PostHog vs. Heap: Which Analytics Platform Fits Your Business?

The Billing Model Is the Real Difference

Most comparison articles lead with features. The feature lists look similar on paper — both tools do funnels, retention, session replay, and dashboards. But the billing model determines what you can actually do with each tool in practice.

PostHog: Events-Based Billing

PostHog charges by event volume. An event is any tracked action: pageview, click, custom event, feature flag evaluation, survey response. The free tier includes 1M events/month. Paid tiers scale with event volume.

What this means in practice: You can track 100 users or 100,000 users — the cost is the same if event volume is similar. A B2B SaaS with 500 customers generating 200K events/month pays the same as a consumer app with 50,000 users generating 200K events/month. User count doesn't matter. Session count doesn't matter. Only events.

When this works in your favor: You have a product with moderate traffic but need deep event tracking — every button click, every feature usage, every workflow step. You want to instrument everything without worrying about session quotas.

When this works against you: You have a high-traffic website where every pageview is an event. If you have 500,000 monthly visitors and each generates 10 pageview events, that's 5M events/month — and you'll hit paid tiers quickly.

Heap: Session-Based Billing

Heap charges by session volume. A session is a period of continuous user activity on your site or app. The free tier includes 10K sessions/month. Paid tiers (Growth, Pro) scale with session count and are contact-sales pricing.

What this means in practice: You can track unlimited events per session — Heap's autocapture records every click, every form submission, every pageview without consuming quota. But every new session (every new visit) counts against your limit. A user who visits 5 times in a month consumes 5 sessions.

When this works in your favor: You have moderate traffic but need rich event tracking per session. A B2B SaaS where each user visits 10–20 times/month and triggers hundreds of events per session. You get unlimited events within those sessions.

When this works against you: You have high traffic with many brief visits. An e-commerce site or content platform with 500,000 monthly visitors — even if each visitor generates only 2–3 events, you'll blow through 10K sessions in days. Teams on Heap often disable tracking on high-traffic pages (pricing pages, blog) to stay under quota — which means losing behavioral data on exactly the pages where conversion decisions happen.

How to Think About This Decision

The right choice depends on 4 dimensions of your business context. Work through each one before looking at pricing.

Feature Comparison

The feature gap is clear: PostHog is a product analytics platform (analytics + experimentation + surveys + flags). Heap is a session analytics tool (autocapture + funnels + AI insights). If you need experimentation, PostHog wins by default. If you only need session analytics with autocapture, Heap's point-and-click simplicity has real value.

When to Pick PostHog

• You need experimentation. Feature flags, A/B testing, and holdout groups are native to PostHog. Heap doesn't have any of these. If you plan to run experiments, PostHog saves you from buying a separate tool (Statsig, Optimizely, Eppo).
• You want SQL access to your data. The HogQL editor lets analysts query raw event data directly. Heap is UI-only — you can't run custom queries against raw data. For teams with analysts, this is a genuine workflow advantage.
• You have compliance or data ownership requirements. Self-hosting, EU data hosting, HIPAA compliance, open-source codebase. These matter for regulated industries and companies that need data sovereignty.
• You're building a product analytics foundation from scratch. PostHog gives you the entire platform in one install. Heap gives you session analytics — you'll need additional tools for experimentation, surveys, and feature flags. Getting the foundation right from the start is what a PostHog consulting engagement is designed for.
• You're engineering-led. PostHog's interface is optimized for technical teams who want to query, experiment, and debug in the same platform. The learning curve is steeper, but the ceiling is higher.

When to Pick Heap

• Your team is non-technical and needs point-and-click analytics. Heap's autocapture works without engineering involvement after the initial snippet install. Funnels, retention, and journey maps are all UI-driven. PostHog requires more setup for custom events.
• You want Contentsquare's AI-powered insights (Sense). Heap's Sense AI assistant surfaces patterns and anomalies automatically — "your checkout conversion dropped 12% this week, and here's why." PostHog doesn't have equivalent AI capabilities.
• You have moderate traffic with high engagement per session. If each user session generates hundreds of events, Heap's unlimited-events-within-sessions model gives you more tracking depth than PostHog's event-based billing at the same price point.
• You already have a separate experimentation platform. If you're using Statsig, Optimizely, or LaunchDarkly for experiments, Heap's lack of experimentation capabilities isn't a gap — it's one less platform to manage.

Pricing at a Glance

The practical cost comparison depends on your traffic and event patterns. A B2B SaaS with 500 monthly active users, each generating 100 events/month (50K events total), stays well within PostHog's free tier. The same 500 users visiting 15 times/month (7,500 sessions) stays within Heap's free tier too. Both are free at this scale.

But a marketing site with 100,000 monthly visitors generating 3 events each (300K events) also stays within PostHog's free tier. Those same 100,000 visitors would need 100K sessions on Heap — 10× the free quota. This is where the billing model creates real cost differences that have nothing to do with your revenue.

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