Originally published at devtoolpicks.com
You just launched your SaaS or indie project. Someone tells you to set up analytics. You Google it, and now you are staring at four completely different tools with no obvious answer. PostHog looks powerful but overwhelming. Plausible looks clean but maybe too simple. Fathom sounds like Plausible but costs more. Mixpanel is free until it suddenly is not.
This post cuts through that. I have used all four across different projects. Here is the honest breakdown of what each tool actually is, what it costs in real terms, and which one you should pick at each stage of building.
Quick verdict: If you are pre-revenue or just tracking a blog or marketing site, use Plausible. If you have a SaaS product with actual users and you need funnel analysis, retention, and feature flags in one place, use PostHog. Fathom is Plausible for teams that need compliance paperwork. Mixpanel is for later, when you have a product team and a budget to match.
Quick Comparison
| Tool | Best For | Starting Price | Free Tier |
|---|---|---|---|
| PostHog | SaaS products, full-stack analytics | Free (usage-based after) | 1M events/month |
| Plausible | Blogs, marketing sites, simple traffic | $9/month | 30-day trial |
| Fathom | Privacy-first, compliance-heavy teams | $15/month | 30-day trial |
| Mixpanel | Product analytics, growing SaaS teams | Free (limited) | 1M events/month |
PostHog
PostHog is the tool that replaces five others. You get product analytics, session replay, feature flags, A/B experiments, user surveys, and error tracking all from a single SDK. For a solo developer building a SaaS product, that is a significant deal. You instrument once and you have everything.
The free tier is genuinely generous. One million analytics events per month, 5,000 session replays, and feature flags included. More than 90% of PostHog users never pay anything, which tells you something about how the free tier is sized relative to early-stage product usage.
Beyond the free tier, pricing is usage-based and transparent. Analytics events cost roughly $0.00031 per event, but only after the first million. Session replays are $0.005 each after the first 5,000. You build your own bill from the products you actually use rather than paying for a bundle you do not need.
The developer experience is excellent. PostHog works natively with Laravel, Vue.js, Next.js, React, and basically every other framework. Setup takes about 15 minutes. The autocapture feature means you start collecting meaningful data before you have written a single custom event.
Who should use PostHog: Solo developers and indie hackers building SaaS products with actual users. You need more than pageview counts. You want to know which features get used, where users drop off in your onboarding flow, and whether that button colour change actually improved signups. PostHog answers all of that without requiring you to stitch together multiple tools.
Who should NOT use PostHog: If you just launched a blog or a content site and you want to know where your traffic comes from, PostHog is overkill. The interface is dense. There is a learning curve. You will spend 20 minutes building a dashboard for a site that just needs to know "did that post get traffic today." Use Plausible instead.
Real pricing at different scales:
- 0 to 1M events/month: Free
- 2M events/month: roughly $31
- 5M events/month: roughly $93
- Self-hosted option available if you prefer to run it on your own VPS
Since you are already running a VPS for your apps, the self-hosted option is worth knowing about. The Vercel vs Hetzner post covers the kind of setup where self-hosting PostHog actually makes sense economically.
Pros:
- Replaces Mixpanel, Hotjar, LaunchDarkly, and Google Analytics in one tool
- Genuinely free for most early-stage usage
- EU Cloud available (Frankfurt, AWS eu-central-1) for GDPR compliance
- Open source, self-hostable
- SQL access for custom queries on all plans
Cons:
- Interface is complex if you just want simple traffic stats
- Pricing complexity increases once you scale past the free tier (each product bills separately)
- Self-hosting requires infrastructure knowledge and maintenance
- Not designed for pure marketing analytics use cases
Plausible
Plausible is the tool that does one thing well. It gives you traffic stats, referrer data, UTM tracking, basic goals, and a clean dashboard. That is it. No funnels, no cohorts, no user-level tracking. Just honest web analytics without the surveillance capitalism model.
It starts at $9/month for 10,000 pageviews. That sounds low, but for a new site with less than 10K monthly visitors it covers you completely. The next meaningful tier is around $19/month for up to 100K pageviews.
One thing that genuinely matters for anyone based in Europe: Plausible is fully EU-hosted on European-owned infrastructure. Your analytics data never leaves the EU. No cookie banners required because no personal data is collected. For projects where GDPR compliance matters but you do not want to hire a lawyer to figure it out, Plausible solves the problem by default.
The setup is minimal. One script tag. Data starts appearing immediately. The dashboard shows you everything important on a single screen. No configuration required, no event taxonomy to design, no SDK to learn.
Plausible is also open source (AGPL licence) and self-hostable if you want to run your own instance. For a blog or marketing site where you just want to understand what content performs, self-hosting Plausible on a cheap VPS is a legitimate option.
Who should use Plausible: Anyone running a blog, a content site, a docs site, or a marketing landing page. Perfect for DevToolPicks itself at the current stage. You want to know which posts drive traffic, where readers come from, and whether a tweet actually sent visitors. Plausible answers those questions cleanly.
Who should NOT use Plausible: If you are building a SaaS product and you need to understand what users do inside your app, Plausible is not the right tool. It tracks pageviews, not product behaviour. No funnel analysis, no retention curves, no feature flag support. You will outgrow it the moment you want to know "how many users completed onboarding."
Pros:
- $9/month is the cheapest credible GA alternative
- EU-hosted by default, GDPR compliant without configuration
- Lightweight script (less than 1KB), no impact on page speed
- Open source and self-hostable
- Google Search Console integration on Business plan
- No sampling, accurate data on all plans
Cons:
- Funnels and custom properties require the Business plan (~$19/month+)
- Cloud-only on paid tiers unless self-hosting
- Not suitable for product analytics (no user-level tracking, no cohorts)
- Only 1 team member on Starter plan, 3 on Growth
Fathom Analytics
Fathom is what you get when you take the Plausible concept and add a compliance checklist, uptime monitoring, and a Canadian company headquarters.
The features are nearly identical to Plausible. You get traffic stats, referrers, UTM tracking, event goals, and a clean dashboard. The meaningful differences are: Fathom is SOC 2 and ISO 27001 certified, closed source (cloud-only, no self-hosting), and starts at $15/month for 100,000 pageviews rather than $9/month for 10,000.
That pricing structure is actually interesting. At lower traffic volumes, Plausible is cheaper. But once you start pushing past 100K monthly pageviews, Fathom can be better value. Plausible charges $69/month at 1 million pageviews. Fathom charges $54/month at the same volume.
All features are included on every Fathom plan. No feature gating, no Business tier required to unlock funnels. Unlimited sites on all plans. That simplicity has genuine value when you are managing multiple projects.
The uptime monitoring is a real bonus. Fathom includes it as part of every plan rather than requiring a separate service. For solo developers running multiple small projects, that saves $5-10/month on a standalone uptime tool.
Who should use Fathom: Teams in regulated industries (healthcare, fintech, legal) where SOC 2 and ISO 27001 documentation matters for enterprise sales conversations or compliance audits. Also worth considering for larger content sites where you want simple analytics with no feature gates and more predictable pricing as traffic grows.
Who should NOT use Fathom: If you are bootstrapping or pre-revenue, the $15/month starting price with no free tier is harder to justify when Plausible gives you comparable features for $9/month. If you need product analytics (funnels, cohorts, session replay), Fathom does not do any of that. And if you care about open source or self-hosting, Fathom is a closed-source cloud-only product.
Pros:
- All features on every plan (no feature gating)
- Unlimited sites on all plans
- SOC 2 and ISO 27001 certified
- Built-in uptime monitoring
- Canadian company with GDPR adequacy status and EU data routing
- Better pricing than Plausible above 100K pageviews
Cons:
- Closed source, no self-hosting option
- $15/month starting price with no permanent free tier
- No product analytics features whatsoever
- Smaller community than Plausible
Mixpanel
Mixpanel is a product analytics platform that has been around since 2009. In 2026, it has expanded well beyond its analytics roots, adding session replay, heatmaps, A/B experiments, and feature flags. It is a serious tool for product teams who need to understand user behaviour at depth.
The free tier is real. One million events per month, unlimited seats, 10,000 session replays, and enough analytics features to get meaningful insights on an early-stage product. For the first year, that is often enough.
The problem starts when you grow. Beyond 1 million events, you pay $0.00028 per event. That sounds tiny until you do the math on an active SaaS product. A product with 5,000 monthly active users triggering 20 events each per day hits 3 million events per month. That is a $560 bill. Most group analytics features (tracking by company rather than individual user) are add-ons even on paid plans. Data Pipelines for exporting to a warehouse costs extra. The pricing structure rewards caution over instrumentation.
The interface is polished but dense. Non-technical product managers generally find it easier to navigate than PostHog. The funnel visualisation and retention analysis are genuinely excellent. If you are a team of three or more with dedicated product manager responsibility, Mixpanel is a reasonable choice.
For solo developers, the honest situation is this: the free tier is useful, the paid tier is expensive, and PostHog gives you equivalent or better functionality at lower cost with a more developer-friendly workflow.
Who should use Mixpanel: SaaS teams with a dedicated product manager, meaningful monthly revenue, and a need for polished analytics reports that non-technical stakeholders can read and act on. Also the right pick if you are doing serious A/B experimentation and need a purpose-built UI for statistical analysis.
Who should NOT use Mixpanel: Solo developers on a budget. Once you outgrow the free tier, the cost jumps fast and the add-on structure means your real bill is higher than the headline number. PostHog covers the same use cases for significantly less at most usage levels relevant to indie hackers and solo developers.
Pros:
- Free tier covers 1M events/month, genuinely useful for early-stage products
- Polished, non-technical-friendly interface
- Excellent funnel and retention analysis
- Now includes session replay, heatmaps, and A/B testing
- Startup programme: first year free for eligible early-stage companies
Cons:
- Event-based pricing scales quickly and unpredictably
- Group analytics (B2B account-level analysis) is a paid add-on
- Data Pipelines (warehouse export) costs extra
- No EU data residency by default (available on Enterprise)
- Pricing complexity makes it hard to forecast your monthly bill
Head-to-Head: Which One for What Situation
The core question for a DevToolPicks reader is almost always "which one for my stage and use case."
For a blog or content site (which DevToolPicks is right now): Plausible at $9/month. Simple, EU-hosted, GDPR compliant without thinking about it. You get traffic data, referrers, UTM tracking. That is genuinely everything you need.
For a SaaS product pre-revenue or early-stage: PostHog free tier. One million events per month is more than enough. You get analytics, session replay, and feature flags for free. When you start tracking payments and MRR, the Lemon Squeezy vs Stripe comparison is worth reading alongside PostHog setup.
For a SaaS product with $5K-$20K MRR: Still PostHog, probably still free or very cheap. The free tier should cover most of your usage. If you are paying, it will be a fraction of what Mixpanel charges for equivalent functionality.
For a product with a dedicated product team and non-technical stakeholders: Mixpanel's polished interface genuinely earns its cost here. The funnel visualisation and A/B testing UI are superior to PostHog for non-developers.
For a company with compliance requirements: Fathom for website analytics. PostHog EU Cloud for product analytics.
Final Recommendation
For most solo developers and indie hackers reading this in 2026, the answer is PostHog for your product and Plausible for your marketing site.
PostHog's free tier is large enough that you will not pay anything until you are making meaningful revenue. By the time you outgrow the free tier, you can afford the usage-based costs. And you only instrument once.
Plausible gives you clean, accurate traffic data for your blog or landing pages at $9/month with no privacy compliance overhead.
Fathom and Mixpanel both have legitimate use cases, but they are narrower. Fathom earns its place when you need compliance documentation. Mixpanel earns its place when you have a team and a budget and value a more polished analytics UI over cost efficiency.
The only genuinely wrong choice is Google Analytics 4. Do not use GA4 in 2026. The compliance overhead alone is not worth it for a solo project, and the UX is genuinely bad.
FAQ
Is PostHog really free for solo developers?
Yes, genuinely. One million analytics events per month, 5,000 session replays, and feature flags are all included at no cost. More than 90% of PostHog users stay on the free tier permanently. For most solo projects and early-stage SaaS products, you will never need to pay.
Plausible vs Fathom: which one should I pick?
If you are a solo developer or indie hacker, pick Plausible. It is cheaper at lower traffic volumes, open source, and covers every use case you have. Fathom is worth the extra cost only if your company needs SOC 2 or ISO 27001 certification documentation, which is rarely a concern until you are selling to enterprise customers.
Does Mixpanel have a free plan worth using?
The free tier covers 1M events per month and is useful for early-stage products. The catch is that important features like group analytics (tracking by company, not just individual user) are paid add-ons. If you are building a B2B SaaS and you need account-level analytics, you will hit a paid feature wall earlier than the event count suggests.
Can I use PostHog and Plausible together?
Yes, and it is a sensible combination. Use Plausible for lightweight traffic stats on your marketing site and blog. Use PostHog for product analytics inside your app. They serve different purposes and there is no redundancy.
Do any of these tools require cookie banners for GDPR compliance?
Plausible, Fathom, and PostHog (in cookieless mode) all operate without cookies and without collecting personal data, which means no cookie banner is required under GDPR. Mixpanel by default does set cookies and may require consent banners depending on your jurisdiction. Check your specific legal requirements with a lawyer if compliance is a concern for your business.
Conclusion
PostHog is the default pick for solo developers building SaaS products in 2026. The free tier is genuinely generous, the feature set replaces multiple paid tools, and the developer experience is excellent. Plausible is the pick for content sites and marketing pages where you just need clean traffic data without the overhead.
If you are spinning up a new project and wondering what to install on day one: add PostHog to your app and Plausible to your blog. You can make this decision again later when you have actual users and actual revenue to justify a more expensive tool.
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