PostHog vs Hotjar

Free tier available

From $32 per month (indicative, Growth tier by daily sessions)

Usage-based pricing per product with a substantial free tier; most small teams stay free indefinitely.

Priced by daily sessions per module; Observe, Ask and Engage are billed separately, so a full setup is several subscriptions.

Large monthly free allowance across every product, plus free self-hosting.

Free plan with a daily session limit and basic heatmaps.

Widely used

PostHog · since 2020

Category standard

Contentsquare · since 2014

• Replaces four or five separate subscriptions with one bill and one SDK.
• Free tier is large enough for real production use at startup scale.
• Open source with a credible self-hosting path.

• Non-technical teams adopt it without training, which is why it spreads inside organisations.
• Surveys and recordings together let you ask a user about the behaviour you just watched.
• Simple installation and good default privacy masking.

• Individual modules are less deep than category specialists.
• Self-hosting at scale is a serious infrastructure undertaking.
• The product surface changes fast, which means occasional churn.

• Session-based pricing across three separate modules adds up quickly.
• Sampling on lower tiers means the session you need may not have been recorded.
• Weak for engineering debugging compared to LogRocket or FullStory.

Startups and scale-ups consolidating analytics, replay and flags into one platform.

Marketing and product teams that want behavioural insight without an analytics specialist.