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Why should I use PostHog?
While visiting SF recently, I saw @PostHog ads everywhere. Most analytics platforms (like Posthog, @Amplitude, @Mixpanel) seem to have pretty much the same feature sets. So let's get real. What is are the real advantages of Posthog versus others like Amplitude? Nicer/easier to use? Or something deeper than that?
A little story:
At Product Hunt, we used @Asana. I knew about @Linear. But I didn't feel that switching was worth the cost to migrate the company. Linear and Asana features were largely the same. We finally switched to Linear a couple months ago. And sure enough, I didn't find any new killer features in Linear. But, Linear is just so much nicer to use. So much faster and more pleasant. The result is that a lot of @Slack chaos has shifted over to Linear without me (the CTO) having to beg and hassle folks to use a task tracker more religiously.
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My background is in Analytics, so I generally have a high bar for tooling and pretty most tools lack the customization I need. We use @PostHog and Recall and it does the job, when I need deep analytics I just download the data, however they have data limitations so I will soon need to use the API. It is also getting super slow now that we are growing. So I hope speed will improve or we may need to find another solution.
@posthog @sankari_nair Hey Sankari, your event level isn't at a volume where we'd expect things to slow down. Where specifically are you seeing things being slow? Improving query performance has been my top priority for this quarter so super keen to look into this for you!
@posthog @tim_glaser Thank you for coming back to me Tim! What superb customer service :) Its specifically when creating a new product analytics view and needing breakdowns > 25K - which is what I tend to need for all my views as I am breaking down by initial URL/ referral source links.
@posthog @sankari_nair Understood! This isn't really an issue with performance of scalability, we just allowed too many breakdowns to be displayed in a graph. I've created a PR to fix this: https://github.com/PostHog/posth...
Using posthog in my current company... i'm speechless I have everything starting from the landing page ending the surveys. Huge fan of Pendo though, looking forward to bringing it to my org tool set
We're using Posthog at NOAN. First time using the tool (for me) but our CTO has experience with it. I used Mixpanel in a former life and hated it, tbh, found the setup to be non-intuitive. That said, I lobbied hard to get it introduced at CBS a few years later when I was running streaming platforms there because it had some v cool real-time streaming analysis capabilities, but I got blocked from implementing for a bunch of bureaucratic 'reasons'.
I'm not an engineer, but my roles for the last decade have involved in-the-weeds data work. I love the data we get from @PostHog and the depth of understanding I get about user behaviour from recordings, etc is utterly transformative. Love being able to set up cohorts and trigger Slack alerts with them - all of which is super user-friendly. Pretty much always have a tab open - Posthog drives major decision-making about product & user behavior almost every day. We'll be implementing polls soon and working harder on setting up events.
One gripe would be that the mobile view of recordings sucks, it's a scroll trap - you can't scrub through the playback or use the buttons. TBH that's a minor gripe but still frustrated me every time.
@markhamnolan
> One gripe would be that the mobile view of recordings sucks
Fair feedback! Not something we've focussed on... out of interest when you're on mobile I'm guessing you only need a subset of what the replay page offers? What's the job you're trying to complete when you're using replay from your phone?
Feel free to send to paul AT posthog dot com
I came to posthog after realizing that google analytics is not easily supported for native development. The setup with PostHog was so easy we just kept on going, and the free tier is pretty good as well
Isn't the downside to Posthog that you have to clone all your tracking data (unlike Growth book which allows you to query on it in situ and save a fortune on the process). Not saying Growthbook is perfect, but Posthog seems to be in second place in terms of cost, features and value.
PostHog helps me understand user behavior so I can make smarter product decisions without relying on guesswork.
Product Hunt
I realize I'm not answering your question but my two cents is that PostHog is winning by staying more nimble and sticking to values. Circa 2010-2018,@Mixpanel was the de facto company in this space with affordable pricing and the best toolkit for handling in-app event analytics. But it was the same dance we've seen 100 times. Mixpanel gets bigger, moves upmarket, prices go up, app gets harder to use, support and "humanity" are abstracted away and young startups can't afford it. If your pricing page doesn't have pricing, it's not for startups. @Hotjar and @Heap started in this time, too, but Mixpanel quickly absorbed their features.
@PostHog emerges in a world where Mixpanel and surrounding companies were too expensive for young startups. Then they nail the playbook that Mixpanel forgot about:
Give away a ton of value for free
Make it so dead simple to use that you'd be crazy not to use it
As a company matures, they're already in love with you. Now you can raise prices.
But Posthog goes even further. Their branding is the anti-big-co. Their pricing page has actual pricing. Their entire marketing schtick is un-enterprise. The people choosing these tools are developers and developers don't want to hop on a call with an AE to get qualified to be given pricing in 2 weeks. They want an easy SDK to integrate to test it out and a generous free plan with a product that works. The disaster that is GA4 helps them even further because now there is no default free analytics tool for startups.
We saw this dance play out even more as this week Mixpanel launched a generous free plan (Mixpanel Events 2.0) to try and eat some of PostHog's lunch.
No idea how the product compares, but in a mature market with commoditized features, their positioning seems to be working extremely well. Barry's analysis on our Data analysis tools category page goes into even more detail.