Metabase VS PostHog

Compare Metabase vs PostHog and see what are their differences.

PostHog

🦔 PostHog provides open-source product analytics, session recording, feature flagging and A/B testing that you can self-host. (by PostHog)
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Metabase PostHog
67 99
36,510 17,172
1.6% 7.2%
10.0 10.0
1 day ago about 7 hours ago
Clojure Python
GNU General Public License v3.0 or later GNU General Public License v3.0 or later
The number of mentions indicates the total number of mentions that we've tracked plus the number of user suggested alternatives.
Stars - the number of stars that a project has on GitHub. Growth - month over month growth in stars.
Activity is a relative number indicating how actively a project is being developed. Recent commits have higher weight than older ones.
For example, an activity of 9.0 indicates that a project is amongst the top 10% of the most actively developed projects that we are tracking.

Metabase

Posts with mentions or reviews of Metabase. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2024-02-27.
  • HackTheBox - Writeup Analytics
    1 project | dev.to | 30 Mar 2024
    Remote Code Execution via H2
  • Blazer: Business Intelligence Made Simple
    4 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 27 Feb 2024
    We've used it for about a year - Blazer is okay if you need a quick SQL query console, but we found it lacking as an actual business intelligence tool. The support for graphs and dashboards is limited, for graphs it requires you to structure the query in an exact way as you can see in the Blazer readme.

    After some research on available alternatives that don't break the bank, we decided to deploy a self-hosted instance of Metabase[0]. This took only a few minutes to set up using their Docker image[1] and it has much better graphing capabilities and you can easily put a custom layout together for dashboards. Upgrading is similarly easy (just redeploy). Also easy to configure: data sources, hiding or changing the data type of a column, G Suite sign-in for our domain. Highly recommend it if you need anything more than Blazer's table output.

    [0]: https://github.com/metabase/metabase

  • Is Tableau Dead?
    3 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 26 Feb 2024
    I've never used Tableau, but heard a lot of hate about it. However, in my previous role, we were big fans of Metabase (https://metabase.com). You can also self-host it, which was a huge win for us.
  • My mental model of Clojure transducers
    2 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 10 Sep 2023
    It seems folks want a working example. Here's one in prod:

    Metabase is a BI tool, backend written mostly in Clojure. Like basically all BI tools they have this intermediate representation language thing so you write the same thing in "MBQL (metabase query language)" and it theoretically becomes same query in like, Postgres and Mongo and whatever. End user does not usually write MBQL, it's a service for the frontend querybuilding UI thing and lots of other frontend UI stuff mainly in usage.

    Whole processing from MBQL -> your SQL or whatever is done via a buncha big-ass transducers. Metabase is not materially faster than other BI tools (because all the other BI tools do something vaguely similar in their langs) but it's pretty comparable speed and the whole thing was materially written by like 5 peeps

    https://github.com/metabase/metabase/blob/master/src/metabas...

    (nb: I used to work for Metabase but currently do not. but open core is open core)

  • Upgrade Your Metabase Installation
    1 project | news.ycombinator.com | 28 Jul 2023
  • Upgrade your Metabase installation immediately
    4 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 21 Jul 2023
    They haven't released the source, and the compiled versions are non-trivial to diff (e.g. there are nondeterministic numbers from the clojure compiler that seem to have changed from one to the other, and .clj files have been removed from the jar).

    The old version has `hash=1bb88f5`, which is a public commit: https://github.com/metabase/metabase/commit/1bb88f5

  • Launch HN: Twenty.com (YC S23) – open-source CRM
    15 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 19 Jul 2023
    We are unsure about the right license to use, so this is a great feedback. We had a MIT license one week ago that we know that we cannot hold on long term and we felt we were lying to the community by keeping an MIT license and changing it in one year.

    By using AGPL, we feel it's the right level of restriction. It's the license used by Metabase for example (https://github.com/metabase/metabase) that many companies use internally.

  • Ask HN: Open-Source Self-Hosted No-Code Platforms?
    3 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 13 May 2023
    The solution really depends on what sort of problems you are trying to solve and who your customers are.

    There are a fair few low-code solutions out there for reporting and data visualisation that are great for finance and marketing teams for example. e.g. https://metabase.com/ , https://evidence.dev/

    For multipurpose SMB workflows and organisational processes, I have used n8n in the recent past and found it was quite good and incredibly easy to maintain. https://n8n.io/engineering-resources/

    For enterprise processes I'd go with Camunda (solely based on recommendations and not first hand experience). Although only parts of their platform are OSS https://github.com/camunda

    Bear in mind that some of these are not suitable if you want to build something that competes with them while taking their OSS code. But are perfectly fine otherwise.

  • 916 days of Emacs
    7 projects | /r/emacs | 13 Apr 2023
    Anyway, I have a collection of scripts that merge ActivityWatch data from all my machines and WakaTime exports to a PostgreSQL database which I then query with a project called Metabase. If you're curious, the scripts are in a repository called sqrt-data. I've been playing with this for ~4-5 years already I think.
  • Ask HN: Who is hiring? (April 2023)
    16 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 3 Apr 2023
    Metabase | https://metabase.com | REMOTE | Full-time | Backend, Frontend, Full Stack, and DevOps engineers

    Metabase is open source analytics software that lets anyone in your company rummage around in the databases you have. It connects to a number of databases / data warehouses (BigQuery, Redshift, Snowflake, Postgres, MySQL, etc).

PostHog

Posts with mentions or reviews of PostHog. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2024-04-12.
  • How Telemetry Saved my Open-Source Platform
    3 projects | dev.to | 12 Apr 2024
    It would be a shame not to mention PostHog as the telemetry provider we are using, since it turned out to be extremely useful. Because it is hard to find people who will talk with you about your product, gathering statistics gave us a much greater insight into our users.
  • Free tools for developers to build their apps
    4 projects | dev.to | 5 Jan 2024
    6- PostHog
  • Using Analytics on My Website
    7 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 15 Dec 2023
    Hi HN, PostHog employee here. I'm working on our Web Analytics product, which is currently in beta. It's fun to see us mentioned here :)

    I should mention that we have a ton of SDKs (see https://posthog.com/docs/libraries) for back end frameworks and languages, so if you wanted to use PostHog without any client-side JS you could send pageviews and other events manually, but for the vast majority of people it makes more sense to use our JS snippet.

    Hijacking this comment to share the roadmap for web analytics https://github.com/PostHog/posthog/issues/18547. It's very much in the launch-early-and-be-embarassed phase, but I would love to hear any feedback or suggestions that people have, particularly if you're already a PostHog user.

  • Show HN: Flywheel
    1 project | news.ycombinator.com | 14 Dec 2023
    how's this different than https://posthog.com/ ?
  • Open Source alternatives to tools you Pay for
    21 projects | dev.to | 8 Dec 2023
    PostHog - Open Source Alternative to Mixpanel
  • Show HN: Monitor your webapp with minimal setup
    7 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 20 Nov 2023
  • Ask HN: Where to Store Logs?
    3 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 21 Oct 2023
    Don't insert the logs/events/analytics into your Application DB. Usually, you send those to specialist datastores (OLAP etc) that process such high volume of data. You can use something like clickhouse [0] for example or use 3rd party SAAS solutions like posthog [1] etc that are built on top of clickhouse

    [0] https://clickhouse.com

    [1] https://posthog.com

  • Ask HN: What would you use to build a mostly CRUD back end today?
    5 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 16 Sep 2023
    I may use Flask-Admin initially to offload the "CRUD" operations to have an initial prototype fast but then drop it ASAP because I don't want to write a "flask-admin application" to fight against later on. If the application is mainly "CRUD", then Flask-Admin is suitable.

    Now...

    Would you do a breakdown/list of all the jobs you've done by sector/vertical and by function/role and by application functionality?

    - [0]: https://flask.palletsprojects.com

    - [1]: https://flask-admin.readthedocs.io/en/latest

    - [2]: https://flask.palletsprojects.com/en/2.3.x/patterns/celery

    - [3]: https://sentry.io

    - [4]: https://posthog.com

    - [5]: https://www.docker.com

  • Ask HN: Who is hiring? (July 2023)
    16 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 3 Jul 2023
    PostHog | Remote (US/Europe timezones) | Full stack engineer, technical ex-founder, tech lead | https://posthog.com

    PostHog is the only open-source Product OS, combining product analytics, session recordings, feature flags, cdp and a data warehouse in one.

    We have a culture of written async communication (see our handbook [0]), lots of individual responsibility and an opportunity to make a huge impact. Being fully remote means we're able to create a team that is truly diverse. We're based all over the world, and the team includes former YC founders, CTOs turned developers and recent grads.

    To apply see https://posthog.com/careers or email us [email protected]

    [0] https://posthog.com/handbook/

  • planetsin.space -- a PI management and reminder tool
    1 project | /r/Eve | 3 Jul 2023
    There seems to be posthog.com analytics and AB or feature flag functionality that is blocked by adblockers. Probably that?

What are some alternatives?

When comparing Metabase and PostHog you can also consider the following projects:

Apache Superset - Apache Superset is a Data Visualization and Data Exploration Platform [Moved to: https://github.com/apache/superset]

Snowplow - The enterprise-grade behavioral data engine (web, mobile, server-side, webhooks), running cloud-natively on AWS and GCP

lightdash - Self-serve BI to 10x your data team ⚡️

Matomo - Empowering People Ethically with the leading open source alternative to Google Analytics that gives you full control over your data. Matomo lets you easily collect data from websites & apps and visualise this data and extract insights. Privacy is built-in. Liberating Web Analytics. Star us on Github? +1. And we love Pull Requests!

appsmith - Platform to build admin panels, internal tools, and dashboards. Integrates with 25+ databases and any API.

Sentry - Developer-first error tracking and performance monitoring

Elasticsearch - Free and Open, Distributed, RESTful Search Engine

Plausible Analytics - Simple, open source, lightweight (< 1 KB) and privacy-friendly web analytics alternative to Google Analytics.

superset - Apache Superset is a Data Visualization and Data Exploration Platform

Grafana - The open and composable observability and data visualization platform. Visualize metrics, logs, and traces from multiple sources like Prometheus, Loki, Elasticsearch, InfluxDB, Postgres and many more.

Redash - Make Your Company Data Driven. Connect to any data source, easily visualize, dashboard and share your data.

openreplay - Session replay and analytics tool you can self-host. Ideal for reproducing issues, co-browsing with users and optimizing your product.