In-depth: PostHog vs FullStory

May 25, 2023

PostHog and FullStory are both popular tools for understanding user behavior, but how are they different? Here’s the short answer.

  • PostHog is an all-in-one product improvement platform built primarily for engineers and technical users. It offers a wide range of features to help teams build better products, including analytics, feature flags, session replays, and more.

  • FullStory is primarily a session replay tool focused on helping product managers and UX specialists to understand more about how their users interact with product UI.

In this comparison, we'll explore, compare and contrast PostHog and FullStory in detail, so you can decide which tool is right for you. We’ll look at areas such as...

How is PostHog different?

1. PostHog is an all-in-one product improvement platform

FullStory includes a few additional features, but it's mostly focused on session replay. In contrast, PostHog is a comprehensive, all-in-one platform that easily replaces an entire stack of traditional tools, such as LaunchDarkly, Amplitude, and FullStory.

2. PostHog is for engineers, technical users, builders

PostHog is designed from the ground up to meet the needs of developers, and product-focused engineers. Session replay includes advanced tools for debugging errors and performance issues, while feature flags make it easy to test, and roll out, new features at scale

3. PostHog is open source

As an open source company, we build in public and give you unrivalled access. You can check out the PostHog repo to monitor code changes, build your own features and apps, and interact directly with our engineering team.

Core features

This comparison will compare all available features, regardless of pricing tier. Visit the pricing section in the FAQ for more information on pricing.

PostHogFullStory

Product analytics

Track events and conversion; analyze user behavior

Session replays

Watch real users use your product; debug behaviour

Feature flags

Roll out features safely; toggle features for cohorts or individuals

User surveys

Ask users for qualitative feedback and gather responses

A/B testing

Test changes and analyze impact

In-app prompts and messages

Send messages to users in your app

Apps/Integrations

Push and pull data to other destinations

Open source

Build your own apps and contribute code

  • Product analytics: Both FullStory and PostHog offer product analytics, but what they offer is drastically different. We explore this comparison in greater detail below.

  • Build your own apps: PostHog makes it easy to build your own apps and integrations, including site apps that inject surveys, messages and prompts into your product.

Further reading: How FullStory compares to other PostHog alternatives

Product Analytics

FullStory is aimed at UI designers and general product managers, while PostHog is suited to product engineers, front-end developers and more technical users. As a result, PostHog offers a wider range of analytics tools, including its own SQL dialect for detailed analysis.

PostHogFullStory

Event tracking

Log page views, clicks and other custom events.

Trends

Track your data over time and visualize in charts.

Funnels

Visualize conversion rates and drop-offs.

Dashboards

Display a collection of insights and trends.

Correlation analysis

Automatically highlight factors affecting funnel conversion rates.

Group analytics

Group events by users in the same company, project, or any other attribute.

Lifecycle insights

Break down events from new, returning, resurrecting, and dormant users.

Retention insights

Understand churn with returning user actions.

Stickiness insights

See how many times users perform an event in a period of time.

Path insights

Inspect how users journey through your product.

Product analytics in PostHog is closely integrated with other tools, such as feature flags and session replays.

This means you can use a Trends insight to examine the performance of a particular metric, click on a point in the graph to see users who contributed to it, and then jump directly to their session replay to see what they did.

You can also do this in reverse by filtering for session replays where particular events occur, and creating dynamic playlists. We cover these session replay features in greater depth below.

PostHog ships weirdly fast. We never stop shipping. Visit the the weekly changelog to keep up to date, or take a look at what we’re planning in our public roadmap!

Session replay

FullStory is primarily a session replay tool, while PostHog is all-in-one platform. FullStory's specialism means it has some extra features compared to Posthog, though the gap isn’t as large as you may imagine... and it's closing fast.

PostHogFullStory

iOS app replays

Record user sessions in iOS apps.

Android app replays

Record user sessions in Android apps

Web app replays

Capture replays from single-page apps

Privacy masking

Avoid capturing user data

Conditional capturing

Only capture the sessions you want

Performance monitoring

Monitor network activity and performance.

Custom playlists

Create playlists of related replays

Share replays

Generate timestamped short links for sharing

Add notes to replays

Add notes to a timebar when sharing

DOM explorer

Explore an interactive snapshot of replays

Export replays

Save replay files offline for storage.

Data retention

Up to 3 months1 month*

Free replay allowance

5,000 sessions every monthNo free allowance**
* Data retention increases on more expensive plans.** FullStory offers a 14-day trial with 5,000 free sessions before forcing you to pay.

Beyond this, PostHog and FullStory are roughly comparable even in spite of FullStory’s near-exclusive focus on session replays as a feature. A major exception is PostHog’s lack of mobile app recording features, but we’re working on it.

Heatmaps, clickmaps and scrollmaps

Different types of heatmaps enable you to see where users are focusing their attention – or even precisely where they are looking on a page.

PostHogFullStory

Clickmaps

Visualize where users click on a page

Scrollmaps

Check where users scroll to

Movement maps

Visualize mouse movements

Apps, integrations and plugins

Apps are a major point of difference between FullStory and PosthHog because PostHog offers the ability to inject code into your site. We use this functionality for our surveys feature, which enables you to ask users for qualitative feedback, to schedule face to face interviews, and more.

PostHog is also open source, meaning you can easily create your own apps. In fact, it’s so easy to create apps in PostHog that some of the apps we already offer have been developed by non-engineers!

Below are some of the most popular apps and integrations for FullStory and PostHog:

PostHogFullStory

Hubspot

Sync event and person data

Salesforce

Sync event and person data

Zapier

Export events for use in Zaps

Stripe

Sync customer and invoice data

Intercom

Extract and load data to external platforms

Customer.io

Sync data between platforms

Sentry

Ingest Sentry errors for analysis

Segment

Ingest events from Segment

Amazon Redshift

Export data to Redshift

Amazon S3

Export data to a S3 bucket

Azure Blob Storage

Export data to Microsoft Azure

Google Cloud Storage

Export data to GCS

Snowflake

Export data to Snowflake database

BigQuery

Export data to Google BigQuery for analysis

Rudderstack

Sync event and person data

Event tracking

Both PostHog and FullStory support a broad range of tracking options and libraries, and manual event instrumentation, as well as autocapture.

PostHogFullStory

Autocapture

Automatically track events without instrumentation

Combined events

Track related events as a single trackable action or behavior

Reverse proxy available

Send events from your own domain to capture more data

Cross-domain tracking

Track users across domains and sub-domains

Server-side tracking

Send events from your server

Capture APi

Send events through an API

Should you autocapture events?

Autocapture is much faster to setup than manual instrumentation, but some argue that it creates too much noise to be useful. We disagree, and it’s why PostHog gives you your first million events for free, every month – so you can capture events without worrying about event limits. It’s something we feel strongly about.

Security and compliance

PostHogFullStory

GDPR-ready

HIPAA-ready

Data anonymization

Cookieless tracking option

SOC 2 certified

SAML/SSO available

2FA available

Frequently asked questions

How much do PostHog and FullStory cost?

Both PostHog and FullStory offer three main pricing tiers, but how these tiers differ is actually quite different.

PostHog has a free tier with a limited feature set and a generous allowance of 1 million free events and 5,000 free sessions each month, after which users move to a more full-featured paid plan that's billed on usage. The third tier is an enterprise add-on, which expands the feature set further with the permissioning and privacy tools needed by large organizations.

See PostHog’s pricing page to find out more about what’s included in each tier.

FullStory has three premium, paid-for tiers, which differ in available features. The basic Business plan offers minimal features and a limited 14-day trial, while the following Advanced and Enterprise plans increase the feature scope and, presumably, cost.

We say 'presumably' because FullStory’s pricing isn’t transparent and there’s no way to know exactly how much each tier costs. In contrast, PostHog's pricing is completely transparent – we have a cost calculator on our pricing page and you can set billing limits to prevent surprise bills.

Do PostHog and FullStory offer free trials?

It doesn’t cost anything to get started with PostHog, and every month we give user their first million events and their first 5,000 sessions for free. As a result, there’s no need for a free trial — you can get started, start tracking and use billing limits to stay within the free allowance. Forever.

FullStory offers a 14-day free trial which is limited to 5,000 sessions. After this, it defaults to a premium Business plan.

Does session replay capture personal information?

Both PostHog and FullStory offer privacy masking to automatically remove text field input from session replays, as well as more advanced controls to further protect user privacy.

What are the alternatives to PostHog and FullStory?

Some other popular session replay tools include HotJar and LogRocket. For more information on how PostHog compares to these, check the session replay page.

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