posthog.com
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PostHog
PostHog vs...
We have some comparisons (of PostHog vs competition), but right now they're in blog form. It would be cool to make landing pages out of these.
Goals
- Make information scannable - The content we have is great, but it takes a lot of reading to get to the meat
- Find commonalities - See what's the same between our content pages so we can figure out how to componentize accordingly (eg comparison charts, top 3 feature callouts, etc)
- Make it more visually compelling - Using our blog template doesn't make these feel super exciting, especially when landing here from a Google search.
It could also be really cool to do custom header art for these (imagine a battlefield where our hedgehog is going head to head against the competitor's logo (or a spin on it so we're not directly using it).
It could also be really cool to do custom header art for these
We already have custom artwork for the blog posts, but did you mean something else entirely? (As a quick solution could be to just repurpose the artwork we already have.)
100% behind this. Blog posts were only ever a stop gap to a better solution.
A few considerations:
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We need to retain a feeling of comprehensiveness while making them more scannable. We don't want to end up here. I feel like an ideal page would be something that feels like a very customized article template, not a marketing landing page. Restack does really well on comprehensiveness, though it fails on visuals.
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We also need a landing page that acts as a hub page for comparisons, which would be optimized to rank for
'PostHog Alternatives'. People are searching for that and we want them to land on our content, not someone else's. -
I'd like to incorporate more visuals (images and video) of PostHog in action. I think this is something we need to get better at generally, and this would be a good opportunity to address that.
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An easy way to create comparison tables (tables generally) would make these much easier to build. Might not be a realistic MVP goal, but building them is a galactic PITA.
idea: video game style choose your fighter - you could select which opponent we want to compare with accompanying artwork. But way less aggro and muscle-y
I don't have a strong opinion on this, but previous feedback that led to the current yin-yang design on the blog was a desire to avoid appearing too adversarial.
Other potential issue is most other companies aren't characters, but that might not be a barrier.
idea: video game style choose your fighter - you could select which opponent we want to compare with accompanying artwork. But way less aggro and muscle-y
YES LOTTIE 😍
I think this is high-impact, so I'm happy to pitch in on content creation here. Having done a lot of these sorts of things in the path, a successful structure IMHO is one which gets progressively more detailed as it goes. These pages should start with a simple headline and a PRO / CON table at the start, which builds through main arguments and ends in a table with detailed comparative elements.
It doesn't have to be a 'fighter' so to speak but could adopt similar elements. Like choosing a character in a game and seeing what speed or agility qualities they possess- I can mock up some sketches to see how it could look
Some first drafts
My ideas for this :
- a street fighter style selection of competitors (the language of fighting can be toned down if necessary)
- a hero image that changes based on your competitor selection (inspired by classic street fighter game backgrounds of dojos) for the meantime I have grabbed other images as placeholders
- then a restack based info packed layout below - which would be similar to the tutorials/docs pages
- I thought we could go up to 3 comparisons at one time and maybe even offer the option to compare our competitors side by side (without PostHog) as a 100% honesty perspective
OMG that looks glorious.
Potentially we could add a lot of competitors. However, I think we can focus in on the following main challengers:
- Amplitude
- Mixpanel
- Heap
- Matomo
- Google Analytics
- Logrocket
Those would be the big ones. Though potentially we could extend to include Hotjar, Fullstory, etc. @andyvan-ph ?
Yeah, it would be great to add a bit more session recording in there if poss!
Some important points we need to consider:
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We need pages that compare PostHog vs individual products, rather than multiple on the same page. People search for "PostHog vs Mixpanel" rather than "PostHog vs Mixpanel vs Amplitude vs Heap" etc. These pages should go deep and satisfy the curiosity of an engineer.
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We want a landing page for all comparisons that's targeting "PostHog Alternatives" as the main search term, so we're the top result here rather than G2 or anyone else. This could provide a very high level comparison of us versus other tools, with CTAs to visit the deeper individual comparison pages. This could satisfy a less technical user.
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I think these pages should be distinct from the product pages given these aren't product pages in any real sense. We could, for example, use the left nav as a way to navigate between different comparisons.
Next steps
How I think we should approach this:
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I'm working on a revised blog format with PostHog vs Mixpanel. Once we've fine-tuned it and got that live, I think it would make sense to take that and create a more 'designed' version of a dedicated comparison page that's more visually appealing.
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Once we're happy with that, we can port existing comparisons to the new format and go live with a very basic MVP landing page.
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After that, we can look at a better landing page that incorporates more high-level comparisons + comparisons of different types of tools outside of product analytics, and considered marketing messages.
Considerations
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It would be useful to consider how we can make these pages easier and faster to build. Having a repeatable template is part of this, hence the PostHog vs Mixpanel comparison, but anything we can do to help here would be ace.
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Could we use the blog redesign to achieve some of the above, rather than doing two separate pieces of work? Feel free to take or leave this idea.
Since this has been paused I'm going to close this issue until we so choose to get stuck back in