Want to know how PostHog and Heap are different? If you remember nothing else, remember these two points:
Heap is a product analytics tool designed for non-technical users.
PostHog is an all-in-one platform for product analytics, session recording, feature management, and more, built for engineers and product teams.
In this guide, we'll cover:
- Heap and PostHog's core features
- Product analytics features and insight types
- Session recording capability
- Third-party integrations, including data export and data import options
- Privacy and security
- Frequently asked questions
Heap, like Amplitude and Mixpanel, focuses mainly on product analytics. That means you need to adopt additional tools for things like session recording, feature management, and A/B testing. PostHog integrates all these features into one platform. PostHog is like mission control for your product.
Anyone can use PostHog – just ask our marketing team – but our goal is to help engineers be better at product by giving them the insights and tools they need to ship impactful features at pace.
Signing up to PostHog is as simple as creating an account and adding our JavaScript snippet to your site or app. That's it. Want more features? Just put in a card and pay for what you use. We have a generous free tier, so you may not pay anything at all. No sales calls. No paid add-ons. No confusing product tiers. Just sign up and start building.
Ready to find out more?
PostHog has three plans (Free, Scale and Enterprise) to Heap's four (Free, Growth, Pro and Premier). In this guide, we'll compare PostHog's Scale plan to Heap Pro as they're the most comparable plans for a typical, mid-market business.
PostHog integrates several normally separate tools, such as product analytics, session recording, and feature flags, into one platform. While it recently added a basic session recording feature, Heap is best known as a pure product analytics tool like Mixpanel or Amplitude.
| Heap | PostHog | ||
| Product analytics | ✔ | ✔ | Track events and conversion; analyze user behavior |
| Session recording | Paid add-on | ✔ | Watch real users use your product; diagnose bugs |
| Feature flags | ✖ | ✔ | Roll out features safely; toggle features for cohorts or individuals |
| Experiments | ✖ | ✔ | Run A/B/n tests on new features; optimize conversion funnels |
| Heatmaps | ✖ | ✔ | Visualize where users click in your app or website |
| Autocapture | ✔ | ✔ | Automatically track events without instrumentation |
| Sync with data warehouse | Paid add-on | ✔ | Sync data to and from your data warehouse |
Session recording: Heap offers basic session recording in addition to its core product analytics product, but it's a bolt-on option on all plans. Session recording is built-in to PostHog and you get 15,000 free recordings every month. Jump to: Session recording comparison
Sync to data warehouse: The ability to sync with your data warehouse is part of Heap Connect, a paid add-on on to Heap's Pro plan – it's included on Heap's Premier plan. Data warehouse sync is available in PostHog at no additional cost because we believe companies should own their data.
Experiments: Heap doesn't have a built-in testing feature, though it does integrate with a number of popular A/B testing tools, such as AB Tasty and Optimizely. PostHog has a built-in experimentation suite for running A/B and multivariate experiments.
Feature flagging: The benefits of feature flags include the ability to stagger new feature releases, ship to test groups or specific cohorts, manage feature access, and more. PostHog's feature flag product is built-in and tightly integrated with all other products.
Open source: PostHog is open source and self-hostable via Docker Compose for small event volumes of ~100k events per month. See our open source deployment docs for more.
Heap and PostHog offer similar product analytics features with a slight difference in emphasis – Heap has more insight options for marketing teams, while PostHog has more for product teams.
Neither currently offers an SQL editor for writing custom queries, but it's in private beta for PostHog with a planned Q1 2023 launch.
| Heap | PostHog | ||
| Dashboards | ✔ | ✔ | Combine insights into shareable dashboards |
| Funnels | ✔ | ✔ | Understand conversion between events, pages |
| Retention | ✔ | ✔ | Analyze user and revenue retention |
| User paths | ✔ | ✔ | Track user flows and where they drop-off |
| Stickiness | ✖ | ✔ | Understand your most engaging features |
| Lifecycle | ✖ | ✔ | Break users down by new, resurrecting, returning, and dormant |
| Influence analysis | ✔ | ✖ | Multi-touch analysis of marketing channels |
| Cohorts | ✔ | ✔ | Combine users based on properties and events for group analysis |
| Group analytics | ✔ | ✔ | Understand how organizations of multiple users use your product |
| Formulas | ✔ | ✔ | Use custom formulas to calculate unique insights |
| Query editor | ✖ | Coming Q1 2023 | Write your own queries in SQL |
| Data retention | 1 year (pay for more) | 7 years | How long historical data is retained |
Session recording is an essential tool for understanding how people use your product, especially for early-stage companies searching for product-market fit. Both Heap and PostHog offer session recording, though Heap's version is quite limited at present.
| Heap | PostHog | ||
| Free recording allowance | None (free trial) | 15,000 per month | Free recordings before being charged |
| Browser app recording | ✔ | ✔ | Watch real users use your product; diagnose bugs |
| iOS app recording | ✖ | Planned Q2 2023 | Record user sessions in iOS apps |
| Android app recording | ✖ | Planned 2023 | Record user sessions in Android apps |
| Playlists | ✖ | ✔ | Create playlists of related recordings |
| Download recordings | ✖ | ✔ | Save recording files offline for storage |
| Play from file | ✖ | ✔ | Replay recording from saved file |
| Console logs | ✖ | ✔ | Debug user problems and app errors |
| Network activity | ✖ | ✔ | Monitor network activity and performance |
- Recording retention: Heap keeps all recordings for 90 days, but retains any viewed recordings for 10 years. PostHog retains all recordings for three weeks, but retains recordings saved to a playlist forever. PostHog also allows you to download recordings as a
.jsonfile for safe keeping.
Ready to find out more?
This section includes a curated summary of the most popular integrations in PostHog and Heap, organized by category.
See the PostHog Apps and Heap integrations pages for complete lists of available integrations.
Categories:
At PostHog, we believe in your right to own your data, which means enabling you to export raw events whenever you want at no additional cost.
In Heap, data warehouse integrations are only available on Heap Premier, or as a paid add-on to Heap Pro, and there is no open export API.
| Heap | PostHog | ||
| Export API | ✖ | ✔ | Export data via API |
| Amazon Redshift | Paid add-on | ✔ | Export data to Redshift |
| Amazon S3 | Paid add-on | ✔ | Export data to S3 bucket |
| Google Cloud Storage | ✖ | ✔ | Export data to GCS |
| Snowflake | Paid add-on | ✔ | Export data to Snowflake database |
| Google BigQuery | Paid add-on | ✔ | Export data to BigQuery for analysis |
| PostgreSQL | ✖ | ✔ | Export data to a PostgreSQL instance |
| Databricks | ✖ | ✔ | Open source data lakehouse |
| RudderStack | ✖ | ✔ | Sync event and person data |
| Hightouch | ✔ | ✔ | Reverse ETL data to multiple platforms |
| Census | ✔ | ✔ | Reverse ETL data to multiple platforms |
| Zapier | ✔ | ✔ | Connect to services using Zapier |
| n8n | ✖ | ✔ | Open source Zapier alternaitve |
- Exporting events in PostHog: PostHog provides numerous methods for exporting event data, including via the PostHog UI (for small volumes), the Events API (with rate limits), or via dedicated export apps (no limits). See our data export documentation for more information.
| Heap | PostHog | ||
| Import API | ✔ | ✔ | API for importing and enriching data |
| Segment | ✔ | ✔ | Ingest events and user properties tracked in Segment |
| RudderStack | ✔ | ✔ | Ingest events and user properties tracked in RudderStack |
| Tealium | ✔ | ✖ | Ingest events and user properties tracked in Tealium |
| Airbyte | ✖ | ✔ | ETL data pipelines |
| Fivetran | ✔ | ✔ | ETL data pipelines |
| Shopify | ✔ | ✔ | Sync customer and order data |
| Stripe | ✔ | ✔ | Sync customer and invoice data |
| Zapier | ✔ | ✔ | Connect to services using Zapier |
| n8n | ✖ | ✔ | Open source Zapier alternaitve |
- PostHog as a Customer Data Platform: PostHog integrates with numerous popular customer data platforms (CDP), but some customers choose to use PostHog as their CDP. This helps reduce costs, the risk of data being dropped, and ensures total compatibility with all our features. See Using PostHog with a CDP for more information.
As an open source platform designed for technical teams, PostHog integrates with numerous developer tools and platforms. This isn't an area of strong support for Heap.
| Heap | PostHog | ||
| BitBucket Release Tracker | ✖ | ✔ | Track impact of releases in analytics |
| GitHub Release Tracker | ✖ | ✔ | Track impact of releases in analytics |
| GitHub Star Sync | ✖ | ✔ | Track GitHub star growth |
| GitLab Release Tracker | ✖ | ✔ | Track impact of releases in analytics |
| PagerDuty | ✖ | ✔ | Create custom alerts based on thresholds |
| Sentry | ✖ | ✔ | Connect errors to individual users |
| Retool | ✖ | ✔ | Build internal tools using your usage data |
| Feedback Widget | ✖ | ✔ | Collect ad hoc feedback in your app |
| User Inteview Scheduler | ✖ | ✔ | Invite users for an interview based on user properties |
| Zendesk | ✔ | ✔ | Track tickets as events, add context to tickets |
| Custom webhooks | In beta | ✔ | Create your own custom webhooks for Slack, etc. |
You can't build a great product without talking to users, which is why we built the User Interview Scheduler app for PostHog. You can use it to automatically invite users to an interview based user properties or actions they've completed.
We also built a simple Feedback Widget app for collecting ad hoc feedback from users. You can analyse this data in PostHog, or use Zapier to send this feedback to other tools like Slack, Zendesk, and more.
See: How to gather feedback and book user interviews with site apps
| Heap | PostHog | ||
| Customer.io | ✖ | ✔ | Sync data and trigger workflows in Customer.io |
| Engage | ✖ | ✔ | Automate onboarding and retention messaging |
| Variance | ✖ | ✔ | Define PQLs with real analytics data |
| Engage | ✖ | ✔ | Automate onboarding and retention messaging |
| Pace | ✖ | ✔ | Identify enterprise sales leads |
| Twilio | ✖ | ✔ | Automated customer engagement platform |
| Hubspot | ✔ | ✔ | Sync customer data to and from Hubspot |
| Salesforce | ✔ | ✔ | Sync customer data to and from Salesforce |
| Sendgrid | ✔ | ✔ | Automate email workflows |
| Mailchimp | ✔ | ✖ | Automate marketing emails |
| Intercom | ✔ | ✔ | Automate your product comms |
| Braze | ✔ | ✖ | Marketing automation |
| Eloqua | ✔ | ✖ | Marketing automation |
| Marketo | ✔ | ✖ | Marketing automation |
- Advertising integration: Neither Heap nor PostHog offer native integrations for advertising platforms (e.g. Google Ads, Facebook Ads, etc.). If you require this, we recommend integrating a CDP like Segment into your data stack.
| Heap | PostHog | ||
| GDPR compliant | ✔ | ✔ | EU hosting or data residency available |
| HIPAA compliant | ✔ | Self-host only | Business Associate Agreement available |
| Data anonymization | ✔ | ✔ | Remove personally identifiable information |
| Self-hosting option | ✖ | ✔ | Self-host and keep complete control of your data |
| Cookie-less tracking option | ✖ | ✔ | Use analytics without cookie consent banners |
HIPAA compliance: Heap will sign a Business Associate Agreement if you require HIPAA compliance. At PostHog, we currently recommend self-hosting PostHog if you require HIPAA compliance. This ensures all sensitive data never leaves your infrastructure, giving you complete control and simplifying compliance processes. HIPAA certification for PostHog Cloud is planned in 2023.
Cookie-less tracking: If you'd rather not serve annoying cookie banners to your users, PostHog can be configured to store data in memory so it doesn't persist beyond a single session. See: How to use PostHog without cookie banners. Some forms of user analysis aren't possible with this method.
| Mixpanel | PostHog | ||
| SOC 2 certification | ✔ | ✔ | Externally audited security |
| SAML/SSO | ✔ | ✔ | Organization single sign-on |
| User permissions | ✔ | ✔ | Assign access levels to team members |
| Multiple organizations | ✔ | ✔ | Create orgs for all your internal teams |
| Multiple projects | 2 (pay for more) | ✔ | Track multiple products |
Deploying PostHog takes mere minutes. Just include our tracking snippet in your product or website and (thanks to autocapture) you're immediately capturing events. Once up and running, you can enable session recording via your project settings. See our guide to getting started on PostHog Cloud for more info.
PostHog is built on ClickHouse, the world’s fastest column-based database. It’s used by the likes of Uber, Spotify and Cloudflare, and allows us to handle billion-scale event volumes with ease.
Are you a company with more than 1 billion events per month? Get in touch so we can discuss your needs and offer a volume discount.
Unlike PostHog, Heap doesn't share its pricing publicly, but its free tier is less generous.
Heap's free tier allows for only 10,000 sessions per month, "limited analysis", six months of data history, and limited access to data sources and integrations.
In comparison, PostHog offers 1 million events per month and 15,000 session recordings for free on all plans with no limits on data integrations – a typical medium-size B2B product with 10,000 monthly active users will generate ~500k events each month.
PostHog users who input their card unlock more features and can use billing limits to avoid surprise bills.
See PostHog's pricing page for a full breakdown and access to our pricing calculator.
Yes, PostHog (like Heap) uses cookies. Cookies are necessary to enable common use cases, such as cross-domain tracking and tracking returning visitors.
It is possible, however, to configure PostHog to track users without requiring without cookie banners by storing cookies in memory so it doesn't persist beyond an individual session.
The PostHog Property Filter app also allows you to further limit the types of information collected to protect user privacy.
If you user privacy is a primary concern for you, consider our open source Docker Compose deployment option.
Absolutely. PostHog is easy to integrate with Shopify, and we have Shopify and Stripe Connector apps for importing order and revenue data into PostHog for analysis. You can easily install PostHog on other e-commerce platforms using our Javascript snippet – see our guides to setting up Webflow analytics and Wordpress.
Yes, depending on your use case, PostHog could replace Google Analytics. Our marketing team uses PostHog effectively, but it isn't primarily designed for marketing use cases. See our GA4 alternatives guide guide for more.
Amplitude and Mixpanel offer similar features to Heap. Read our PostHog vs Mixpanel and PostHog vs Amplitude guides for more info.
Ready to find out more?