PostHog vs Sentry
Pricing
PostHog: Free up to 1M events, then usage-based
Sentry: Free tier, Team from $26/mo
Description
PostHog: Product analytics, session replay, feature flags, and A/B testing, all in one open-source tool
Sentry: Error tracking that shows you exactly what broke, for which user, and how to reproduce it
Pros
- 1 million free events/month covers most startups for a long time
- Replaces 4+ separate tools (analytics, session replay, feature flags, A/B testing)
- Self-hosting option if you need to keep data on your own servers
- Full stack traces with user context: you see exactly what happened
- Supports every major language and framework
- Free tier covers 5,000 errors/month, which is plenty to start
Cons
- Steep learning curve: the sheer number of features can be overwhelming at first
- Setting up meaningful dashboards takes time and thought
- Self-hosted version requires real infrastructure to run
- Can be noisy: without tuning alert thresholds, you get bombarded
- Pricing gets complex and expensive once you need performance monitoring
- Initial setup and filtering takes time to get right
Details
PostHog is what you get when developers build analytics for developers. Instead of paying for Mixpanel (analytics) + FullStory (session replay) + LaunchDarkly (feature flags) + Optimizely (A/B tests), PostHog bundles all four into one platform. And the free tier is 1 million events per month, enough for most startups to run for months without paying.
The honest downside is complexity. PostHog can do a lot, and figuring out what to track and how to set up useful dashboards takes real effort. If you just want page views and referrer data, Plausible or Fathom is simpler. If you want to understand how users actually move through your product, PostHog is worth the setup time.
Sentry catches errors in production before your users email you about them. When something breaks, you get a stack trace, the user’s browser/device info, the exact request that triggered it, and breadcrumbs showing what happened before the error. It is the difference between “something is broken” and “this specific API call fails for Firefox users on line 47.”
The free tier covers 5,000 errors per month. For a solo founder, that is more than enough unless something is seriously wrong. The main annoyance is noise: out of the box, Sentry will alert you about every third-party script error and browser extension conflict. Spend 30 minutes configuring filters when you set it up, and it becomes invaluable.
Verified
