Open source Google Analytics replacement
121 comments
·May 7, 2025nm980
openplatypus
As a founder in this space, it not as bad as you think. There are niches in this crowded yet broad space.
Plausible - good for self-hosting, but their SaaS is very expensive and FOSS vs SaaS offering differ.
Ahrefs - they will use your traffic to improve your competitor research, you really should use them cautiously.
Matomo - feature rich but can be overwhelming.
Posthog - its SaaS is US based so dismissed early by EU customers.
Clarity, like GA has serious privacy issues.
Our product, Wide Angle Analytics, has its own gotchas compared to competitors - its opinionated and there are folks who do not agree with our opinions, but the landscape of websites is so vast that you find your client nevertheless.
That said, we are still in business after 4 years, and we saw few competitors disappear or get acquired and extinguished.
So, all the best to the OP. Hope you find your niche :)
stuartjohnson12
> Posthog - its SaaS is US based so dismissed early by EU customers.
Posthog has had an EU server for years. I'm not sure what you mean by this.
openplatypus
It is US company. It does not matter where the servers are physically located.
nm980
What's your sales strategy? Is cold calling companies with google analytics installed on their websites more effective than the blog? Have you been able to retain Next.js users after Vercel released Web Analytics?
null
gregjw
Surprised no ones talked about Fathom Analytics. My alternative of choice.
meander_water
There's a bunch more listed here as well https://github.com/oxnr/awesome-analytics
flashblaze
I'm using Clarity and was under the impression it was better than GA
rossjudson
What are the privacy issues with GA and Clarity?
bill_yang
This is pretty spot on. There's a couple of dimensions the major players sit on, and there's enough combinations that there's plenty of space for smaller players to survive in.
I'm not super familiar with all of these products, so some of these ratings will be based on vibes
1-----------------10
OSS <-> Proprietary
Small business <-> Enterprise
Simplicity <-> Complexity
Web analytics <-> Product analytics
Privacy <-> No privacy
# Rybbit (me) - just launched $0
OSS/Proprietary - 2
I use AGPL 3.0 which isn't as permissive as MIT
Small business/Enterprise - 5
I definitely want enterprises to use Rybbit, but it's hard to target them at this stage
Simplicity/Complexity - 6.5
I think Rybbit is going to end up as one of the more feature-rich OS analytics tools, but I hope it stays easy to use (famous last words)
Web analytics/Product analytics - 4
Want to target both eventually, but my product analytics is weaker relatively
Privacy/No privacy - 3
Can be as GDPR compliant as others, but can also be configured to be a bit more invasive
# Posthog - ~15M ARR
OSS/Proprietary - 4
Have a bunch of enterprise licensed parts of their repo and they tell people in their docs to not self-host it because it's too difficult.
Small business/Enterprise - 8
Seems like they hook startups in with generous free tiers and then milk the unicorns that come out
Simplicity/Complexity - 10
The scope of Posthog is awe inspiring. They are literally 10 startups in 1
Web analytics/Product analytics - 8
I believe product analytics was their first feature
Privacy/No privacy - 7
I think they use cookies?
# Google Analytics
OSS/Proprietary - 10
Small business/Enterprise - 9
Free for everyone but it's clear they don't care about regular users that want to track their small site
Simplicity/Complexity - 8
If there was a dimension for usability it would be 11/10 totally unusable
Web analytics/Product analytics - 6
Not too sure about this one
Privacy/No privacy - 9
i mean it's google
# Mixpanel - $200m ARR
I'm the least familiar with this one
OSS/Proprietary - 9
Small business/Enterprise - 8
Simplicity/Complexity - 8
Web analytics/Product analytics - 9
Privacy/No privacy - 7
# Umami - unknown ARR (maybe 500K?)
OSS/Proprietary - 1
MIT license, no enterprise only features from what I see
Small business/Enterprise - 5
Seem to have some big names on their site
Simplicity/Complexity - 4
Web analytics/Product analytics - 5
Privacy/No privacy - 5 They claim GDPR compliance but I've self hosted it and they clearly fingerprint users without any obvious opt out.
# Plausible - ~2m ARR
OSS/Proprietary - 4
AGPL v3 and some a some enterprise features the community version doesn't have. Also they use Elixir so i doubt anyone actually reads it/s
Small business/Enterprise - 6
Have to be selling to enterprises with that ARR
Simplicity/Complexity - 3
Tool is very simple at the surface, but there's a lot of config options under the hood
Web analytics/Product analytics - 3
Mostly just web analytics
Privacy/No privacy - 2
This is a big focus for them
# Simple Analytics ~500k ARR
OSS/Proprietary - 8
Closed source, but they are an open startup that shares their financials
Small business/Enterprise - 3
They show some big names, but the creator is an indie hacker
Simplicity/Complexity - 2
Self explanatory
Web analytics/Product analytics - 2
Privacy/No privacy - 2
Very GDPR compliance focused
If this was a multi-dimensional vector, I'm trying to fill the space between something like Posthog and Plausible, where we are as open source as either of them and fill the missing space between extreme simplicity and extreme complexity.
bill_yang
Builder of rybbit here - I will probably add a free tier in the following weeks. I didn't was because I was scared of being overloaded by an influx of free users, but that doesn't scare me anymore.
I started working on this 4 months ago and only publicly launched a few days ago.
As for monetization, I have no idea yet. I'm happy to collect stars for the time being. What do you think I should do?
nm980
Not sure, but I'm definitely interested in following your business and seeing what your strategy will become because I was building something similar but when larger teams starting releasing free solutions I couldn't think of a way to compete. Best of luck.
Alex_001
That’s a fair point — the analytics space is definitely saturated, especially on the privacy-first, open-source end. Without a standout feature or a compelling free tier, it's tough to draw developers away from proven tools like Plausible or PostHog.
I wonder if Rybbit is betting more on UX simplicity or niche use cases (e.g. very lightweight deployments, self-hosting ease, etc.). Has anyone here actually tried it? Curious how it stacks up in terms of setup time, dashboard clarity, and tracking depth.
thwarted
> if someone is a PostHog customer they probably won't be using Ahref web analytics
It's (un)surprisingly common to end up with multiple website analytics products on the same site; marketing wants these two, another department wants another. When I had ghostery show the list of things it was blocking I often saw multiple, overlapping-feature-set analytics integrations being blocked on the same site.
openplatypus
Yes, I have seen organizations with websites that had 15+ trackers because every person in the company had their favourite tool.
xyzzy_plugh
I've seen companies from the inside where those 15+ trackers were all added by one person in the span of a week.
I've also seen those trackers be added by someone who exits the organization a month later there by blessing the trackers with a protection spell making their removal unlikely for fear of breaking some metric pipeline somewhere.
tonyhart7
its crowded but only for web, I still searching the one for desktop and mobile (posthog still the best imo)
neves
Are these open source and locally hosted? Or you must share your data with a big corporation to use them?
nm980
PostHog and Plausible are both open source and not backed by big corporations but if sharing data to third parties and being open source is a concern (which seems to be the selling point rybbit.io is targeting) I would expect users to self host instead of paying for a hosted plan anyways?
pc86
Is sharing your data with a startup or small company any better than sharing it with a big corporation?
haswell
Potentially yes, but depends very much on the privacy policy and data handling promises being made.
I think the instinct to distrust big companies is at least partly because many of them have already proven not to be good stewards of data which when combined with their scale has more worrisome implications.
With a smaller/newer player, at least there’s some hope that they’re not capable of the same harms at a smaller scale, and in some cases may market themselves specifically as a more private alternative.
Whether or not this turns out to be true in practice and over the long run is another thing.
dec0dedab0de
It's open source and locally hosted, you don't have to share your data with anyone.
betterThanTexas
> Or you must share your data with a big corporation to use them?
I'm choking on the irony
dec0dedab0de
It's open source, why would you also need a free tier for hosting?
nm980
Self hosting would cost more money than free tier for most companies.
> more than 90% of companies use PostHog for free.
steviedotboston
Clarity is more of a Hotjar competitor, right?
nm980
It also tracks page views, referrers, geographic location, and other analytics common to rybbit
Apreche
For me, the best Google analytics replacement has been nothing. Just don’t do analytics at all. Your web site will still work without it. In fact, it will work better!
mindcrash
Once upon a time we did analytics and error analysis by running shell scripts executing awk, sed and grep over a apache or nginx access log or error log.
What I am trying to say is that you can still do analytics, even pretty advanced stuff with some more elaborate scripting, if you want. The only thing you need is the access log.
Something which has been largely forgotten ever since tools like Urchin became a thing :)
ordersofmag
Except if any of your pages are cached between eyeball and your server and so your server logs don't capture everything that is going on. You can get fancy with web server logs, but depending on what you're trying to understand it may not be the data you need.
<source: did fancy things with logs over the last 25 years, including running multiple tools on the same site in parallel to do comparisons (Analog, AWStats Urchin, GA, Omniture, homegrown, etc...)>
codingdave
If you control the cache layer, log it there. If you don't control the cache layer, does a read from the end user cache really count as a separate visit anyway?
hinkley
This is how you end up with no-cache assets on pages so they can keep track of actual traffic.
closewith
However, if you do this, you will still need to comply with all relevant privacy laws.
For example, in the EU, you need user consent to use server logs that include IP addresses for analytics. You also need to provide post-consent opt-outs and privacy statements and audit logs and all off a sudden you're building another analytics tool.
cortesoft
How exactly does that work? You need consent for server logs? Am I able to run fail2ban without consent?
pc86
One of the greatest jobs I ever had from a technical perspective had terabytes of structured access logs hosted on prem inside of a VPN, with a few small bespoke tools to search through them (and many more pages of commands for common tasks not yet implemented in a UI).
Not a single line of tracking or analytics on the front end, we just tracked everything we cared about at the server level.
closewith
And most likely a compliance and legal nightmare waiting to drop on a DPO one day.
cptskippy
> Urchin
Urchin was acquired by Google and was ultimately sunset in favor of Google Analytics. It supported local and hybrid analytics models, the later arguably evolved into Google Analytics.
crazygringo
> Your web site will still work without it. In fact, it will work better!
It objectively won't.
Analytics tell you where your website isn't working, so you can fix it. Buttons you thought were obvious that users are blind to. Pages where nobody scrolls because they didn't realize there was more content. Figuring out where users get stuck because they don't understand the navigation you designed. Etc etc etc.
If you have a hobby website, then sure maybe analytics don't matter. But the idea that sites work better without analytics makes as much sense as saying you'll see better when you wear dark sunglasses.
paxys
Such a product will work fantastic until you get your first user.
dylan604
That's just not realistic though. People with marketing departments need analytics. Otherwise, they atrophy and reveal to everyone they are not as necessary as led to believe. People without marketing departments probably never look at the logs like you.
jsheard
True, but for personal/hobby sites you probably are just better off just not knowing. Nothing good comes of tying your self-worth to how much attention you think you're getting.
crazygringo
Why would you jump to the conclusion that any of it is about "self-worth"?
Maybe you're writing for an audience and you want to see what resonates most with them.
Sometimes popularity is a good thing to measure, not for your ego, but by how much you are helping others.
It is sad when people assume metrics are about vanity, rather than about how much we're helping others.
cortesoft
I think most people are talking about for business websites
sneak
There is nothing to suggest that people who want to measure (and perhaps increase) their publishing reach are “tying [their] self-worth to how much attention [they] think [they’re] getting”.
This is sort of like assuming everyone who is taking photos at a tourist attraction is doing so to show off their holiday for social status.
If your site or content is truly valuable, it is a public good to monitor, analyze, and improve upon its reach and usability.
closewith
> Otherwise, they atrophy and reveal to everyone they are not as necessary as led to believe.
In my experience, when analytics and the related ads tracking tools break, Marketing departments are revealed to be much more important than generally believed in the business.
SchemaLoad
Product people need analytics too. You need to know how many people use each feature to make informed decisions on what needs to be invested in, what should be cut, etc.
cortesoft
I can't imagine someone trying to run a web business with no analytics.
vivzkestrel
this is some kinda joke right? analytics are necessary for 10000 reasons
null
karolist
I'm hosting my blog on cloudflare pages, it's analytics show 80 or so uniques every day consistently even though I barely write there. Installed Umami - 0 visitors. None. Internet is just LLM crawlers hungry for content now?
lmkg
We passed the tipping point where bot traffic outnumbered human traffic fifteen years ago. LLMs are an order of magnitude worse by most first-hand accounts, but it's just a continuation of a very long trend.
tonyhart7
"Internet is just LLM crawlers hungry for content now?"
its been that way for a few years, real users using mobile app and access social media now
the percentage internet user who "surfing" on the web is dwindling and more likely diminish in near future
sltr
I see this too on my CF Pages-hosted blog.
Analytics only work if the agent runs JS. CF on the other hand counts file fetches, which can't be circumvented.
There's always a baseline of bot traffic.
karolist
ah, that explains it, I think. I expected them to sessionize the file transfers under one unique somehow still, even without JS.
indiantinker
Umami works for me. I just want that dopamine kick that someone clicked on my page so I dont feel lonely on the internet.
threatripper
Would you be interested in a service that occasionally reads your page and sends you thoughtful comments?
bitbasher
It was only a bot, but if it makes you feel better... :)
AndrewStephens
The documentation states that rybbit does not use cookies and is compliant with the GDPR. The first part is true but, looking at the code (very nice to have it available), the tracking is done by IP address, trading one piece of tracking data for another.
I realize that this is probably the only way it could work but it is not clear to me that tracking by IP address (even over a single session and shredding the data once a day) is any better from a GDPR standpoint.
KronisLV
It doesn't have that much in the way of fancy UI, but I found that Matomo allows you to both choose whether to use cookies / IP or maybe to cut off parts of the IP as well: https://matomo.org/faq/general/configure-privacy-settings-in...
People seem to occasionally post cool new solutions, though it doesn't seem like Matomo has gotten that much attention, despite being a pretty strong alternative to Google Analytics (I haven't had that many issues while self-hosting it either).
AJMaxwell
I have been using Matomo along side GA4 for a month now. The amount of useful data coming from Matomo, even anonymized, is more expansive and easier to access than GA4. Plus self-hosting was pretty easy and it keeps the data on our servers, which just feels right.
wqtz
The jury is out on ip address vs GDPR. Hashed IP address is not anonymous, nor is last digit anonymization anonymous.
So, let's not bother with it. I can say all IP address are located in earth and someone would be offended because now we are invading their privacy by knowing which planet they are from. GDPR is not clear on IP address or IP address derived metadata. There is no case law for it, nor acceptable methodology and everyone is speculating about what are the consequences of and it is mostly just opinions from IANALs. GDPR is astrology for non-enterprise companies.
keerthiko
If the IP address is hashed somehow it would no longer be personally identifying while still being unique enough for analytics purposes, correct?
Does geographic grouping data depend on the IP address? If so I suppose it would need to be extracted first before hashing the IP, and I wonder how much that weakens the anonymization.
kevin_thibedeau
You can hash every IPV4 for a rainbow table. Needs some salt.
SquareWheel
According to the author, Rybbit hashes IPs with a daily rotating salt.
https://www.reddit.com/r/selfhosted/comments/1kgytl4/i_built...
dylan604
Okay, but that doesn't mean the concept is bad.
9283409232
I deal with GDPR daily and the truth is that GDPR enforcement doesn't understand what is acceptable from a GDPR standpoint and that is likely why they are in the process of revamping it. You can also anonymize data and that is no longer considered personal data under GDPR so it is possible to hash an IP address and that be acceptable.
Fraaaank
> You can also anonymize data and that is no longer considered personal data under GDPR so it is possible to hash an IP address and that be acceptable.
That's not completely true. Recital 26 of GDPR stipulates that
> “information which does not relate to an identified or identifiable natural person or to personal data rendered anonymous in such a manner that the data subject is not or no longer identifiable.”
Hashing does not meet this threshold. If the same IP address is hashed using the same method, the result will always be the same, meaning it can be matched. Hashing is therefore considered pseudonimization and under GDPR, pseudonymized data is still considered personal data.
Moreover, the act of anonymization itself is a form of processing and therefore falls under the scope of GDPR. So even attempting to anonymize personal data doesn't remove GDPR obligations for the anonimyzation itself.
robbie-c
Disclaimer: IANAL
> If the same IP address is hashed using the same method, the result will always be the same, meaning it can be matched.
The way people get around this is by using an ephemeral salt, that is deleted e.g. daily. After enough time has passed, it'd be impossible to reverse the hash as the salt would be lost.
rustc
Plausible uses the same algorithm and they have a page written by a lawyer claiming this is GDPR compliant: https://plausible.io/blog/legal-assessment-gdpr-eprivacy
Edit: Found more discussion here: https://github.com/plausible/analytics/discussions/1963#disc...
> To summarize, I believe the EDPB has made their position very clear on this in their 2023 guidelines: Plausible's fingerprinting is subject to Article 5(3) of the ePD. Plausible has made their position very clear in their blog post, leaning in the other direction. Until this is tried out in court, I don't believe that there will be any definitive answer.
dkga
So IP is considered personal information?
autoexec
If people insist on tracking users with analytics, the least folks can do is use something other than google to do it.
newusertoday
very nice demo. I saw that you are using threejs but when i checked network logs its not downloading it which is great. Are you doing SSR?
bill_yang
Thank you. I am using https://globe.gl/ which wraps three.js. The page realtime page is still pretty slow to load so though.
I'm using Next.js but I'm using all client-side components. The tooling around SPA client side state is just really good so I don't see a huge reason to go full SSR, especially when SEO doesn't matter for the actual app.
dhosek
There were a gajillion of these things before Google Analytics. Probably the best options were those that relied on log analysis rather than having a JavaScript bug on every page.
ray023
Well, obvious question: How does it compare to Plausible and all the other open source analytics.
bill_yang
Check out our demo at https://demo.rybbit.io/1. We have a lot more features than Plausible, but they're still presented in a way that is intuitive to use. You shouldn't need to read pages and pages of documentation to be able to set up funnels on rybbit, for example.
colesantiago
Plausible is too needlessly expensive as one grows and it essentially punishes you for growing.
And some features aren't available 1:1 with the CE version of Plausible either.
bill_yang
Yea, funnels are not open source for Plausible
ksec
This seems, very similar to Umami. Is this a fork from them? TypeScript / Next.JS and similar design?
bill_yang
I wrote this fully written from scratch. Similar stack to Umami though.
kull
Why not Matomo?
tacker2000
Upvote for matomo!
This project here looks interesting, but is quite new. Lets see how it evolves in the future.
ordersofmag
Matomo is an evolution of Piwik which was first released in 2007. So not 'quite new'.
tacker2000
Im talking about the project OP posted, not matomo.
nh2
Probably one of the coolest logos I've seen so far. How did you come up with it?
The market for Google Analytics alternatives is crowded. There's Plausible, Ahrefs web analytics, onedollarstats.com, PostHog, Matomo, Unami, Grafana, Microsoft Clarity (free at any scale), and so many others. Despite minor differences these products all compete for the same users (e.g. if someone is a PostHog customer they probably won't be using Ahref web analytics) yet most of these companies offer generous free tiers while rybbit only a free trial.
How do products like rybbit.io stay competitive without a similar free tier or major differentiation? Is rybbit generating revenue for its hosted plan?