My Love-Hate Relationship With PostHog (And Why I Keep Recommending It Anyway)

The short version: PostHog's pure product analytics is genuinely weaker than Mixpanel's or Amplitude's, and complex reports push you into SQL. I still recommend it to most founders, because it bundles session replay, feature flags, experiments and a real data warehouse into one tool at a stage when standing those up separately costs more than the analytics depth you give up.

I have a complicated relationship with PostHog. Always have.

There are things about it that genuinely frustrate me. Things I've complained about more than once. And yet, every time a founder asks me "what analytics tool should I use?" - PostHog is almost always my answer.

Strange, right? Let me explain.

What I love about it

The first thing is built-in SQL. For years, I wished I could query my data directly in tools like Mixpanel or Amplitude - without having to export everything to a data warehouse first. PostHog lets you do that. You can join multiple data sources, build base tables, slice data however you want. It sounds like a small thing. It isn't.

The second is data pipelines. You can pull data from your warehouse or other tools directly into PostHog - no third-party connectors, no extra setup. This alone has made it so much easier for me to convince clients to unify their data in one place.

And then there are Workflows. It's a newer feature, but a genuinely useful one. You can set up automations - like sending an email to users who start onboarding but don't finish - right inside PostHog. Previously, you'd have had to sync data into something like Customer.io or Klaviyo just to do the same thing. It's a real time-saver.

What I hate about it

The product analytics side is honestly quite weak. The trends, funnels, and retention reports are basic, sometimes frustratingly so. Things that Mixpanel or Amplitude handle effortlessly just aren't possible in PostHog. Want to see the average sum of products viewed per user, day over day? You'll hit a wall. Want a funnel where a property stays consistent across steps? Same problem. Want an overall retention view instead of just cohort-level? Good luck.

The SQL dashboard experience is also buggy. I've saved a report, come back later, and found it gone - and had to rebuild it from scratch. On top of that, the filters aren't dynamic, so you're constantly hardcoding values. It gets old fast.

There's also the fact that PostHog uses ClickHouse SQL instead of Postgres or MySQL. This isn't a dealbreaker, but ClickHouse has its own quirks, and simple queries that work perfectly elsewhere will sometimes just fail because they aren't optimized for it. If you've spent years working with Postgres, there's a learning curve.

So why does everyone stick with it?

Here's what I think PostHog figured out - and it's actually pretty simple.

There is no other tool right now that does everything PostHog does in one place. Product analytics, A/B testing, data pipelines, workflows, built-in SQL - all under one roof. Mixpanel and Amplitude are better at pure analytics, no question. But they stop there.

And what founders almost universally want is two things: fewer tools to manage, and all their data in one place. PostHog delivers on both. It quietly acts as a lightweight data warehouse on top of everything else.

That's the hook. That's why people put up with the bugs and the ClickHouse quirks and the basic funnel reports - because nothing else gives them this much under one login.

It's not perfect. But it's hard to replace.

Frequently asked questions

Should startups use PostHog?

For most founders, yes — despite its product analytics being weaker than Mixpanel's or Amplitude's. It bundles product analytics, session replay, feature flags, experiments and a data warehouse in one place, which is worth more early than the analytics depth you trade away.

What's actually frustrating about PostHog?

The depth. Building a complex report through the UI gets painful, and for anything genuinely deep you drop into SQL — which costs you time that Mixpanel or Amplitude wouldn't.

PostHog vs Mixpanel — which should I pick?

If you already have a warehouse, or you want the best pure product analytics and nothing else, pick Mixpanel. If you want the whole stack under one roof without standing up a warehouse separately, PostHog is hard to beat.

Is PostHog's data warehouse a real warehouse?

Real enough to matter. You can run SQL across your product events alongside external data it pulls in from Stripe, Google Ads, HubSpot and dozens of other sources — which Mixpanel and Amplitude simply don't offer.

When should you move off PostHog?

When the analytics depth starts costing you more than the bundling saves — when your team is writing SQL for questions a purpose-built product analytics tool would answer in a few clicks.