Nearly every software company keeps its most valuable asset on a platform somebody else owns: GitHub, GitLab, Bitbucket, or one of a handful of smaller hosts. Your git history can leave any of them in an afternoon — almost nothing else you built there can, so who owns the platform matters more than its feature list.
Picking a product analytics tool in 2026 means choosing between a dozen mature options that all claim to do the same thing. This is a developer's field guide to how Google Analytics 4 (GA4), PostHog, Mixpanel, Amplitude, Heap, Pendo, Statsig and the rest actually differ — on data model, instrumentation, self-hosting, and price.