Because replays are just structured text data, they are highly compressed, lightweight, and inherently portable. Methods for Achieving PostHog Session Replay Portability
In short, your session replays are not trapped inside PostHog’s UI. They are your data, stored in your infrastructure, playable anywhere . posthog session replay portable
However, the concept of portability is not without its technical challenges. A session replay is complex, consisting of a DOM snapshot and a stream of incremental updates. Making this data lightweight enough to be easily moved and stored, while still being high-fidelity enough to reproduce the user’s experience, is a difficult engineering feat. PostHog addresses this through efficient compression and a decoupled architecture, where the ingestion pipeline and the storage layer can scale independently. Because replays are just structured text data, they
: Captures console output and network request metrics to help identify the root cause of frontend bugs. DOM Explorer However, the concept of portability is not without
For one-off use cases, PostHog allows you to export individual session recordings directly from the web interface. You can download a recording as a JSON file and re-import it at any time, even after the original recording has been deleted from the platform. This is a straightforward, user-friendly method that is perfect for preserving key recordings for compliance or long-term storage.
You can deploy PostHog on your own servers using Docker Compose for testing or small-scale internal use.
🏗 The Architecture: How PostHog Records and Packs Sessions
