Grafana
PostHog
| Feature | Grafana | PostHog |
|---|---|---|
| Pricing | Free / from $29/mo | Free / from $0/mo |
| Free Plan | ✓ Yes | ✓ Yes |
| Rating | 4.6 / 5 | 4.5 / 5 |
| Best For | devops-teams, sre-teams, data-engineers, iot-monitoring | developers, startups, product-teams, privacy-conscious-companies |
| Founded | 2014 | 2020 |
| Dashboards | ✓ | ✗ |
| Data Sources | ✓ | ✗ |
| Alerting | ✓ | ✗ |
| Annotations | ✓ | ✗ |
| Plugins | ✓ | ✗ |
| Loki Logs | ✓ | ✗ |
| Tempo Traces | ✓ | ✗ |
| Mimir Metrics | ✓ | ✗ |
| Product Analytics | ✗ | ✓ |
| Session Replay | ✗ | ✓ |
| Feature Flags | ✗ | ✓ |
| Experiments | ✗ | ✓ |
| Surveys | ✗ | ✓ |
| Data Warehouse | ✗ | ✓ |
| Self Hosting | ✗ | ✓ |
✓ Grafana Pros
- Connects to virtually any data source
- Beautiful and highly customizable dashboards
- Open-source with massive community
- Grafana Cloud includes Loki, Tempo, and Mimir
- Alerting across all data sources
✗ Grafana Cons
- Self-hosting requires DevOps expertise
- Dashboard creation has a learning curve
- Plugin quality varies
✓ PostHog Pros
- All-in-one analytics replacing multiple tools
- Generous free tier (1M events/month)
- Self-hostable for full data control
- Feature flags and experiments built-in
✗ PostHog Cons
- Can be complex to set up properly
- Self-hosting requires infrastructure maintenance
- Less polished UI than Amplitude
The Verdict
Grafana is built for devops teams and sre teams, with a focus on dashboards and data-sources. PostHog targets developers and startups and leads with product-analytics and session-replay.
On pricing, PostHog is the clear winner for budget-conscious users — starting at $0/mo compared to $29/mo for Grafana. That $29/mo difference adds up quickly for growing teams.
Both offer free plans, so you can test each with your real workflow before committing to a subscription.
Feature-wise, Grafana offers broader built-in capabilities (8 features vs 7), while PostHog takes a more focused approach — which can mean a simpler, faster onboarding experience.
This is a genuinely close comparison. If you can, sign up for both free trials (where available) and run a one-week test with your actual team tasks before deciding.