In today's data-driven world, product analytics tools play a crucial role in understanding user behaviour, optimizing user experiences, and making informed decisions for product development and growth. Open-source product analytics tools offer the advantage of transparency, customization, and community-driven development. In this blog post, we will compare and evaluate some of the best open-source product analytics tools available: PostHog, Matomo, Countly, OpenReplay, Plausible Analytics, Unami, and GrowthBook.
PostHog is an open-source product analytics platform that helps you understand user behavior and improve your product. It provides features like event tracking, user recording, user cohorts, funnels, and more.
Who is this product for: PostHog is ideal for product teams and developers who want to track user interactions, identify bottlenecks, and iterate on their product based on real user feedback.
PostHog is positioned as a product analytics tool for engineers - compared to its competitors, which target product teams. It is also built with the intent to eliminate the need to have multiple tools such as (e.g. Mixpanel, LaunchDarkly, Hotjar) .
PostHog Open Source is available for free and is distributed under the MIT license. The open source version includes the core product analytics, feature flagging, and session recording features, but is limited to one project. There's also a FOSS edition that removes all proprietary code.
By subscribing to PostHog Cloud, the project limit is removed and a lot of paid features are added, such as the ability to experiment, correlation analysis, group analytics for keeping track of organizations, and advanced cohorts. PostHog Cloud is free up to 1 million events per month.
Matomo, formerly known as Piwik, is a leading open-source web analytics platform. It provides comprehensive insights into user behavior, visitor segmentation, conversion tracking, and more..
Matomo caters to individuals, businesses, and organizations seeking complete control over their analytics data. It is particularly useful for privacy-conscious users who want to comply with data protection regulations. The European Union uses an enterprise-grade version of Matomo on all of its websites, so you know it is good for small and large businesses alike.
Matomo is licensed under the GNU General Public License v3. It offers a free self-hosted version, allowing you to manage your analytics infrastructure. Matomo also offers paid plans for additional features, cloud hosting, and support.
Countly is an open-source product analytics platform that provides real-time insights into user journeys, engagement, and conversions. It offers a comprehensive set of features, including push notifications, crash reporting, and attribution analytics. Who is this product for:
Countly is suitable for organizations looking for a unified analytics solution that covers mobile, web, and desktop applications. It caters to product managers, developers, and marketers.
Countly is dual-licensed under the GNU Affero General Public License v3 and a commercial license. The open-source version allows self-hosting, while Countly offers paid plans with additional features, cloud hosting, and support.
OpenReplay is an open-source session replay and frontend monitoring tool that helps developers understand and reproduce user sessions. It captures and replays user interactions, network requests, and JavaScript errors.
OpenReplay is primarily designed for developers, QA testers, and support teams who want to gain insights into user sessions, debug issues, and improve user experience.
OpenReplay is available under the ELv2 license. An Enterprise version adds additional reporting features and dedicated support, but there's no public pricing. There's also a cloud version with pricing based on sessions.
Plausible Analytics Plausible Analytics is a lightweight and privacy-focused open-source web analytics tool. It offers simple and clean analytics without collecting personal data or using cookies.
Plausible Analytics caters to website owners, bloggers, and small businesses who prioritize privacy and want a simple yet effective analytics solution without compromising user data.
Plausible Analytics is released under the AGPLv3 license. The project offers both self-hosted and cloud-hosted options. Paid plans for additional features and support sustain the development of the project.
Umami Unami is an open-source, real-time web analytics solution built with Node.js and MongoDB. It provides detailed insights into user behavior, engagement, and performance.
Unami is suitable for developers and small to medium-sized businesses looking for a self-hosted, real-time analytics platform with customization options..
Unami is released under the MIT License, allowing free and open use. The project is maintained through community contributions and support.
GrowthBook is an open-source A/B testing platform and experimentation framework. It enables product teams to run experiments, track metrics, and make data-driven decisions for growth.
GrowthBook targets product managers, growth marketers, and developers who want to run A/B tests, track key metrics, and optimize user experiences to drive growth.
GrowthBook is released under the MIT License, allowing free use and modification. The project offers a self-hosted option, and paid plans provide additional features and support. The cloud version is free for up to three users, and $20 per user per month for more than three users.
