Overview

Heap

Stacks686

Followers468

Votes126

PostHog

Stacks154

Followers104

Votes6

GitHub Stars29.9K

Forks2.0K

Heap vs PostHog: What are the differences?

Introduction

Here, we will discuss the key differences between Heap and PostHog.

Data Collection Approach: Heap automatically captures all user interactions and events without requiring manual event tracking. It tracks every click, pageview, and form submission by default, providing a comprehensive dataset. On the other hand, PostHog offers a flexible event tracking system where developers explicitly define the events they want to track, requiring intentional event setup.
Pricing Model: Heap follows a usage-based pricing model, charging based on the number of monthly tracked users. In contrast, PostHog follows an open-source model, offering a self-hosted version with no per-user fees, which can be cost-effective for organizations with large user bases.
Event Analysis: Heap provides an automatic retroactive analysis that enables exploration and analysis of historical data, even for events that were not initially tracked. This feature allows retroactive funnel analysis and cohort analysis. PostHog, in contrast, doesn't offer automatic retroactive analysis, and historical data exploration is dependant on the events that were explicitly set up.
Event Querying and Segmentation: Heap offers a visual interface where users can easily query and segment data by dragging and dropping elements, simplifying the data exploration process. PostHog, on the other hand, offers a query builder that allows users to leverage SQL-like syntax to filter and segment data.
Collaboration and Sharing: Heap enables teams to collaborate by providing access control settings and the ability to easily share insights and reports with team members. PostHog also supports collaboration, allowing multiple team members to work on tracking and analyzing events simultaneously.
Third-party Integrations: Both Heap and PostHog offer various integrations with popular tools and platforms. However, Heap provides a larger number of pre-built integrations, allowing for easier data syncing between different systems.

In summary, Heap provides automatic event tracking, retroactive analysis, and visual querying, whereas PostHog offers more flexibility in event tracking, an open-source pricing model, and SQL-like query capabilities.

Detailed Comparison

Heap	PostHog
Heap automatically captures every user action in your app and lets you measure it all. Clicks, taps, swipes, form submissions, page views, and more. Track events and segment users instantly. No pushing code. No waiting for data to trickle in.	Open-source product analytics for developers and product teams. PostHog helps you build better products without sharing your data with anyone. Deploy on your own infrastructure and automatically collect events, session recordings and more.
Define analytics events using a simple, point 'n' click interface. People with zero coding knowledge can start tracking events and generating important metrics instantly;Automatically capture every user action in your iOS or web app and measure it all. Clicks, taps, swipes, form submissions, page views, and more;All analysis is automatically retroactive, so there's no need to wait days for data to accumulate. You can rely on each report to include everything from day one.;Define meaningful user segments in seconds, without writing code. Or pick a single user and display every single action they performed in your app.;Define active users and plot their growth, or list users who hit the sign up page but never registered.	OPEN SOURCE: Create plug-ins, inspect our code, request features and talk to our team on Github.; SELF-HOSTING: Deploy on your infrastructure to retain control of your data, or launch instantly on our cloud.; CORE METRICS: Auto-capture events such as sign-ups, purchases and pageviews, then analyse results.; SESSION RECORDING: See how users intact with your products while filtering out sensitive data to protect them.; EXPORT DATA: Transfer or replicate info to platforms such as Redshift, S3, BigQuery or Snowflake.; LIBRARIES: Send events to PostHog with JavaScript, Python, Ruby, Node, PHP, Android, iOS and more.
Statistics
GitHub Stars -	GitHub Stars 29.9K
GitHub Forks -	GitHub Forks 2.0K
Stacks 686	Stacks 154
Followers 468	Followers 104
Votes 126	Votes 6
Pros & Cons
Pros 36 Automatically capture every user action 23 No code required 21 Free Plan 14 Real-time insights 11 Track custom events	Pros 3 Frontend events captured out of the box 3 Full access to data when self-hosting
Integrations
Optimizely Segment Visual Website Optimizer	PagerDuty Node.js PostgreSQL Render iOS Amazon S3 Flutter Customer.io AWS CloudFormation Helm

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