PostHog tells you how people use your product. pylo gives you the business data itself with analytics built in: every change is an event, with dashboards, permissions, flows, admin UI and forms in one system, hosted in Germany.

TL;DR

PostHog is an all-in-one toolkit for product teams: product and web analytics, session replay, feature flags, experiments, surveys, error tracking, a data warehouse and workflows, fed by SDKs in your website and apps. It answers how people use your product. pylo is a backend platform where your business data itself lives: data model, typed GraphQL API, permissions, flows, admin UI, forms and analytics in one system, and every change to a record is an event you can chart. If you need replays, feature flags and funnels on user behaviour, PostHog is the better tool, and the two work well side by side. If you mostly use PostHog to track orders, status changes and other business events, then sync data into its warehouse to report on it, pylo gives you those events straight from the data, with permissions your client's team can work under.

What is pylo?

pylo is a Backend-as-a-Service platform from Germany that you can use to build the operating system for your company. You model entities, fields and relations in the admin panel or through the API, and pylo generates a typed GraphQL API instantly. The same permission model governs that API, the admin UI, forms, flows, dashboards and the MCP server. pylo flows run business processes and automations on top of your own data model and connect to the tools you already use. With pylo you build apps, automations and products on one coherent data base across your whole team.

What is PostHog?

PostHog is a US company whose product started as open-source product analytics and has grown into a suite of developer tools. You add an SDK to your website, app or backend and PostHog captures events, either automatically through autocapture or through events you send yourself. On top of those events you get insights such as trends, funnels, retention, paths and stickiness, web analytics, session replay, heatmaps, feature flags, A/B experiments, surveys, error tracking, logs and LLM analytics. A data warehouse pulls in sources like Stripe, HubSpot or your Postgres database so you can query them with SQL next to your events, and the CDP and workflows send data and messages onward. The core is open source under the MIT license, and PostHog runs its cloud in Frankfurt and in the US.

At a glance

Product analytics versus analytics on your business data

PostHog is built around people using your product. An event is a pageview, a click, a signup or anything you capture from your code, tied to a person and a session. That is exactly what you need to understand activation, conversion and churn, and PostHog's insights for funnels, retention and paths are very good at it. Business records such as orders, contracts or tickets are not where PostHog lives: they stay in your own database and only reach PostHog when you send an event for them or sync the tables into the data warehouse.

pylo starts from the other end. Your orders, contracts and tickets are entities in pylo, and every create, update and delete emits an event with the full before and after state, without a single line of tracking code. A status change from "offer sent" to "won" is an event you can count, chart and react to the moment it happens. You can add your own events through the API, for example from a website or a machine, and build dashboards on events and records together. What pylo does not do is product analytics on user behaviour: there is no autocapture SDK, no session replay and no funnel or retention analysis like in PostHog.

No tracking plan to keep in sync

With PostHog someone has to decide which events exist, implement them in the frontend and backend, and keep the names and properties stable when the code changes. Autocapture covers clicks and pageviews, but business events like "invoice paid" still have to be sent from the code that changes the invoice. When a developer forgets one, the dashboard is quietly wrong.

In pylo the data model is the tracking plan. Add a field to an entity and its changes show up in the events right away, because every write goes through pylo's GraphQL API. The event history of your entities is kept for as long as your account exists, on every plan, so you can still answer in two years what a record looked like before a change.

Permissions that follow the data, also in dashboards

PostHog controls who can open which project in an organization, and role-based access control for features and resources is part of the Enterprise add-on at $2,000 a month. Inside a project, everyone with access sees the events and persons in it. That is fine for a product team, and harder when you want to show a client, a sales team or a franchise partner only the numbers that belong to them.

pylo separates tenants at the row level. Inside a tenant, any entity can act as the requester (ARO) and any entity as the requested object (ACO), with hierarchies and field-level rules. Dashboards, the API, the admin panel, forms, flows and MCP all use the same rules, so a regional manager sees the revenue chart for their region and nothing else, without a second analytics setup per audience.

pylo flows compared to PostHog Workflows

PostHog Workflows trigger on events and person properties and send emails and Slack messages, wait, branch and hand data to any real-time CDP destination. They are built for lifecycle messaging and for reacting to what users do in your product, and you can build them in the app, through the API or through the MCP server.

pylo flows are built for business processes on top of your data model. Any event in pylo can start a flow, and so can cron schedules and incoming webhooks. Flows include retries, custom rate limiting, error handling and full event logs, and everything is statically typed. A flow can read and write the records it is about, so "when an order is marked as paid, create the delivery, notify the warehouse and update the customer" is one flow in the same system as the data. pylo ships integrations for email sending and a growing set of third-party systems, and you write your own flow actions in TypeScript.

A back office instead of a reporting layer

PostHog shows you data, it is not where your team edits it. Surveys collect feedback from your users, but there is no admin interface or form builder for business records, so the place where your team changes an order or a customer is a separate system.

In pylo the data, the back office and the reporting are the same product. You compose list and detail views from predefined components and show or hide fields depending on a record's state. The form builder maps forms directly to your entities, including relations, with public or authenticated access, hidden fields, conditional rendering and submission limits. Every form submission and every edit in the admin UI is an event in the same analytics.

AI and MCP with guardrails

PostHog goes far on AI: PostHog AI answers questions and builds insights inside the app, and the hosted MCP server lets agents in Claude, Cursor and other clients query data, create insights and dashboards, ship feature flags and manage experiments. Access follows the scopes of the key or login you connect with, and PostHog's docs describe no human approval step for what an agent writes.

pylo's MCP server is ready to connect, for developers who use agentic coding and for team members who want to analyze their data. The AI gets exactly the connected user's read permissions, nothing else. pylo never applies an AI's writes directly: they arrive as proposals that a human accepts or declines inside pylo, whatever AI client someone uses.

Agencies and multi-tenant work

PostHog organizes data in projects, 1 on the free plan, 6 on pay-as-you-go and unlimited from the Boost add-on, with white labeling on Boost as well. Agencies typically run one project per client, and the client's business data still lives in another system.

With pylo, agencies run many client workspaces from one user account. Each workspace is its own tenant separated by RLS, and one login switches between them. Client teams get the admin UI, forms, flows and dashboards in the same product, with unlimited users on every plan.

Pricing

PostHog has one of the most generous free tiers in analytics, and many small products never pay. Above it, every product is billed separately by usage with volume discounts, and SSO, RBAC and priority support come with platform add-ons. Costs grow with traffic: more visitors mean more events and recordings, whether or not they ever become customers.

pylo bills by the size of your business data and automation, not by traffic. The price already includes hosting, flows, the admin UI, forms, analytics and personal onboarding, every plan has every feature and unlimited users. Plans differ only in included usage for records, flow actions and file storage.

Hosting, compliance and reliability

All pylo content data, data models and databases live in data centres in Germany. Our subprocessor list is public and names every non-EU parent company openly. A GDPR data processing agreement is part of the terms, and we never use customer data to train AI models. Paid plans come with a 99.5% availability SLA, hourly encrypted backups kept for 30 days at a separate German location, and support from the team that builds the product.

PostHog lets you choose EU Cloud on AWS in Frankfurt, where event and user data stay in the EU, or US Cloud in Virginia. PostHog is a US company, holds SOC 2 Type 2 and offers a DPA, and a HIPAA BAA comes with the Boost add-on. You can also self-host the open-source version, which PostHog provides without support or guarantees.

Where PostHog is the better choice

We would rather tell you than have you find out later:

• You want to understand how people use your website or app: autocapture, funnels, retention, paths, stickiness and web analytics are PostHog's core, and pylo does not offer them.

• You need session replay, heatmaps, feature flags, A/B experiments or error tracking. pylo has none of these.

• You want SQL over your events and synced sources like Stripe and HubSpot in one warehouse. pylo has no direct SQL, everything goes through GraphQL.

• The core is open source under MIT and you can self-host it. pylo can't be self-hosted.

• It has open signup, a very generous free tier, SOC 2 Type 2 and a HIPAA BAA, and a huge community with excellent docs.

If your question is how users behave in your product, PostHog is excellent and we use tools like it ourselves. pylo is for the data your business runs on, and the two fit well together.

Where pylo is a great PostHog alternative

We think these are the main reasons to pick pylo over PostHog for analytics on business data:

• Events you don't have to instrument. Every create, update and delete is an event with before and after state, so your tracking can't drift away from your data.

• The data and the analytics in one place. Orders, contracts and tickets live in pylo, with a typed GraphQL API, so you don't sync tables into a warehouse to report on them.

• Permissions that hold in every dashboard. Hierarchies and field-level rules apply to dashboards, API, admin panel, forms, flows and MCP on every plan, without an enterprise add-on.

• Flows that act on the data. Events on your records start flows the moment they happen, with retries, rate limiting, typed actions and full logs, and the flow can change the records it is about.

• Your team can work in it. Admin views, state-dependent fields and a form builder come with the backend, so the place where data is edited is the place where it is reported.

• AI access that's safe for production. MCP runs with the connected user's exact read permissions, and every write goes through human approval in pylo.

• Pricing by data, not by traffic. Unlimited users and API requests and all features on every plan. Only three meters are billed: flow actions, records, and file storage/traffic.

• German hosting from a German company. Data stays in Germany on every plan, including the free one, and the DPA is part of the terms. You get a 99.5% SLA from the first paid plan, hourly backups with 30-day retention, and personal support from the people who build the product.

FAQs - Questions and answers about pylo

• Does pylo replace PostHog completely? Only if you mainly use PostHog for business events and dashboards. pylo has no session replay, feature flags, experiments, autocapture or funnel analysis, so for product analytics on user behaviour you keep a tool like PostHog.

• Can I use PostHog and pylo together? Yes. PostHog can send events to a pylo webhook through its CDP destinations, where a flow stores or acts on them, and pylo flows can send business events to PostHog through its capture API, so a signup in PostHog and a won deal in pylo meet in one place.

• Can I send my own events to pylo? Yes. Besides the events pylo emits for every change, you can bring your own events through the API and build dashboards on both.

• Is pylo open source? No, but you can export all data at any time as CSV or JSON or through the API. The data models, flow definitions and generated SDK code are yours to keep, even after you leave.

• Can I self-host pylo? No, but if you need specific hosting options, we can discuss them as part of the Enterprise plan.

• Where exactly is my data? Content data is in data centres in Germany and backups are kept at a different German location.

• Can I get access now? pylo is currently in private beta. Request access and we will set up your first entities with you on a call and onboard you personally for your first project.