Self-hosted open-source deployment is made for hobbyists or hosting PostHog in weird and wonderful ways (like in your basement).
It's MIT licensed and provided without guarantee. You should be confident in your security knowledge to run it. Everything runs on a single machine, and thus is unlikely to scale past a couple 100ks events without significant effort in scaling. As a small team we can only provide limited support for open-source PostHog.
For most companies we'd recommend PostHog Cloud, which comes with a very generous free tier.
What you lose when self-hosting
We work hard to pack loads of value into PostHog Cloud, including helping you resolve issues that arise in the product. Self-hosted customers cannot receive commercial support from PostHog. Because hosting environments can vary so widely, we cannot answer tickets and cannot help debug. We're unable to support recovery from data loss.
In addition, here's what you'll miss out on in the product itself.
Product analytics
- Insight & dashboard subscriptions
- Advanced paths
- Correlation analysis
- Lifecycle insights
- One year event retention
- More than two alerts
- Group analytics
- Data pipelines
Web analytics
- Path cleaning
Session replay
- Download recordings
Feature flags & experiments
- Multi environment support
- Group experiments
Surveys
- Multiple questions
- Custom colors & positioning
- Custom HTML text
- Recurring surveys
- Event based surveys
- Action based surveys
Other add-ons
Teams
- Managed reverse proxy
- Priority support
- Unlimited projects
- White labeling
- SSO enforcement
Enterprise
- SAML
- Highest support
- RBAC
- Custom MSA
- Account management
- Training & onboarding
- Audit logs
- Custom data retention
- Unlimited projects