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Guides

AllInside PostHogProduct updatesEngineeringProduct analyticsOpen source

The best open-source analytics and data tools

Aug 25, 2022 by Joe Martin, Andy Vandervell

The best open-source analytics and data tools

Aug 25, 2022 by Joe Martin, Andy Vandervell
The best of PostHog. Delivered twice a month.
Recent Posts
As a company born at the beginning of the pandemic, PostHog has been fully-remote from its inception. Our team is 30+ people distributed across 10 countries; we have no central office, but  we still value getting together  in person.  We give…
How to plan a killer company offsite in just 8 weeks
Aug 17, 2022 by Grace McKenzie
The GDPR places significant restrictions on how you can use tools like Google Analytics to track and collect user data. And, while there is  no universal legal definition  of what constitutes "GDPR-compliant analytics", there are some fundamental…
The 6 best GDPR-compliant analytics tools
Aug 12, 2022 by Joe Martin, Andy Vandervell
The AARRR framework, also known as "pirate metrics" or the AARRR funnel, is a classic framework for understanding customer behavior. It's useful for marketers, product managers and growth hackers at startups. In this guide, you'll learn: How the…
Building an AARRR pirate funnel (how and why)
Aug 3, 2022 by Andy Vandervell
PostHog is a growing platform. We used to call ourselves a product analytics platform, but product analytics is just one feature  among many  these days. And that got us wondering... what are some of the most useful things you can you do with PostHog…
22 ways you can use PostHog to build better products
Jul 20, 2022 by Andy Vandervell
When developing software, there's no shortage of work: building new features, fixing bugs, maintaining infrastructure, launching new systems, phasing deprecated solutions out, ensuring security, keeping track of dependencies… Whew. And that's before…
Automating a software company with GitHub Actions
Jul 5, 2022 by Michael Matloka
When talking through our editions and pricing options with potential customers I'm often asked "How can I estimate my event count?" If you're not already using an analytics tool, or it doesn't readily give you a count of tracked events, it can be…
The two ways to estimate your monthly event usage
Jun 21, 2022 by Simon Fisher
So, you're building a B2B SaaS product. Everyone knows you've got to measure stuff to succeed. This is not news.  What, why, and how? These are the questions that matter. In this guide we will: Reveal  what makes a good metric  for a B2B product…
The most useful B2B SaaS product metrics
Jun 16, 2022 by Andy Vandervell
PostHog and Matomo are both  open-source analytics platforms  you can self-host on your own infrastructure, giving you complete control over your data and unrivaled privacy compliance. However, there are some important differences between the two…
PostHog vs Matomo
Jun 1, 2022 by Andy Vandervell
Also known as split testing or multivariate testing, A/B testing is the practice of splitting your audience to test variations of a product design, new feature, call to action, landing page – anything you can imagine, really. Here, we’re sharing our…
The 5 best free and open-source A/B testing tools
May 25, 2022 by Hanna Crombie
PostHog and Amplitude are both product analytics tools. That means they tell you where users are coming from and how they interact with your product, so that you can find ways to make it better. But we think PostHog is a more powerful tool for…
PostHog vs Amplitude
May 13, 2022 by Andy Vandervell, Joe Martin
Ok, so you’ve read  Zero to One  and  The Hard Thing About Hard Things , but what are all the boring admin things that are actually going to drain 40% of your time which no one has told you about? More importantly, what is the ops stack you can use…
The ops toolkit for early-stage startups
May 4, 2022 by Charles Cook
Most analytics tools just give you the hard numbers: views, clicks, conversions. This is a good starting point, but statistics alone give you an incomplete picture – why did the user rageclick or fail to convert? Enter session recording. Why you need…
Open source (and self-hosted) alternatives to Hotjar & FullStory
Apr 7, 2022 by Hanna Crombie
We just launched our Experimentation suite, and there's a ton we learned about running successful experiments. It was a no brainer product decision: Since you're already analysing your data in PostHog, and you're already using  Feature Flags  to roll…
What launching Experimentation taught us about running effective A/B tests
Mar 23, 2022 by Neil Kakkar
HIPAA, which stands for the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, regulates how individuals and organizations are required to secure, handle and transmit protected health information (PHI) – and the stringent penalties for failing to…
Is Google Analytics HIPAA compliant?
Feb 21, 2022 by Andy Vandervell
Engineers and product managers need to be vigilant when collecting user data. Punitive GDPR fines can run to €20 million or 4% of a company's global turn (whichever is greater) and that's after the expense, time, energy, and stress generated by the…
A simple guide to personal data and PII
Feb 21, 2022 by Andy Vandervell
HIPAA, which stands for the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, is a piece of legislation which was first introduced in 1996. Its main goal is to ensure that personally identifiable information is protected, with $1M+ fines and 1…
The 4 best HIPAA-compliant analytics tools
Feb 16, 2022 by Joe Martin
PostHog is a self-hosted,  open-source analytics tool . Transparency is one of our  core values  and we believe self-hosting is the best solution for many businesses, especially large enterprises with complex needs. But, why? Why do we believe in…
The 3 critical reasons companies choose self-hosted analytics
Jan 14, 2022 by Andy Vandervell
User segmentation is a term which is thrown around a lot within product-led teams, but what does it mean? In this article we'll explain what user segmentation is, why it's important and give examples of how segmenting your userbase can uncover…
What is user segmentation?
Jan 5, 2022 by Marcus Hyett
Validating B2B product market fit is a common problem and the bad news is that there's no universal standard for validating product market fit.  But there are some great heuristics you can use to understand whether you’re on the right track - and…
How to achieve B2B product market fit
Dec 9, 2021 by Marcus Hyett
Understanding the needs of your users better than anyone else is critical for the success of any product. For years, taxis solved the primary user need of getting from A to B quickly. Someone would wait by the roadside until an available taxi drove…
How to work out what your users really need
Dec 8, 2021 by Marcus Hyett
Disclaimer:  This is intended as a short, tactical guide to getting your trademarks sorted out for the first time, on a minimal budget. This is  not  legal advice and we are not lawyers - this is just what has worked for us. Don't bother securing…
Don’t bother securing your trademarks in the beginning
Dec 1, 2021 by Charles Cook
There are lots of ways to do analytics. You can do SQL. You can do it in the cloud. You can not do it at all and hire an analytics agency or consultancy instead. But by far one of the most popular (and, we think, best) ways is  self-service…
Introduction to self-service analytics
Nov 30, 2021 by Joe Martin
Product engagement is the most important factor when it comes to driving retention and revenue for your business. Though it seems easy to view success through a financial lens, revenue alone is rarely a clear indicator of a sustainable product.  In…
How to measure product engagement
Nov 23, 2021 by Hanna Crombie
Successful products need actionable metrics and for many businesses this starts with identifying what many refer to as a 'North Star' metric. This article explores the different types of North Star metrics using examples from well-known tech…
Finding your North Star metric and why it matters
Nov 12, 2021 by Andy Vandervell
Recently, PostHog was invited to speak at  OSA Con 2021 , an open source analytics conference organised by Altinity. It was a fantastic opportunity to talk to the community, alongside other engineers and leaders from projects such as  ClickHouse…
How we turned ClickHouse into our event mansion
Nov 6, 2021 by James Greenhill
Customer retention metrics are some of the most important to understand and the most vital to the long term success of any product. In this article we’ll explain what customer retention is, why it’s important and some examples of tactics you can use…
An introduction to customer retention
Nov 3, 2021 by Marcus Hyett
ClickHouse supports speeding up queries using materialized columns to create new columns on the fly from existing data. In this post, I’ll walk through a query optimization example that's well-suited to this rarely-used feature. Consider the…
How to speed up ClickHouse queries using materialized columns
Oct 26, 2021 by Karl-Aksel Puulmann
What is product analytics? At the most basic level product analytics refers to the process of gathering data about how a product is used, then analyzing that data in order to make decisions about improving it. Where it gets more complicated is in the…
An introduction to product analytics and how it works
Oct 21, 2021 by Joe Martin
Developer Relations exists and is executed in different ways at almost every company. Our Developer Relations journey at PostHog has just begun, and we still don't know exactly what it will look like in the medium term. But we can still assess what…
How to seed, grow, and scale Developer Relations (and how we're doing it at PostHog)
Sep 30, 2021 by Phil Leggetter
Google  says  they intend to deprecate the use of third-party cookies in 2023. But why is this important, and how will this affect product analytics? What are third-party cookies? Cookies are small files stored on a user’s machine, helping you…
Google is about to make it a lot harder to track website and app users without third-party cookies
Aug 23, 2021 by Marcus Hyett
Creating a product that people need and are willing to pay for is hard. At PostHog, it took us months to get to 10 paying customers — this after  pivoting  several times before we finally landed on product analytics. We tried a million things and…
How to get the first 10 paying customers for your devtool company (and other customer acquisition tips)
Aug 18, 2021 by Mo Shehu
Our main selling point as a company is transparency. Being an  open-source company , this isn’t surprising: our code, designs, and content are all largely available  online , for free, even while still a work in progress. This transparency also…
How we do hiring & HR at PostHog
Jun 23, 2021 by Mo Shehu
How we monetized our open source devtool
Apr 30, 2021 by Mo Shehu
Setting up super fast Cypress tests on GitHub Actions
Jun 10, 2020
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