When building a product or business, having a powerful analytics tool that supports your long-term goals can make a massive difference. In today’s competitive analytics landscape, users are constantly seeking the best options and analytics tools that play a crucial role in helping businesses or startups stay agile have been evolving! This blog is about PostHog vs Google Analytics!
In one of our previous blog, we understood how MixPanel and Amplitude compare by analysing their features and capabilities.
We’ll try to discuss a detailed comparison between the tools to help you understand their strengths and differences. PostHog claims to offer an entire suite of products designed to help you build successful products vs Google that allows to integrate once and track across different Google Products!
What’s PostHog
PostHog is an open-source product analytics platform that gives teams full control over their data. Unlike traditional analytics tools, it allows you to self-host your data, ensuring privacy and compliance while eliminating the need for third-party tracking. It offers features like event tracking, session recording, feature flagging, A/B testing, and more, all in one platform. It’s particularly popular among developers and startups because of its flexibility, scalability, and ability to integrate directly into the product development workflow.
The biggest positive is its open-source nature which has allowed the company to build a massive community around it. The strong powerful community acts as a free marketing tool for PostHog who often contribute to the platform’s growth by suggesting features, discussing bugs, and creating various integrations.
At the same time, it offers a monthly allowance of events, replays, and feature flag requests. If you can stay within these limits, you can use its core features at no cost, indefinitely.
Pros
- PostHog gives full control to the user as it offers self-hosting, allowing full control over data to the users
- Combined features like event tracking, session replays, and A/B testing in one place is a massive advantage.
- Compliance with data regulations like GDPR along with privacy because of self-hosting.
- Easy integration with powerful tools like Slack, and ZapierStripe, Hubspot, Salesforce in the existing workflows
- Detailed insights into user behaviour with cohort and funnel analysis thereby helping teams make data-driven decisions.
- The community-driven approach means users often get their doubts or problems solved via the community only.
- Better UI/UX since it’s custom built out while Google Analytics is quite information heavy and less insight rich!
Cons
- While self-hosting is beneficial for greater control, it comes with the added responsibility of managing and maintaining server resources, which can increase complexity.
- The paid versions of PostHog become increasingly expensive as you exceed the usage limits.
- Technical expertise is needed to access and be able to utilize all the features, unlike its competitors like Mixpanel or Google Analytics.
- PostHog is focussed on product analytics while Google Analytics has lots of heavy marketing and user growth related metrics.
- The tool’s limited AI capabilities can be a significant drawback in today’s AI-driven world.
There comes Google Analytics
One of the widely used web analytics platforms, Google Analytics (GA4) allows users to keep track of the users, and their approach on web or mobile apps. It is a powerful tool capable of providing detailed insights into the web or mobile app traffic, their sources, user demographics, and other growth-related metrics.
One of the most recognised aspects of using Google Analytics is that anyone can use it by integrating the script into their websites! The platform integrates with numerous external tools to provide detailed insights and results, helping businesses improve and grow their products or businesses.
Pros
- The free version of the tool offers extensive features that can be used indefinitely.
- The comprehensive reports on traffic sources, demographics, and behaviors are as detailed as possible.
- The integration of Google Analytics with other powerful Google tools like Google Ads, Search Console, and Firebase is seamless.
- Google Analytics allows you to build personalised dashboards to monitor key metrics at a glance.
- The detailed tracking of the entire user journey on the website or app ensures startups use their money wisely during marketing campaigns.
- Predictive analysis and analytical intelligence help you focus on the growing aspects of the business.
Cons
- A beginner accessing the dashboard of Google Analytics can be overwhelmed with tons of features and pointers.
- The free version’s offerings might experience data sampling.
- Compliance is one of the major drawbacks of Google Analytics. With G4 format out due to privacy concerns in Europe and now across the world!
- Reliance on third-party cookies to track user behavior means it can be challenging for users in different regions. For example, GA doesn’t fully comply with the EU’s GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation). This led to lots of privacy first analytics tools also coming up.
- The lack of dedicated customer support is another major drawback of Google Analytics.
- The paid version of Google Analytics is expensive. Google Analytics 360, as it is called, costs $50,000 per year and can increase based on usage.
Right then! That’s a lot of information to absorb. Google Analytics, having started early, now controls over 80% of the analytics tracking tools market share, according to a report by W3Techs.
In this article, we’ve discussed PostHog vs Google Analytics. Now, it’s time for you to make your choice. Fundamentally, the major difference seems to self hosted vs an off the shelf kind of tool!
If you are a developer focussed startup with strong tech chops, you might prefer postHog while if you are running small blogs or sites and want to get started with Analytics fast using simple plugins, you might start with Google Analytics!
Which tool do you think will help you grow your product or startup? Choose wisely. And remember, we recently compared two other major players in the industry, Mixpanel and Amplitude. Go check out that blog too and make an informed decision.
Still unsure about the best option? Reach out to us, and together we’ll find the perfect fit for your business.
