Lyraflow and PostHog, when you run it yourself.

Every claim about PostHog on this page links the PostHog page or file that makes it, and each was checked on 22 September 2026. PostHog changes quickly. If something here has gone out of date, tell us and it will be corrected.

The short version

What PostHog does that Lyraflow does not

This is the longer list, and it should be read first. If anything on it is what you need, PostHog is the better choice and Lyraflow will not become that choice soon.

• A hosted service. PostHog runs PostHog Cloud, and its own self-hosting page recommends Cloud for the vast majority of users. Lyraflow has no hosted version at all. If you do not want to run a server, Lyraflow is not an option.
• Everything that is not product analytics. PostHog's product list includes session replay, feature flags, experiments, error tracking, surveys, a data warehouse, data pipelines (its name for a CDP, sending data on to other tools), logs, workflows and several AI products. Lyraflow has none of these.
• Web analytics as a product of its own. PostHog lists web analytics beside product analytics. Lyraflow records page views and can split a trend by path or referrer, but it has no web-analytics screen.
• Deeper analysis in Cloud. PostHog's list of Cloud-only features includes advanced paths, correlation analysis, lifecycle insights, group analytics, more than two alerts, and insight and dashboard subscriptions. Lyraflow has no path analysis of any kind, no group analytics, no alerting and no scheduled email of any kind.
• Teams and access control. PostHog's paid platform features include role-based access, SSO enforcement, SAML and audit logs, all in Cloud. Lyraflow has one admin account and no roles, on any install.
• People to call. The same paid platform features include priority support, account management and onboarding. Lyraflow is built by one person. There is no support rota and replies take days.

Some of Lyraflow's gaps have nothing to do with PostHog. Its first commit was on 1 August 2026, and as far as we know nobody outside the project runs it in production yet; for anything that matters today, that alone is a fair reason to choose something else. Ingest never fills country, region or city yet, because there is no GeoIP lookup (#12); the countries in the demo are generated seed data. There is no published container image, so the install builds one from the checkout. A funnel and a retention grid cannot be broken down by a dimension the way a trend can. The documentation ends each screen with what it does not do.

What self-hosting PostHog means, in PostHog's words

PostHog is direct about its self-hosted build, and this page quotes it rather than paraphrasing. Its disclaimer calls it a “hobby deploy”, “made for hobbyists”, and says that “everything runs on a single machine, and thus is unlikely to scale past a couple 100ks events without significant effort in scaling.” The same page says self-hosted customers “cannot receive commercial support from PostHog” and that PostHog is “unable to support recovery from data loss.”

Its self-hosting page says there are no tagged releases for self-hosted PostHog, that every change ships continuously from master, and that PostHog does not publish CVEs. It says a self-hosted install gets the features PostHog offers free, and that every paid feature is Cloud-only. New Kubernetes deployments of the open-source build are no longer supported.

On hardware, the same page asks for something equivalent to a 4 vCPU, 16 GB RAM machine with more than 30 GB of storage. The example container list in its troubleshooting section shows eight images: PostHog itself, Caddy, ClickHouse, Kafka, ZooKeeper, Redis, Postgres and MinIO. PostHog's architecture page describes Kafka as the message bus between ingestion and storage, with ClickHouse, Postgres, Redis and blob storage behind it.

What self-hosting Lyraflow means

Self-hosted is the whole product rather than a reduced edition of one, because there is no hosted edition to reserve features for. Every screen and endpoint in the documentation is in the install.

The install is three containers: the app, ClickHouse for events and Postgres for identity. A fourth, Caddy, is added when you give the installer a domain and want it to serve HTTPS. There is no message queue, no cache server and no object store. Releases are tagged and each has a changelog entry; upgrading is a backup, a rebuild and a restart, and migrations run on boot.

What Lyraflow cannot give you is PostHog's evidence at volume. There is no published minimum machine and no event volume it has been measured at. Those numbers will be published when they have been measured, and not before.

The licences, stated carefully

PostHog's repository LICENSE file puts everything outside the ee/ directory under the MIT licence, which is an open source licence in the full OSI sense. Everything inside ee/ is under the PostHog Enterprise license, under which production use needs an agreement with PostHog and a valid Enterprise license, and redistribution is not allowed. PostHog's self-hosting page describes the self-hosted deployment as MIT licensed and does not mention ee/. We have not checked whether code from ee/ ships in the self-hosted images, so this page does not claim it either way.

Lyraflow is fair-code under the Sustainable Use License, and it is not open source. The source is always visible, and you may self-host it, use it and modify it for your own business, including commercially. You may not sell Lyraflow as a hosted service to other people. On freedom to redistribute, PostHog's MIT code gives you more than Lyraflow does.

What Lyraflow is built around

The part of Lyraflow that has had the most care is identity. An anonymous visitor who signs up two weeks later is one person, with their earlier events attached. If two people share a device, each event goes to whoever was signed in at that moment, not to whoever used it last. Every screen reads that same stitched identity. And deleting a person hides them from every read from the moment the request is accepted, not when the purge finishes.

Which to choose

Choose PostHog if you need session replay, feature flags, experiments or surveys, if you want a hosted service, or if you need something further along than Lyraflow is. Choose Lyraflow if you want product analytics alone, on your own server, from a small stack you can read end to end, and you are comfortable running software this early. The live demo shows the whole of it in a few minutes.

Sources

Every PostHog page and file this comparison was checked against, on 22 September 2026:

• https://github.com/PostHog/posthog/blob/master/LICENSE
• https://github.com/PostHog/posthog/blob/master/ee/LICENSE
• https://posthog.com/docs/self-host
• https://posthog.com/docs/self-host/open-source/disclaimer
• https://posthog.com/pricing
• https://posthog.com/docs/how-posthog-works

Lyraflow's side is its own documentation and source.