Why consider OpenPanel over PostHog?
PostHog has built an impressive all-in-one platform with product analytics, feature flags, session replay, surveys, A/B testing, and more — over 10 products under one roof. It's a popular choice among developer-led teams who want everything in a single tool. But that breadth comes with trade-offs: a 52+ KB SDK, complex multi-product pricing, and a self-hosted setup that requires ClickHouse, Kafka, Redis, and PostgreSQL.
OpenPanel takes a focused approach. Instead of trying to be everything, it delivers excellent analytics — events, funnels, retention, cohorts, user profiles, and web analytics — with a dramatically smaller footprint. The SDK is just 2.3 KB (over 20x lighter than PostHog), which directly translates to faster page loads and better Core Web Vitals for your users.
Cookie-free tracking is another key difference. PostHog uses cookies by default and requires configuration to go cookieless, while OpenPanel is cookie-free out of the box — no consent banners needed. Self-hosting is also far simpler: OpenPanel runs in a single Docker container compared to PostHog's multi-service architecture.
If you need focused analytics without the feature bloat, want a lighter SDK that doesn't impact performance, and prefer simple event-based pricing over multi-product metering — OpenPanel gives you exactly what you need without the overhead.
