Comparison
Tidings vs PostHog
Tidings and PostHog are both product-analytics tools, but they are different sizes of tool. PostHog is a platform: analytics plus session replay, feature flags, experiments, surveys, and a data warehouse, available as open source you can self-host. Tidings does event analytics only, integrates over plain HTTP with no SDK, and is designed to be fully set up in an afternoon. Pick PostHog if you want those adjacent products in one place or need to run analytics on your own infrastructure today. Pick Tidings if analytics is the only thing you need and you want the smallest possible integration.
What PostHog does well
PostHog is genuinely broad and genuinely open. If you want session replay next to your funnels, feature flags gated on the same events, and the option to run the whole thing on your own servers under an open-source license, PostHog does all of that and Tidings does none of it. It is also a much larger and more established product, with a correspondingly larger community, integration catalogue, and set of edge cases already solved.
Side by side
| Spec | Tidings | PostHog |
|---|---|---|
| Category | Event analytics, and nothing else | All-in-one platform: analytics, session replay, feature flags, experiments, surveys, data warehouse |
| Integration | One HTTP POST. No SDK, no client library, no snippet to vendor | Client and server SDKs across web, mobile, and backend languages, plus an HTTP capture API |
| Time to first event | A curl command with an API key | Install and configure an SDK, or call the capture API |
| Event explorer & live feed | Yes — live tail, filter by name, property, or user | Yes |
| User profiles | Yes — assembled automatically from the distinct_id on each event | Yes, with person profiles and properties |
| Funnels, retention, paths | Yes | Yes, plus experiments and cohort analysis |
| Dashboards | Pinned-tile dashboards per project and per organization | Dashboards, insights, and saved views |
| Session replay | No — out of scope | Yes |
| Feature flags & A/B testing | No — out of scope | Yes |
| Read / query API | Yes — events, users, property keys and values, over a token-authenticated REST API | Yes, including SQL-style querying |
| Batching | Up to 500 events per request | Yes, handled by the SDKs |
| Self-hosting | No — hosted service only | Yes — self-host the open-source edition |
| Open source | No — source is not public | Yes |
| Event retention | Configurable per project, 1–730 days (30 by default); a daily purge deletes anything older | Retention varies by plan |
| Pricing shape | Free during beta. A flat $29/month Pro tier is planned. No enterprise tier | Free tier plus usage-based pricing, billed per product |
| Maturity | Beta | Established, widely deployed |
PostHog details summarise its public documentation and change often — check posthog.com for current features, limits, and pricing. Tidings rows describe the product as it ships today; anything marked planned is not available yet.
Which one should you use?
Choose PostHog if…
- You want session replay, feature flags, or experiments in the same tool as your analytics.
- You need to self-host analytics on your own infrastructure today, or you need an open-source license.
- You want a large integration catalogue and a warehouse to model data in.
- You are a larger team that will grow into the platform's depth.
Choose Tidings if…
- Analytics is the only thing you need, and every other product in the platform is weight you'd carry unused.
- You want to instrument a codebase without adopting an SDK — one POST, from any language.
- You want a tool a new teammate can understand in ten minutes.
- You are a small team or solo developer instrumenting a SaaS app, side project, or MVP.
Try it in the time this page took to read
Create a project, grab an API key, POST one event. Free while in beta.