PostHog is an open-source analytics platform designed to help software teams understand user behavior, improve products, and drive growth. It offers a suite of tools for event tracking, heatmaps, session recording, and feature flags, enabling developers and product managers to gain insights into how users interact with their applications.
PostHog is also often used as Product Analytics of choice in Indie Hacker and Product Management tech stacks.
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Deployment | Cloud / SaaS / Web-Based, On-Premise Linux |
Training | Documentation |
Languages | English |
Posthog is easy to set up and gives you in-depth details about your users. Within a few hours of signing up I was able to start tracking my users' flow easily with custom and built-in events.
There isn't much to dislike about Posthog. There is a learning curve to figure out the exact analytics you are looking for and set up your dashboard, but that is an easy hurtle to overcome. The only feature I am currently missing is notifications when certain events reach a threshold.
Posthog lets me get a detailed look at what actions my users perform and know when something isn't working while also allowing me see a high-level view of what all the users are doing.
I like the ability to view in real-time how my customers interact with my website.
So far there is nothing that I dislike about Posthog. The majority of the time, I use the funnel & trends tool. Both are phenomenal for understanding how to improve my site.
Posthog allows me to analyze and understand key customer funnels. Posthog allowed me to understand exactly what steps of the checkout process some of my customers were abandoning their carts.
You have full control over what you want to track, and how you would like to do it
The User Interface is a bit tricky to navigate at times
PostHog helps us understand how users are using/not using different features
I like the funnels feature the most. It allows you to understand what features of your website and services lead to conversions and how you can increase those conversions.
It's not the most intuitive for users. In my experience, there aren't a ton of resources out there explaining what all of PostHog's features mean and how they can be used.
PostHog is closing the gap between what users and customers say about their experience and their actual actions. While we conduct user interviews to better understand customer behavior, PostHog lets us watch what out customers are actually doing.
Super direct and simple UI, very easy to understand for the get-go, super fast integrations with several programming languages (great that Flutter is present)
Maybe you can find the create some pre-loaded insights and dashboards that can be useful for a wide spectrum of businesses
Super fast insights on what our customers are doing, direct pulse on our data and how people are using our app
Freedom to track events the way you want (frontend, session recordings or backend) and host it the way you want. I am currently running a self-hosted instance and Posthog EU cloud.
- steep learning curve to build the analytics and dashboard you want. Video tutorials would be great. - Some features that make my life easier (e.g. email reports (subscriptions)) are hard to find.
Keeping track of my basic project KPIs (number of users, signups, important events, retention) and doing this in a privacy compliant way (I can use self-hosting if necessary).
We can trust the data collection, transformation, less code to be responsible for, and usability for PMs to create their own insights.
We would like to have an easier way to have customer-facing charts for event data to better communicate our value prop. This is more for B2B SaaS.
Significantly less code to be responsible for, reliable, Dev Experience is fantastic, more time can be spent on building and insights rather than maintaining
* ability to self-host * cloud hosting in the US and EU * ability to customize via plugins * active slack community * responsive developers and support staff * API enables using analytic not just for internal but also fur user facing analytics insights
* not all features are fully polished * event documentation subpar and limits ease of use for non-developers * due to monetizing via events, more event intensive use cases pay more
* page analytics (including heat maps, recordings etc) * custom analytics * insights and dashboards on collected analytics * ability to process events in posthog or in 3rd party systems
Easy to set up and to tag. Had in running in half a day, and gained insights by the end of the day. Really great blog and documentation as well. Puts you on the right path right from the get go.
So far, I'm pretty happy. Haven't dived into this to point out downsides, though I'm sure there are.
I finally have a view of customer behaviour statistics. But not only that, as PostHog also records screen constantly, it is really easy to see individual behaviours and also solve specific customer problems.
I loved that they did not have too many features that were exclusive but rather kept the tool open and if you really needed to extend the functionality, it made sense as to what you might need to pay to upgrade.
I wish that you could export the raw video data from the session recordings so that those could be analyzed separately. With that said, I understand why they cannot export it.
It helps with a lot of things including tracking users and sessions as well as individual user tagging data to understand their behavior over time. I cannot wait to implement it in another project!
Installation was straightforward. Put a javascript snippet into the header of the pages you want to monitor, and you're all set. The admin GUI is easy to use and is not bulky or heavy. The trial/free level account was exactly what I needed to do some debugging on a small client's web form. I will most likely go ahead and install a self-hosted version of the system on my server.
The console logging doesn't seem to be as detailed as FullStory, so it took a bit more digging through the logs to find the problems I was facing. Session recording isn't enabled by default on a project, and it took me a bit of searching through the documentation to find the instructions for that.
I needed a way to record Javascript console logs from users' browsers and see exactly what they entered on the signup form. I needed to know how the system behaved once the user submitted the web forms. I did not have the budget or time to install a system like FullStory. I had everything set up in about 30 minutes.
Posthog Service has been great and very scalable for the heavy amount of events we ingest. The recording feature has been huge for our company and developers for troubleshooting customer and internal issues. Technical Support has been pretty great. Shout out to Tiina Turban for all the help troubleshooting and helping our setup run smooth!
The application is complex, and finding the culprit for an outage can sometimes be cumbersome.
event ingestion on a large scale and session recordings to help troubleshoot and collect click data.
- Live recordings - A/B tests (experiments) - The launchpad from which you can select actions no-code - heatmaps - design - it's quite beautiful and a good tool for viewing analytics -> all-in-one solution, without needing to install extras like hotjar Also, the trackers are quite aggressive (sophisticated).
- Setup for more complicated tasks is challenging as the docs are yet incomplete. For example, several config options in the initialisation function are not explained anywhere in the docs (e.g. methods for adjusting GDPR). In any case, the docs should contain more examples through code than written explanations. - No warning panel for experiments and other features before stopping/deleting them. I once thought stop meant pause and killed my entire experiment (wasn't too tragic as it hadn't fully started yet)
Validating design and product hypothesis, measuring out conversion funnel, quantitative and qualitative ways to analyse a customer
PostHog was easy to set up and immediately started tracking events and contact data. We love the new screen recordings feature and how it auto-captures events without us setting up the telemetry - no code changes are needed. It's as simple as point and click - we use the "Inspect element" feature to define an event and then navigate to the "Live feed" to see if the events we just defined are being tracked correctly.
The screen recordings is a fantastic new feature, but we experienced a few bugs. Hoping to see it polished as the rest of the platform in the coming weeks. Apart from that, the reporting feature needs some more types of graphs and features to replace the other tools we use entirely.
Two things we use Posthog for as an early-stage startup: 1. Easy access to feature utilisation data without requiring colossal development effort and time. 2. Observe how our users interact with our app and see where the significant dropoffs are, and improve the flow.
Insight reports and Dashboards are easy to create. I like being able to filter recordings for specific events in order to watch users as they attempt to use our product.
I've had a few issues with errors or bugs occurring. I have a few graphs that even though they are set to group Monthly, are showing weekly. When watching recordings, I would like to be able to move to the next video without having to go back to the first Recordings page.
We're using PostHog to track our most important metrics and other data in order to determine friction points in our product and learn how to best optimize the user experience.
PostHog is a powerful cloud-based tool that allows us to index and analyze a large volume of data in real time and query it. It offers great features like session recording, integration with other tools, and allows us to export data to platforms like BigQuery and Hubspot.
PostHog suits my needs. But I have to mention that it is not that effective for running analytic queries on larger datasets.
PostHog is relatively easy to use. And we use it for processing and analysis to give value to the data, with the aim of helping our clients make decisions. It is also a very powerful software with which I can integrate it with other platforms to export data to other platforms such as Hubspot.
Its quite easy to set up a new experiment or ab test and to start testing it. Lot of features and information can be track
License model. Quite expensive when you raise the free limit.
Capacity to ab test new features and to analyse their performance.
PostHog has been essential for bringing our engineers and product teams together. The suite of products works together perfectly. It was fairly straightforward to implement and add to our product.
PostHog provides a variety of products under one roof, which sometimes leads to poor user experience and it is something that can be improved.
PostHog is helping us track and capture product metrics.
It's all in one, it does product analytics and experimentation. I like that it's more of a self-serve tool because I don't need regular meetings with a representative trying to help me learn how to use the tool, I want good documentation so I can use the tool at my own pace, and PostHog does that very well. The documentation is well organized and uses videos and animated screenshots to visually reinforce the concepts. Also, their pricing model is quite simple to understand and easy to get started without a big commitment.
The funnels and journeys aren't very easy to use, but it could be our test data. I found them hard to understand, but once I have a real use case I would dig more into it. The heatmaps were hard to find and only showed clicks, not scroll maps or anything else I'd expect from a heatmap.
We need a product analytics tool to help us understand who are users are and we want to leverage the built-in experimentation tools to run experiments with our hypothesis once we understand our users better.
The recordings part is great and the fact that you can use it to do qualitative research based on events that you can filter out. The in-built automatic filters are extensive and easy to use.
PostHog has a lot of different features compared to other product analytics suites. Most products usually just focus on one part of the features PostHog incorporates, making them easier to use.
Helping us in finding patterns in user activities, allowing us to do user research and A/B testing in one place with good visibility and less technical management.