Google Analytics vs PostHog
Google Analytics and PostHog are both web analytics software. Google Analytics is a commercial product from Google. PostHog is open source under a license set out in its repository, with 41k GitHub stars.
Which to pick
- Pick Google Analytics when
- You run Google Ads or need free, widely understood traffic reporting and can accept Google processing your visitor data.
- Pick PostHog when
- You build a web or mobile product and want analytics, replay and feature flags in one tool instead of stitching Mixpanel, Hotjar and LaunchDarkly together.
Side by side
Tracks website and app visits, traffic sources, conversions and user behaviour, and feeds Google Ads audiences.
A product analytics suite covering event analytics, web analytics, session replay, feature flags, A/B experiments, error tracking, logs and a data warehouse.
GA4's interface and data model are hard for casual users, it needs cookie consent in the EU, and data sampling and thresholds hide detail.
Self-hosting is supported only as a hobby deployment and most teams use the paid cloud, where usage-based bills can grow quickly with event volume.
Production-ready (both)
Cloud service
Cloud service and self-hosted server
Not published
Python, Django, TypeScript, React, Rust and ClickHouse
Closed source, sold by Google
Open source, license unclear on GitHub
Closed source: you use it under the maker's terms and cannot change or resell the code.
GitHub could not read the license. Check it in the repository before reusing any code.
652 Wikipedia readers a month on phones
41k GitHub stars
Not known
Established: started 6 years ago, latest release desktop-v0.61.946.
Other comparisons
More web and product analytics tools
Both sides were judged on 2026-11-03 from makers' descriptions, Wikipedia, READMEs and GitHub data. License, age and popularity lines are worked out directly.