA4 script, 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 about 2.5KB, which the company puts at roughly 54 times smaller than GA4's 135KB gzipped payload. PostHog's bundle is in the tens of kilobytes depending on features enabled, though PostHog now ships an experimental slim bundle and per-feature extension bundles to trim that. 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.

By the Numbers (2026)

Specs and prices checked on 2026-05-29 against vendor pricing pages, official docs, the GitHub API, and the npm registry. Sources are listed at the end.

PostHog

Latest posthog-js client version: 1.376.4 on npm.
npm weekly downloads: posthog-js around 6.55M, posthog-node around 5.41M (week of 2026-05-21).
GitHub: 34,750 stars, 2,789 forks on the main PostHog/posthog repo.
Free tier, resets monthly, no card required: 1M product analytics events, 5K session recordings, 1M feature flag requests, 100K error-tracking exceptions, 1,500 survey responses, plus a 1M-row data warehouse allowance.
Free plan: 1 project, 1 year data retention. Pay-as-you-go: 6 projects, 7 years retention.
Pay-as-you-go unit rates once you pass the free allowances: events at $0.00005 each from 1M to 2M (cheaper per unit as volume climbs), session recordings at $0.005 each from 5K to 15K, feature flag requests at $0.0001 each from 1M to 2M.

Plausible

Latest self-hosted release: v3.2.1, published 2026-05-15.
GitHub: 26,603 stars, 1,562 forks, AGPL-3.0 licensed.
Free 30-day trial, no credit card. Three paid plans at the 10k-pageview entry tier: Starter $9/mo (1 site, 3 years retention), Growth $14/mo (up to 3 sites and 3 team members), Business $19/mo (up to 10 sites, 10 team members, 5 years retention, funnels and revenue attribution). Yearly billing saves two months.
Pricing scales with monthly pageviews via a slider on the pricing page. Higher tiers are quoted per volume, so check current pricing for your exact pageview band.
Tracking script: about 2.5KB, which Plausible states is roughly 54 times smaller than GA4's 135KB gzipped script.

Real Cost at Solo-Dev Scale

The two tools bill on different axes, so the honest way to compare is to price a single realistic solo-dev workload through each. Assume a small SaaS with a public marketing site plus an authenticated app, generating about 80,000 marketing pageviews per month and about 900,000 product events per month, with light session replay (say 3,000 recordings per month) for debugging onboarding.

Plausible for the marketing site. At 80,000 monthly pageviews you are above the 10k Starter entry tier, so the price comes from the pageview slider rather than the $9 floor. Starter covers a single site, which fits a solo marketing site. The exact figure at the 80k band comes off the live slider, so check current pricing, but the model is a flat monthly subscription with no per-event surprises, and yearly billing knocks off two months.

PostHog for the app. Here the free tier does most of the work. 900,000 events sits under the 1M free monthly event allowance, so product analytics is $0. 3,000 session recordings sits under the 5K free recording allowance, so replay is $0 too. At this scale PostHog costs nothing, which is the whole reason it tends to win for early-stage apps. The bill only starts when you cross 1M events (then $0.00005 per extra event, so the first 100k events past the line is about $5) or 5K recordings (then $0.005 each).

The takeaway. For this profile you pay Plausible's subscription for the marketing site and $0 to PostHog for the app, because the app's volume fits inside PostHog's free allowances. The crossover happens when the app gets busy. If product events climb from 900k to, say, 5M per month, PostHog's events alone run into the low tens of dollars per month at the 1M-to-2M rate of $0.00005 each, and heavy session replay above 5K recordings at $0.005 each adds up faster than people expect. Plausible's cost rises smoothly and predictably with pageviews. PostHog's stays at zero longer and then steps up with usage. Model your real event and recording volume against the free allowances above before assuming either is cheaper.

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.