Our April comparison of these three tools leaned on two numbers: Mixpanel's 20 million free events a month and Amplitude's $49 entry plan. Neither matches what the vendors publish today. Mixpanel's free plan now lists 1 million events. Amplitude's Plus plan starts at $0 and bills by usage. PostHog's entry price per event is far lower than the figure we quoted.
The feature gap has narrowed too. Mixpanel and Amplitude both bundle session replay and experiments now, so "PostHog is the only all-in-one" isn't the clean argument it was. Here's where the three stand in October, with every price checked against the vendor's own pages.
Short answer: For most startups and mid-size product teams, PostHog is still the best value and the easiest to keep under budget. Pick Mixpanel if your team mostly wants fast, clean funnel and retention analysis. Pick Amplitude if you have a data team, need governance, and expect to sign an enterprise contract anyway.
What changed since April
Mixpanel's free tier is much smaller than we said. The Mixpanel pricing page lists the Free plan at up to 1M events and 10K session replays a month, with unlimited seats. Growth "starts at $0" and covers up to 20M events a month and up to 500K session replays, with volume discounts and a calculator for anything in between. That 20M figure is the Growth ceiling, not a free allowance.
Amplitude dropped the $49 floor. The Amplitude pricing page now offers a Free plan with 2M events a month "forever" and 10K session replays. Plus starts at $0 with the first 2M events free, scales up to 70M events (or 700K MTUs), and requires a credit card. Growth and Enterprise are custom quotes.
PostHog's per-unit prices are lower than we listed. Its product analytics page gives the first 1,000,000 events free every month, then pricing "starts at $0.00005 / event and reduces with volume." Session replay is free for the first 5,000 recordings, then from $0.005 per recording. Feature flags and experiments get 1M free requests, then from $0.0001 per request. Surveys get 1,500 free responses, then from $0.10 each.
Pricing side by side
| PostHog | Mixpanel | Amplitude | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Free events/month | 1M | 1M | 2M |
| Free session replays | 5,000 | 10K | 10K |
| Next tier | Usage-based, from $0.00005/event | Growth: from $0, up to 20M events | Plus: from $0, up to 70M events |
| Feature flags / experiments | 1M requests free, then from $0.0001 | Experiments on Free (up to 1K MEU) and Growth | Limited on Free, more on paid plans |
| Enterprise | Custom | Custom | Custom (Growth and Enterprise) |
| EU hosting | Yes (EU Cloud) | US or EU data residency | EU data center option on every plan |
Prices checked October 5, 2026.
All three now have a usable free tier, and all three have moved to usage-based pricing for the middle of the market. The difference is how predictable the bill is.
PostHog publishes its per-unit rates, so you can work out a bill on paper. A product sending 5M events a month pays for the 4M above the free tier: at the starting rate that's at most $200 a month, less once volume discounts apply. Mixpanel and Amplitude both point you to a calculator rather than a public per-event rate. That's not a red flag, but it makes budget comparisons harder, and a calculator estimate isn't a contract.
PostHog: still the value pick
PostHog's case rests on breadth and transparency. Product analytics, session replay, heatmaps, feature flags, experiments, surveys and a data warehouse sit behind one SDK and one bill, and each product has its own free allowance. A seed-stage team can run all of it for $0 for a long time.
What changed is the self-hosting story. PostHog still documents a "hobby" self-hosted deployment via Docker, but its self-host docs say new Kubernetes deployments of its paid open source product are no longer supported. Treat self-hosting as fine for a side project and the cloud (US or EU) as the production answer. If data residency is your concern, EU Cloud covers most of what self-hosting used to.
The weak spots are the same as in April. The interface is busier than Mixpanel's, analysts coming from Amplitude will miss its governance tooling, and usage billing punishes bad instrumentation. Set billing limits on day one. A tracking bug that fires on every scroll will find your credit card faster than you'd think.
Mixpanel: the cleanest analytics, now with more around it
Mixpanel is still the fastest of the three for answering "where do users drop off?" Funnels, retention and flows are quick to build and easy for non-analysts to read. That hasn't changed.
What has changed is scope. Mixpanel now includes session replay on every plan (10K a month free, up to 500K on Growth), and experiments are metered by MEU (monthly experiment users), with a small allowance on Free. Its governance list includes SOC 2 Type II, US or EU data residency, SAML SSO with SCIM provisioning, audit logs and HIPAA compliance tools. Check which plan includes each control before you assume it's on yours.
The catch is the free tier. At 1M events, a growing product will hit the ceiling quickly, and our old "most startups won't outgrow it" advice no longer applies. Budget for Growth from the start if you expect real traffic.
Amplitude: built for teams with analysts
Amplitude's free plan is now the most generous of the three on events, at 2M a month. That makes it a reasonable place to start, which wasn't really true when Plus began at $49.
Its strength is still depth for data teams: behavioral cohorts, custom events and formulas, tracking plans and governance that stop event sprawl. Plus adds 20 behavioral cohorts, alerts, heatmaps and two years of data retention. SSO and project permissions arrive on Growth, and advanced permissions and SCIM on Enterprise. An EU data center option is included on every plan.
The downside is that the plans with the features larger companies need, like SSO, are custom-quoted. That's normal for enterprise analytics, but it means you can't compare Amplitude to PostHog on price without a sales conversation. If your security team requires SSO for every SaaS app (mine does), expect that conversation early.
The data question still matters
The point I made in April holds. Product analytics means shipping behavioral data about your users to a third party. Before you install any of these SDKs:
- ▸Decide what you track. Autocapture is convenient and collects far more than most teams need. Turn it off or filter it if you handle anything sensitive.
- ▸Pick the region deliberately. All three offer EU hosting now, so there's no excuse for European user data landing in the US by default.
- ▸Mask session replays. Replays capture whatever is on screen. Make sure input fields and anything containing personal data are masked before you turn replays on in production.
- ▸Check retention. Know how long each vendor keeps raw events on your plan, and whether you can delete a user's data on request.
Who should pick which
Pick PostHog if you're a startup or mid-size product team, you want analytics, replay, flags and experiments under one bill, and you'd like to calculate your costs yourself. It's the only one of the three whose bill you can work out from published rates.
Pick Mixpanel if your product managers and marketers do most of the analysis and you value speed and clarity over breadth. Plan on the Growth tier once you're past 1M events.
Pick Amplitude if you have dedicated analysts, need tracking plans and governance, and are heading toward an enterprise agreement. Start on the 2M-event free plan and let the data team decide whether Plus covers them. If Heap is also on your list, our Heap vs Amplitude comparison covers the auto-capture trade-off.
My pick hasn't changed, even though the reasons have. For most product teams, PostHog gives you the most capability per dollar and the most predictable bill. The difference is that Mixpanel and Amplitude are now credible all-in-one options too, so if your team already knows one of them well, switching to PostHog just to save money is no longer an automatic win.