sonex vs PostHog

PostHog and sonex get compared often and probably should not be. PostHog is a product-analytics platform: session replay, feature flags, experiments, error tracking and a data warehouse, aimed at teams instrumenting an application. sonex is web analytics that leads with revenue, aimed at people who want to know whether their traffic is paying for itself. The overlap is the pageview counter, which is the least interesting part of either.

Checked against both products’ own pages and a direct measurement of both scripts on 2026-08-17.

At a glance

	sonex	PostHog
Category	Web analytics, revenue-first	Product analytics platform
Tracker size (brotli)	2,968 bytes	68,135 bytes
Free plan	2,000 events/mo, ongoing	1,000,000 events/mo, ongoing
Paid model	$20/mo for 200k events	Usage-based, from $0.00005/event
Cookies by default	Never	Configurable; cookieless mode available
Consent banner	Not needed	Recommended in cookie configurations
Revenue integration	Stripe, Polar, all plans	Stripe, native, with deferred revenue
Session replay	No	Yes
Feature flags, experiments	No	Yes
Retention window	6 months free, up to 5 years	1 year free, 7 years paid
Self-hosting	No	Yes, MIT licensed
Hosting	Hosted SaaS	Cloud US, Cloud EU, or self-host

Where PostHog is genuinely better

The free tier. One million events a month, free, ongoing, plus 5,000 session recordings and a million feature-flag requests. Ours is 2,000 events. For a small product that needs deep instrumentation and has no budget, PostHog is difficult to argue against and we are not going to try.

Breadth. Session replay, feature flags, A/B testing, surveys, error tracking and a data warehouse in one product, with a usage-based bill instead of a tier ladder. Assembling that from separate tools costs more and integrates worse.

Self-hosting. The self-hosted edition is MIT licensed. If your requirement is that the data never leaves infrastructure you control, sonex has no answer for you.

Revenue depth. PostHog’s Stripe integration syncs charges, customers, invoices and subscriptions into a warehouse and recognises deferred revenue properly. That is more sophisticated than what we do, and if you need MRR recognition modelled inside your analytics, they have built it.

Where sonex is better

Weight. 2,968 bytes against 68,135 — twenty-three times less JavaScript on every page load, for every visitor. On a marketing site that is a real cost difference for capability you will not use, and it lands on the main thread during the exact window a page is trying to become interactive.

Cookies, by construction. sonex has no cookie mode because it has no cookies. PostHog’s cookieless mode is a configuration you enable, and its own documentation recommends a banner for the configurations that do use storage. One of these is a default and the other is a decision someone has to make and keep making.

Revenue on the free plan. Ours is included at every tier including free. If you are pre-revenue-ish and want to see the first sales land next to the traffic that produced them, you do not need to reach a threshold first.

Simplicity as a feature. PostHog is a platform, with the setup surface a platform implies. sonex is one script tag and a dashboard that opens on the answer. For a site rather than an app, that difference is the product.

Polar, and the world map. We read Polar as well as Stripe, and geography resolves to country, region and city.

The honest overlap

If all you want is pageviews, referrers and a funnel, both do it. PostHog will do it for free at a volume we charge for, and will cost you 65 kB of JavaScript to do it. sonex will do it in under 3 kB and charge you at 2,000 events a month.

Which trade is right depends on something simple: are you instrumenting an application, or measuring a website?

Choose PostHog if

• You are instrumenting a product and want replay, flags and experiments alongside analytics.
• You need a large free allowance more than you need a small script.
• You require self-hosting.
• You want deferred revenue recognition modelled inside your analytics.

Choose sonex if

• You are measuring a website and want revenue beside the traffic, not a platform to configure.
• Page weight matters — a marketing site, a content site, or anywhere Core Web Vitals are a real target.
• You want no cookies and no consent banner as a default rather than a mode.
• You use Polar, or want revenue included on a free plan.

Many teams end up running both: PostHog inside the app, something light on the marketing site. That is a perfectly sensible answer, and it is the one we would give if you asked us directly.

Facts checked against both products’ own pricing and documentation on 2026-08-17. Script sizes measured the same day; method published in our script-size study.