Metabase vs PostHog

Metabase

Open-source business intelligence anyone can use

Metabase is an open-source business intelligence tool that lets non-technical people query a company database through a point-and-click question builder, while analysts drop into SQL in the same interface. The problem it solves is the analyst bottleneck. In most companies every number request routes through one or two people who can write SQL, which makes simple questions slow and discourages people from asking them at all. Metabase's answer is a visual query builder good enough that a marketer can answer their own question, backed by dashboards, alerts, and permissions that keep the underlying data safe. Pricing splits into two products. Business intelligence: Starter is $100 per month ($90 per month billed annually, $1,080 per year) with the first 10 users included and $6 per additional user per month ($65 per year), covering 20+ data sources, unlimited questions and dashboards, AI-assisted SQL generation, and 3-day email support. Pro is $575 per month ($517.50 per month billed annually, $6,210 per year) with the first 10 users included and $12 per additional user per month, adding row and column level permissions, SSO, caching controls, usage analytics and auditing, multi-tenant embedded analytics, and white-labelling. Enterprise starts at $20,000 per year with free unlimited users, custom pricing, an air-gapped deployment option, and a 1-day support SLA. Two billing details are easy to miss and change the maths: users of your embedded analytics count as users, not just your internal team; and AI features are billed separately at $3.75 per 1 million tokens if you use Metabase's own AI service rather than bringing your own provider key, with 1 million tokens included. Transforms include 1,000 runs on Starter and Pro, then $0.01 per run. The open-source edition remains free and self-hostable, and for a lot of small teams that is the whole answer - the paid tiers buy permissions, SSO, embedding, and support rather than core functionality. Who it is for: companies of 10 to a few hundred people who have a real database, want everyone to self-serve answers, and do not want to staff a BI team to make that happen. How it compares: Looker is far more powerful and far more expensive, and requires modelling everything in LookML before anyone gets an answer. Tableau and Power BI are stronger for deep visual analysis and weaker for casual self-serve querying. Superset is the closest open-source peer and is more capable but much harder to operate. Retool and Hex serve adjacent needs - internal tools and analyst notebooks - rather than the same one. Choose Metabase when the goal is that non-analysts stop filing requests.

PostHog

Open-source product analytics, session replay, and feature flags

PostHog is an open-source product platform that bundles product analytics, session replay, feature flags, experimentation, surveys, error tracking, and a data warehouse into one tool, available as cloud or self-hosted. The problem it targets is stack sprawl. A typical product team wires up Mixpanel or Amplitude for analytics, LaunchDarkly for feature flags, FullStory or Hotjar for session replay, Sentry for errors, and Typeform for surveys - five contracts, five SDKs, five sets of user identities that do not join up. PostHog's bet is that these are all the same data, so they belong in one product where you can watch the session replay of the user who dropped out of the funnel, behind the feature flag you shipped last week. Pricing is usage-based with a large free tier, and PostHog states that more than 90% of its customers use it for free. The monthly free tier resets every month and applies on every plan, including paid ones: 1 million analytics events, 5,000 session recordings, 1 million feature flag requests, 100,000 error tracking exceptions, 1,500 survey responses, 1 million data warehouse rows, 10,000 pipeline events, 100,000 AI observability events, and 10 GB of ingested logs. No credit card is required, and the free plan includes 1 project, 1-year data retention, unlimited team members, and a choice of US (Virginia) or EU (Frankfurt) hosting. Past the free tier, pricing is per unit and the rate falls with scale. Product analytics starts at $0.00005 per event for the first 1-2 million events beyond the free tier, dropping through $0.0000343 (2-15 million), $0.0000295 (15-50 million), $0.0000218 (50-100 million), $0.0000150 (100-250 million), to $0.0000090 per event above 250 million. Adding a card also raises the account to 6 projects, 7-year data retention, and email support. Per-product billing limits can be set so a traffic spike cannot produce a surprise invoice. Who it is for: engineering-led product teams, especially at startups, who would rather instrument once and get five tools than integrate five vendors. Self-hosting suits teams with data residency constraints, though PostHog's EU cloud region covers most of that need without the operational burden. How it compares: Mixpanel and Amplitude are more refined as pure analytics products and are the better choice if analytics is all you need. LaunchDarkly is a stronger standalone feature-flag platform with more governance. Sentry is a better error tracker. PostHog rarely wins any single category head-to-head - it wins on consolidation, price at low volume, and the fact that the tools share one user identity. Evaluate it when you are about to buy your third point solution.