TimescaleDB VS PostHog

Compare TimescaleDB vs PostHog and see what are their differences.

TimescaleDB

An open-source time-series SQL database optimized for fast ingest and complex queries. Packaged as a PostgreSQL extension. (by timescale)

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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TimescaleDB PostHog
82 99
16,445 17,013
1.6% 7.2%
9.8 10.0
7 days ago 7 days ago
C 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.

TimescaleDB

Posts with mentions or reviews of TimescaleDB. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2023-10-11.
  • TimescaleDB: An open-source time-series SQL database
    1 project | news.ycombinator.com | 6 Feb 2024
  • Google Cloud Spanner is now half the cost of Amazon DynamoDB
    2 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 11 Oct 2023
    Don't forget PostgreSQL extensions. For something like a chat log, TimescaleDB (https://www.timescale.com/) can be surprisingly efficient. It will handle partitioning for you, with additional features like data reordering, compression, and retention policies.
  • How to setup Postgres master-master cluster.
    1 project | /r/sysadmin | 5 Sep 2023
    Offboard it to Postgres specialists like https://www.timescale.com/
  • How to Choose the Right MQTT Data Storage for Your Next Project
    8 projects | dev.to | 23 Jul 2023
    TimescaleDB{:target="_blank"}: an extension of PostgreSQL that adds time-series capabilities to the relational database model. It provides scalability and performance optimizations for handling large volumes of time-stamped data while maintaining the flexibility of a relational database.
  • Why does the presence of a large write-only table in a PostgreSQL database cause severe performance degradation?
    1 project | /r/PostgreSQL | 2 Jul 2023
    Have some experience with https://www.timescale.com in this context
  • Opinions and Suggestions for PostgreSQL Extension under Development
    3 projects | /r/PostgreSQL | 29 May 2023
    What about getting in touch with commercial organisations that have products/services based on PostgreSQL? For example Timescale, EDB, and Citus Data, or really any hosting provider that offers a managed PostgreSQL service.
  • I have to do about a million inserts on a table every day that is also under very frequent reads. How should I do that?
    1 project | /r/PostgreSQL | 20 May 2023
    There is Timescale.
  • Ask HN: It's 2023, how do you choose between MySQL and Postgres?
    7 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 11 May 2023
    Friends don't let their friends choose Mysql :)

    A super long time ago (decades) when I was using Oracle regularly I had to make a decision on which way to go. Although Mysql then had the mindshare I thought that Postgres was more similar to Oracle, more standards compliant, and more of a real enterprise type of DB. The rumor was also that Postgres was heavier than MySQL. Too many horror stories of lost data (MyIsam), bad transactions (MyIsam lacks transaction integrity), and the number of Mysql gotchas being a really long list influenced me.

    In time I actually found out that I had underestimated one of the most important attributes of Postgres that was a huge strength over Mysql: the power of community. Because Postgres has a really superb community that can be found on Libera Chat and elsewhere, and they are very willing to help out, I think Postgres has a huge advantage over Mysql. RhodiumToad [Andrew Gierth] https://github.com/RhodiumToad & davidfetter [David Fetter] https://www.linkedin.com/in/davidfetter are incredibly helpful folks.

    I don't know that Postgres' licensing made a huge difference or not but my perception is that there are a ton of 3rd party products based on Postgres but customized to specific DB needs because of the more liberalness of the PG license which is MIT/BSD derived https://www.postgresql.org/about/licence/

    Some of the PG based 3rd party DBs:

    Enterprise DB https://www.enterprisedb.com/ - general purpose PG with some variants

    Greenplum https://greenplum.org/ - Data warehousing

    Crunchydata https://www.crunchydata.com/products/hardened-postgres - high security Postgres for regulated environments

    Citus https://www.citusdata.com - Distributed DB & Columnar

    Timescale https://www.timescale.com/

    Why Choose PG today?

    If you want better ACID: Postgres

    If you want more compliant SQL: Postgres

    If you want more customizability to a variety of use-cases: Postgres using a variant

    If you want the flexibility of using NOSQL at times: Postgres

    If you want more product knowledge reusability for other backend products: Postgres

  • Help with timeseries data
    2 projects | /r/Database | 10 May 2023
    TimescaleDB is Postgres with extensions to automatically partition tables for fast processing of time series data.
  • Postgres for time-series data
    1 project | news.ycombinator.com | 2 May 2023

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 TimescaleDB and PostHog you can also consider the following projects:

ClickHouse - ClickHouse® is a free analytics DBMS for big data

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

promscale - [DEPRECATED] Promscale is a unified metric and trace observability backend for Prometheus, Jaeger and OpenTelemetry built on PostgreSQL and TimescaleDB.

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!

TDengine - TDengine is an open source, high-performance, cloud native time-series database optimized for Internet of Things (IoT), Connected Cars, Industrial IoT and DevOps.

Sentry - Developer-first error tracking and performance monitoring

GORM - The fantastic ORM library for Golang, aims to be developer friendly

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

temporal_tables - Temporal Tables PostgreSQL Extension

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.

pgbouncer - lightweight connection pooler for PostgreSQL

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