PostHog vs Smartlook

Free tier available

From $55 per month (indicative)

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

Session-based pricing; mobile sessions counted alongside web.

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

Free plan with a monthly session limit.

Widely used

PostHog · since 2020

Established

Cisco · since 2016

• 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.

• Genuinely good native mobile replay, including Flutter and React Native.
• Always-on event tracking without pre-instrumentation.
• Reasonable pricing for mid-sized traffic.

• 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.

• Post-acquisition product direction is uncertain.
• Web analytics features are behind Hotjar and FullStory.
• Interface is less refined than the market leaders.

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

Teams whose primary product is a native mobile app.