PostHog

PostHog is an open source product analytics platform founded in January 2020 by James Hawkins and Tim Glaser, who met while working at a London-based fintech startup. During Y Combinator's Winter 2020 batch, the pair grew frustrated with having to send user data to third parties every time they pivoted their product, so they built PostHog as an all-in-one analytics solution that companies can self-host. The project launched on Hacker News just four weeks after they started writing code and received an overwhelmingly positive response.

PostHog has evolved from a simple analytics tool into a comprehensive product engineering platform built on ClickHouse, an open source columnar database optimized for real-time analytics. The platform offers product analytics with funnel and retention tracking, session replay, feature flags, A/B testing, user surveys, data pipelines connecting to 60+ destinations, SQL access for advanced queries, and event autocapture that automatically tracks user interactions without manual instrumentation. The generous free tier includes one million product analytics events, 5,000 session recordings, and one million feature flag requests per month.

Headquartered in London with data center options in both the EU and US, PostHog is SOC 2 certified and fully GDPR-compliant. The platform can be self-hosted for organizations that require complete data sovereignty, and its open source codebase on GitHub has attracted a large community of contributors. PostHog has raised over $180 million in funding and serves as a European-rooted alternative to US analytics tools like Mixpanel, Amplitude, and Heap.