PostHog and Matomo are both open-source analytics platforms you can self-host on your own infrastructure, giving you complete control over your data and unrivaled privacy compliance. However, there are some important differences between the two platforms.
Matomo is primarily pitched as a Google Analytics alternative for marketing analytics, and offers useful tools for migrating GA data into Matomo for a seamless transition. Its focus on session tracking makes it ideal for running analytics on large content and e-commerce websites
In contrast, PostHog is a product analytics platform designed to show you what your users do in your product. PostHog is event-based, so it tracks not just what pages users are visiting and how they got there, but also helps you detect, understand and fix user experience problems.
Contents:
- How is PostHog different to Matomo?
- PostHog vs Matomo feature comparison
- Integrations and data sources
- Strengths of PostHog
- Strengths of Matomo
- Coming soon to PostHog
Matomo charges extra for product analytics features like funnel analysis, cohorts, path analysis, and session recording, and they're not tightly integrated. In PostHog, these are core features in all editions, including the open source release, while Experimentation is free up to 1 million events per month.
PostHog is built to work seamlessly with your data stack. That means we offer data import and export integrations with most popular data warehouses, as well as numerous integrations with CRMs (Hubspot, Salesforce), data platforms (Segment, Airbyte, Rudderstack), engineering tools (PagerDuty, Sentry), and more via the PostHog App Store.
PostHog is about giving engineering and product teams the tools they need to build better products. The core product analytics tools are part of this, but we go further by providing market-leading feature flag functionality, and integrating Session Recording so you can deploy one platform that does everything, rather than integrating multiple discrete tools into your stack.
This table compares three self-hosted plans: Matomo On-Premise, PostHog Open Source, and PostHog Self-Host – our paid self-hosted plan.
Matomo On-Premise ships with a robust set of core web analytics features, while advanced product analytics features are available at various prices from the Matomo On-Premise Marketplace.
All features in PostHog Open Source are totally free, including core product analytics tools.
PostHog Self-Hosted is a paid edition that adds Experimentation, Group Analytics, support for multiple projects, and numerous team management tools. It's priced on a per event basis and is free up to 1 million events per month.
| Matomo On-Premise | PostHog Open Source | PostHog Self-Hosted | |
| Platform | |||
| Open source | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ |
| Host yourself | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ |
| 1st-party cookies | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ |
| Custom apps | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ |
| Multiple projects | ✔ | ✖ | ✔ |
| Unlimited users | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ |
| Event autocapture | ✖ | ✔ | ✔ |
| GDPR compliance | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ |
| HIPAA compliance | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ |
| API access | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ |
| Cookie-less option | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ |
| Features | |||
| Feature Flags | ✖ | ✔ | ✔ |
| Retention tracking | ✖ | ✔ | ✔ |
| Unique user and pageview tracking | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ |
| UTM tracking | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ |
| User profiles | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ |
| Funnel analysis | 179 to 529 EUR pa | ✔ | ✔ |
| Cohorts | 89 to 259 EUR pa | ✔ | ✔ |
| Path analysis | 89 to 259 EUR pa | ✔ | ✔ |
| Multi-Channel attribution | 79 to 229 EUR pa | ✖ | ✖ |
| Session Recording & Heatmaps | 199 to 599 EUR pa | ✔ | ✔ |
| Experimentation | 199 to 599 EUR pa | ✖ | ✔ |
| Roll-up reporting | 199 to 599 EUR pa | ✖ | ✖ |
| Hedgehogs | ✖ | ✔ | ✔ |
Matomo doesn't offer many dedicated integrations for syncing data with other platforms, but its Tracking and Reporting APIs allow you to query a large range of parameters. It also offers a Google Analytics importer.
In addition to extensive selection of dedicated integrations, PostHog offers two APIs: a public API for pushing data into PostHog, and a private API for exporting data and performing various actions.
| Matomo | PostHog | |
| Export | ||
| API | ✔ | ✔ |
| Redshift | ✖ | ✔ |
| Google Cloud Storage | ✖ | ✔ |
| Snowflake | ✖ | ✔ |
| Amazon S3 | ✖ | ✔ |
| Google BigQuery | ✖ | ✔ |
| Google Pub/Sub | ✖ | ✔ |
| RudderStack | ✖ | ✔ |
| Hubspot | ✖ | ✔ |
| Sentry | ✖ | ✔ |
| Zapier | ✖ | ✔ |
| Hubspot | ✖ | ✔ |
| Salesforce | ✖ | ✔ |
| Import | ||
| Google Analytics | ✔ | ✖ |
| API | ✖ | ✔ |
| Redshift | ✖ | ✔ |
| Google Cloud Storage | ✖ | ✔ |
| Snowflake | ✖ | ✔ |
| Amazon S3 | ✖ | ✔ |
| Sentry | ✖ | ✔ |
| Hubspot | ✖ | ✔ |
| Salesforce | ✖ | ✔ |
| Zapier | ✖ | ✔ |
| Zendesk | ✖ | ✔ |
Feature Flags are at the core what makes PostHog a great tool for product-lead businesses. They're especially useful for gradually rolling out new features, and quickly rolling back if you detect problems, but they can be used in other creative ways.
Need feedback on a design change? Roll it out to internal users first to gather feedback. Need to optimize messaging for different regions or demographics? Use a feature flag targeted on user properties. Want to change something without the CEO noticing? Create a flag just for them. Ok, we don't actually recommend the latter, but you get the idea.
Feature flags also integrate with other analytics insights, so you can breakdown a conversion funnel by a feature flag, or filter trends, paths, and numerous other insights by specific feature flags. Using Feature Flags and product analytics together gives developers a complete toolset.
PostHog and Matomo both support event tracking, but PostHog goes one step further by autocapturing events so you don't have to instrument every single thing before you start tracking it. This means you start capturing useful data from the moment you deploy PostHog, but it also makes rolling out updates much easier as you don't have to define your events each time.
Self-hosting PostHog means data never leaves your infrastructure, which makes protecting user privacy a breeze. GDPR and HIPAA compliance are vastly simplified this way, and you can go one step further by running PostHog without any cookies and therefore without the need for cookie banners.
Matomo is especially well-suited to content and e-commerce websites. Unlike Google Analytics, it doesn't employ any data sampling, and it offers a wide-range of features specifically designed to aid marketing teams. For example, Matomo's Multi Channel Conversion Attribution reports (a paid feature) allow marketing teams to understand how all their activities impacted a conversion, not just the last interaction.
Like PostHog, Matomo is a good option for anyone seeking a privacy-respecting analytics platform. While by default it uses cookies, it also offers the option for cookie-less tracking, and features a built-in GDPR Manager utility to help simplify and monitor your compliance. The European Union uses a forked version of Matomo on all its websites.
Matomo is ideal for anyone who uses popular off-the-shelf content management systems or e-commerce platforms. Websites with fewer than 50,000 page views per month can safely install Matomo straight from the WordPress plugin library, and Matomo offers an official integration with WooCommerce as well. There are community integrations for numerous other platforms, including Drupal, Joomla, DatoCMS, Pimcore, and Adobe Commerce.
We ship new features fast. Here's a quick snapshot of what we're working on right now:
- In-app setup guided tour
- PostHog Cloud EU
- Session Recordings DevTools
- Turbo feature flags
- Unified querying across events, persons, sessions, groups
- Automated insight recommendations
- Lightning fast querying at billion event and person scale
- Extended insight visualizations
Got a question? Ask them here.
You can read about how we work in the open in our company handbook.
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