A lighter PostHog alternative
PostHog's cloud is good. Its self-hosted version is, in their own docs, “officially unsupported”, needs 4 vCPU and 16GB RAM, and gives you none of the paid features — those are “Cloud-only”. smolanalytics is one binary on 256MB with every feature included, MIT, forever.
the same week, counted both ways
These are our own numbers for this site, not a benchmark we designed to win. Over 7 days a JavaScript pixel — which is what PostHog uses — recorded 34 visitors. Reporting from the server over the same week recorded 483 fetches by 8 AI crawlers across 163 pages.
Those reads happen whether or not anyone clicks through. When an assistant answers in place there is no visit for PostHog to record, and nothing in its reports says so.
Not a knock on PostHog: no pixel can see this, because these crawlers execute no JavaScript. It is a different data source, and ours reports both halves on one log. Measured 2026-08-18 · recomputed hourly, never hand-typed.
is smolanalytics a good PostHog alternative?
Yes, and the clearest case is self-hosting. PostHog's own documentation calls self-hosted deployments “officially unsupported” (“you assume all responsibility and risk”), offers no customer support for them, asks for roughly 4 vCPU / 16GB RAM / 30GB disk, and states that “all paid-plan features are Cloud-only” — so the version you can run yourself is both unsupported and feature-limited. smolanalytics is a single MIT-licensed Go binary with no external services, running the full product on 256MB: docker run and it is up in about 30 seconds, with every feature included. It still does funnels, retention, paths, and cohorts, adds a daily verdict on what to fix, and lets your own Claude or Cursor answer questions over MCP on your own model, so there is no AI bill. The answers come from the exact same deterministic reports the dashboard renders. And if what you are measuring is itself an AI agent, the same engine computes its observability from those events (tool-call latency p50/p90/p99, error taxonomy, and conversation health like re-ask and resolution), all computed, not model-labeled. It is also the cheapest way to scale: $6 per million events versus PostHog's roughly $50, and free unlimited self-host. smolanalytics now ships feature flags, A/B experiments, heatmaps, surveys, and an event-based session inspector too; keep PostHog if you need pixel-perfect DOM session recording or more depth in experiments than we go for.
why people leave PostHog
“I hate Posthog more than any other object in the world… We now have no analytics.”
r/ProductManagement
“A full disk would cause their instance of PostHog to be down for hours or days.”
PostHog's own blog
PostHog vs smolanalytics
| PostHog | smolanalytics | |
|---|---|---|
| Self-host footprint | Kafka + ClickHouse + Redis + PG | one static binary, one file |
| Minimum box to self-host | 4 vCPU · 16GB RAM · 30GB disk | 256MB — our own demo runs on it |
| Self-host support | “officially unsupported”, no customer support | the same binary everyone runs, and I answer |
| Features when self-hosted | “all paid-plan features are Cloud-only” | every feature, MIT, nothing held back |
| Time to running | “heavy engineering lift” | 30 seconds, docker run |
| Keeps working | “down for days” on a full disk | one process, no stack to babysit |
| Tells you what to fix | dashboards you interrogate | a verdict, every morning |
| Ask in your editor | MCP, generates SQL against your data | MCP, calls the same reports the dashboard renders |
when to keep PostHog
- You need pixel-perfect DOM session recording, or more depth in experiments than we go for. smolanalytics now ships feature flags, A/B experiments, heatmaps, surveys, and an event-based session inspector, but PostHog's video-style replay and its experiment tooling go deeper. Keep it for those jobs.
- You want everything in one hosted platform and its cloud free tier covers you. PostHog's free tier is genuinely generous, and if the self-host weight never bites you, there's no reason to move.
Self-host in 30 seconds
# no Kafka, no ClickHouse, no Helm chart docker run -p 8080:8080 -v $PWD/data:/data \ -e SMOLANALYTICS_DB=/data/smolanalytics.data \ ghcr.io/arjun0606/smolanalytics # dashboard + MCP at http://localhost:8080
One process, one file, your box. Point Claude or Cursor at it and ask anything: no model to pay for, no number it can make up.
questions
Is smolanalytics a good PostHog alternative?
Yes, if PostHog's weight is the problem. Self-hosting PostHog means running Kafka, ClickHouse, Redis, and Postgres, and PostHog itself has written that many teams lack the resources to run it reliably. smolanalytics is a single MIT-licensed Go binary with no external services: docker run and it's up in about 30 seconds. It still does funnels, retention, and paths, adds a daily verdict on what to fix, and lets your own Claude or Cursor answer questions over MCP on your own model, so there is no AI bill. The answers come from the exact same deterministic reports the dashboard renders.
Is self-hosting smolanalytics really lighter than PostHog?
Yes, and by more than the stack list suggests. PostHog asks for roughly 4 vCPU, 16GB RAM and 30GB+ storage to self-host, running Kafka + ClickHouse + Redis + Postgres, and a full disk can take the instance down for hours. smolanalytics is one static binary and one data file, and the public demo runs the whole product on a 256MB box. One process to run, one file to back up.
Do I get every feature if I self-host?
Yes, and this is the sharpest difference. PostHog's docs state plainly that “all paid-plan features are Cloud-only”, so the self-hosted build is missing what you would actually pay for. smolanalytics is MIT end to end: funnels, retention, paths, cohorts, feature flags, A/B experiments, heatmaps, surveys, the session inspector, deploy impact and the full MCP server are all in the free binary. There is no open-core split and nothing is held back for the cloud.
Is PostHog self-hosting supported?
Not by PostHog. Their documentation says self-hosted deployments are “officially unsupported”, that “you assume all responsibility and risk”, and that they do not offer customer support for self-hosted instances. They also do not publish CVEs, so you track security by staying on the latest image. That is a reasonable position for them, since their cloud is the product. It just means self-hosting PostHog is a decision you own alone, which is worth knowing before you pick it.
How does the cost compare once I am past the free tier?
Both free tiers are 1M events a month. Past that PostHog charges about $50 for the second million; smolanalytics includes 2M on Pro at $19/month and bills a flat $6 per million after that. At 5M events that is roughly $140 on PostHog versus $49 here. Below 1M, PostHog's free tier and ours both cost nothing, so pick on the product rather than the price.
Can the AI in smolanalytics hallucinate a number, like generated SQL can?
No. Where an LLM writing SQL against your warehouse can quietly return a wrong number, smolanalytics answers from deterministic report functions, the same ones the dashboard uses.
Get the verdict, not another dashboard.
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