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The market for Google Analytics alternatives is crowded. There's Plausible, Ahrefs web analytics, onedollarstats.com, PostHog, Matomo, Unami, Grafana, Microsoft

by nm980 1y ago

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?

neves 1y ago
Are these open source and locally hosted? Or you must share your data with a big corporation to use them?
- pc86 1y ago
  Is sharing your data with a startup or small company any better than sharing it with a big corporation?
  - haswell 1y ago
    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.
    - betterThanTexas 1y ago
      Hope ain't the same thing as trust, though. A small player would need to make a pretty significant effort to suggest they wouldn't abuse your usage-patterns.
    - j16sdiz 1y ago
      Startup have high chance being acquired. The new owner will get all your data, no matter you trust them or not.
      - haswell 1y ago
        Yeah, that’s the big issue and what I was alluding to in the last paragraph. It’d be nice to have products that aren’t created with the aim of being acquired, and/or companies that remain committed to their original mission.
  - dec0dedab0de 1y ago
    It's open source and locally hosted, you don't have to share your data with anyone.
- nm980 1y ago
  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?
- betterThanTexas 1y ago
  > Or you must share your data with a big corporation to use them? I'm choking on the irony
steviedotboston 1y ago
Clarity is more of a Hotjar competitor, right?
- jhpacker 1y ago
  Yes, it's very much like HotJar, focused on session capture & heatmap.
- nm980 1y ago
  It also tracks page views, referrers, geographic location, and other analytics common to rybbit
- XCSme 1y ago
  Yeah, but free as far as I know. You usually have: All-in-one analytics: Posthog, Matomo, UXWizz (I made it!) Simple analytics: Plausible, Umami Qualitative analytics (heatmaps/recordings): Hotjar, Clarity, FullStory, Mouseflow, LuckyOrange, etc. I think Clarity also added more analytics features, but you're still sending all your data to Microsoft.
luckylion 1y ago
Grafana isn't a Google Analytics alternative. You can build a lot of what you need with it (I've done that), but you still need to manage the actual Analytics part separately, Grafana only gives you the visualization. It's okay, but I probably wouldn't choose it again. The ease of setting up Dashboards and Panels is great at first, but you pay for it with a low ceiling of what you can do (without building around it) and a "we trust everyone" approach to security.
- betterThanTexas 1y ago
  > actual Analytics I've never used google analytics before. What's the marginal value over statsd?
  - luckylion 1y ago
    Primarily the ease of use. You add the JS to your site and don't worry about anything else, collection is very fast (delivering data is < 30ms) and has edge-servers around the globe.
xyst 1y ago
Posthog is pretty good but very pushy towards using their SaaS (understandably). Self hosting is not really advertised on their main site however is buried in their gh repo as a footnote [1] with indications of vague issues past 100K events/month. Haven’t delved into how to scale it past that though and they do provide some docs that I have yet to review. Also the primary repo is not FOSS, and that "100% FOSS" repo is buried in yet another footnote [2]. Plausible follows in PH footsteps but is not fully faithful to open source. If you want to self host, you won’t have same set of features as their SaaS and need to rely on long term releases for their "community edition" [3] On "Ahrefs", is there even an open source version of their product? I couldn’t easily find it (on mobile). [4] Maybe I’ll take a look at others you mentioned later but if rybbit can remain faithful to their FOSS roots then I think there’s a real chance of it becoming huge. For thosw that don’t want to self host (mostly corporate shitholes), rybbit can milk them with their managed SaaS product. [1] https://github.com/PostHog/posthog?tab=readme-ov-file#self-hosting-the-open-source-hobby-deploy-advanced https://github.com/PostHog/posthog?tab=readme-ov-file#self-h... [2] https://github.com/PostHog/posthog?tab=readme-ov-file#open-source-vs-paid https://github.com/PostHog/posthog?tab=readme-ov-file#open-s... [3] https://github.com/plausible/analytics?tab=readme-ov-file#can-plausible-be-self-hosted https://github.com/plausible/analytics?tab=readme-ov-file#ca... [4] https://ahrefs.com/ https://ahrefs.com/
- nm980 1y ago
  > "Self hosting is not really advertised on their main site" How would rybbit.io make money if they are only better at self hosting? Wouldn't the users they are targeting only self host anyways? > "On "Ahrefs", is there even an open source version of their product? I couldn’t easily find it (on mobile)." Not all of these companies are open source but they are still competitors because they have generous free tiers so the cost of self hosting an alternative wouldn't be justified.
- bill_yang 1y ago
  I think Posthog is incredible, and there's no way I (it's just been me building rybbit for the past few months) will be able to compete with them on their full scope of features for the foreseeable future. I tried to self host Posthog for my other project as it far exceeded even the generous free tier. I have a Hetzner bare metal server with 64gb of ram https://www.hetzner.com/dedicated-rootserver/ax42/ https://www.hetzner.com/dedicated-rootserver/ax42/ and it was running all 16 cores at 100% and didn't end up working. So I think Posthog's stack is just way too heavy to self host effectively, and it's just not in the same category as Plausible, Umami, or Rybbit. I'm trying to build best OSS analytics out there - and even though it's super crowded, most non-trivial websites run one so there is space for everyone to survive in.
openplatypus 1y ago
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 :)
- meander_water 1y ago
  There's a bunch more listed here as well https://github.com/oxnr/awesome-analytics https://github.com/oxnr/awesome-analytics
- stuartjohnson12 1y ago
  > 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 1y ago
    It is US company. It does not matter where the servers are physically located.
    - _heimdall 1y ago
      It would be quite funny to reply to an NSA request by saying "Oh yeah, I have that data and can access it but its on a server in the EU. I can get it, but I won't." I genuinely don't know how they would proceed, but it'd be interesting to watch.
dec0dedab0de 1y ago
It's open source, why would you also need a free tier for hosting?
- nm980 1y ago
  Self hosting would cost more money than free tier for most companies. > more than 90% of companies use PostHog for free. https://posthog.com/pricing https://posthog.com/pricing
bill_yang 1y ago
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 1y ago
  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.
thwarted 1y ago
> 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 1y ago
  Yes, I have seen organizations with websites that had 15+ trackers because every person in the company had their favourite tool.
  - xyzzy_plugh 1y ago
    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 1y ago
its crowded but only for web, I still searching the one for desktop and mobile (posthog still the best imo)
Alex_001 1y ago
[dead]
Onavo 1y ago
Which ones are embeddable? Often I need to embed some analytic charts for users in my app e.g. blog views and very few support easy embedding+authentication.
- XCSme 1y ago
  I am actually implementing the widgets/embedding feature in UXWizz. What type of authentication would you need? A simple token in the embedding URL? Or you want a way in which you can publicly share the URL, but require a password/auth?
crowcroft 1y ago
You would be surprised how many companies do in fact use multiple analytics services. Only one tool will be a 'source of truth' but a company using a combination of something like GA4 (Business source of truth), Mixpanel (product insights), and Clarity (Landing page analysis) is not unheard of. The types of companies that use multiple services are also the types of companies that are likely spending $1,000s per month as well, so overall quite a profitable industry for many companies to operate in.
XCSme 1y ago
I can only speak for myself (I made UXWizz): I feel like interest has always been there for different platforms, most are still too simple or too complex and hard to set up and use. In my case, I am simply focused on the self-hosting niche, trying to make the best self-hosting experience. I have an advantage here, because most other tools earn their money from their cloud version, so they don't really want you to self-host, thus usually provide different "open-source" versions and rarely provide support for it. Also, because "cloud-focused" analytics are built for scale, they are actually not optimal for tracking smaller amounts of traffic (most websites don't have millions of visitors per month), so they use more resources for running scale-proof stacks.
- have_orange 1y ago
  I'm working on releasing a product and I am trying to figure out between: self-hosted and SAAS model. My question is: I want to release it as self-hosted, but I think the risk of giving the customer the source code is too high... they can just release it as open-source or sell it at a lower price, so my business is dead? how do you do it? Is it worth trying to obfuscate code or compile it as a binary so they cannot access the code? Also, with it being self-hosted, how are you chargin a monthly fee? If you are chargin for a monthly fee, can't the customer just remove the product licence validity check? e.g. they remove verification that they have purchased a licence? Any insight highly appreciated.
  - XCSme 1y ago
    You can't beat piracy. Look at video-games. Just make it easier to install and set-up when purchasing than when pirating. Also, the automatic updater only works with a valid license key and support is also only provided with a valid key. I don't charge monthly, I charge for having an active support/updates period, eg: https://license-api.uxwizz.com/support/prices https://license-api.uxwizz.com/support/prices
    - have_orange 1y ago
      OK, firstly thank you so much for the reply! I have also sent you a DM on X to try and get your input, but you already replied here so cheers! So I was focused on the wrong thing… focusing on rem ing the possibility of fraud/theft/piracy etc… but what you are saying is focus on charging for product updates I.e. new releases which require a valid key + direct support. Thanks for helping me get this straight in my head. I feel that selling as a self-hosted model will allow me to operate as a solo founder without the overhead of legal complications with GDPR/Security certifications/ owning the liability of having my customers data… if it is self-hosted they can do what the fuck they want with their own customer data and I don’t need to own that liability… this was my thinking… but then obviously I made the error of focusing too much on trying to avoid theft. Thanks again. I have followed you on X, would be great to connect there. Wishing you lots of continued success! Appreciate your time and advice. Matt

by nm980 1y ago

neves 1y ago

Are these open source and locally hosted? Or you must share your data with a big corporation to use them?

pc86 1y ago
Is sharing your data with a startup or small company any better than sharing it with a big corporation?
- haswell 1y ago
  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.
  - betterThanTexas 1y ago
    Hope ain't the same thing as trust, though. A small player would need to make a pretty significant effort to suggest they wouldn't abuse your usage-patterns.
  - j16sdiz 1y ago
    Startup have high chance being acquired. The new owner will get all your data, no matter you trust them or not.
    - haswell 1y ago
      Yeah, that’s the big issue and what I was alluding to in the last paragraph. It’d be nice to have products that aren’t created with the aim of being acquired, and/or companies that remain committed to their original mission.
- dec0dedab0de 1y ago
  It's open source and locally hosted, you don't have to share your data with anyone.
nm980 1y ago
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?
betterThanTexas 1y ago
> Or you must share your data with a big corporation to use them? I'm choking on the irony

steviedotboston 1y ago

Clarity is more of a Hotjar competitor, right?

jhpacker 1y ago
Yes, it's very much like HotJar, focused on session capture & heatmap.
nm980 1y ago
It also tracks page views, referrers, geographic location, and other analytics common to rybbit
XCSme 1y ago
Yeah, but free as far as I know. You usually have: All-in-one analytics: Posthog, Matomo, UXWizz (I made it!) Simple analytics: Plausible, Umami Qualitative analytics (heatmaps/recordings): Hotjar, Clarity, FullStory, Mouseflow, LuckyOrange, etc. I think Clarity also added more analytics features, but you're still sending all your data to Microsoft.

luckylion 1y ago

Grafana isn't a Google Analytics alternative. You can build a lot of what you need with it (I've done that), but you still need to manage the actual Analytics part separately, Grafana only gives you the visualization. It's okay, but I probably wouldn't choose it again. The ease of setting up Dashboards and Panels is great at first, but you pay for it with a low ceiling of what you can do (without building around it) and a "we trust everyone" approach to security.

betterThanTexas 1y ago
> actual Analytics I've never used google analytics before. What's the marginal value over statsd?
- luckylion 1y ago
  Primarily the ease of use. You add the JS to your site and don't worry about anything else, collection is very fast (delivering data is < 30ms) and has edge-servers around the globe.

xyst 1y ago

Posthog is pretty good but very pushy towards using their SaaS (understandably). Self hosting is not really advertised on their main site however is buried in their gh repo as a footnote [1] with indications of vague issues past 100K events/month. Haven’t delved into how to scale it past that though and they do provide some docs that I have yet to review. Also the primary repo is not FOSS, and that "100% FOSS" repo is buried in yet another footnote [2]. Plausible follows in PH footsteps but is not fully faithful to open source. If you want to self host, you won’t have same set of features as their SaaS and need to rely on long term releases for their "community edition" [3] On "Ahrefs", is there even an open source version of their product? I couldn’t easily find it (on mobile). [4] Maybe I’ll take a look at others you mentioned later but if rybbit can remain faithful to their FOSS roots then I think there’s a real chance of it becoming huge. For thosw that don’t want to self host (mostly corporate shitholes), rybbit can milk them with their managed SaaS product. [1] https://github.com/PostHog/posthog?tab=readme-ov-file#self-hosting-the-open-source-hobby-deploy-advanced https://github.com/PostHog/posthog?tab=readme-ov-file#self-h... [2] https://github.com/PostHog/posthog?tab=readme-ov-file#open-source-vs-paid https://github.com/PostHog/posthog?tab=readme-ov-file#open-s... [3] https://github.com/plausible/analytics?tab=readme-ov-file#can-plausible-be-self-hosted https://github.com/plausible/analytics?tab=readme-ov-file#ca... [4] https://ahrefs.com/ https://ahrefs.com/

nm980 1y ago
> "Self hosting is not really advertised on their main site" How would rybbit.io make money if they are only better at self hosting? Wouldn't the users they are targeting only self host anyways? > "On "Ahrefs", is there even an open source version of their product? I couldn’t easily find it (on mobile)." Not all of these companies are open source but they are still competitors because they have generous free tiers so the cost of self hosting an alternative wouldn't be justified.
bill_yang 1y ago
I think Posthog is incredible, and there's no way I (it's just been me building rybbit for the past few months) will be able to compete with them on their full scope of features for the foreseeable future. I tried to self host Posthog for my other project as it far exceeded even the generous free tier. I have a Hetzner bare metal server with 64gb of ram https://www.hetzner.com/dedicated-rootserver/ax42/ https://www.hetzner.com/dedicated-rootserver/ax42/ and it was running all 16 cores at 100% and didn't end up working. So I think Posthog's stack is just way too heavy to self host effectively, and it's just not in the same category as Plausible, Umami, or Rybbit. I'm trying to build best OSS analytics out there - and even though it's super crowded, most non-trivial websites run one so there is space for everyone to survive in.

openplatypus 1y ago

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 :)

meander_water 1y ago
There's a bunch more listed here as well https://github.com/oxnr/awesome-analytics https://github.com/oxnr/awesome-analytics
stuartjohnson12 1y ago
> 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 1y ago
  It is US company. It does not matter where the servers are physically located.
  - _heimdall 1y ago
    It would be quite funny to reply to an NSA request by saying "Oh yeah, I have that data and can access it but its on a server in the EU. I can get it, but I won't." I genuinely don't know how they would proceed, but it'd be interesting to watch.

dec0dedab0de 1y ago

It's open source, why would you also need a free tier for hosting?

nm980 1y ago
Self hosting would cost more money than free tier for most companies. > more than 90% of companies use PostHog for free. https://posthog.com/pricing https://posthog.com/pricing

bill_yang 1y ago

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 1y ago
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.

thwarted 1y ago

> 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 1y ago
Yes, I have seen organizations with websites that had 15+ trackers because every person in the company had their favourite tool.
- xyzzy_plugh 1y ago
  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 1y ago

its crowded but only for web, I still searching the one for desktop and mobile (posthog still the best imo)

Alex_001 1y ago

[dead]

Onavo 1y ago

Which ones are embeddable? Often I need to embed some analytic charts for users in my app e.g. blog views and very few support easy embedding+authentication.

XCSme 1y ago
I am actually implementing the widgets/embedding feature in UXWizz. What type of authentication would you need? A simple token in the embedding URL? Or you want a way in which you can publicly share the URL, but require a password/auth?

crowcroft 1y ago

You would be surprised how many companies do in fact use multiple analytics services. Only one tool will be a 'source of truth' but a company using a combination of something like GA4 (Business source of truth), Mixpanel (product insights), and Clarity (Landing page analysis) is not unheard of. The types of companies that use multiple services are also the types of companies that are likely spending $1,000s per month as well, so overall quite a profitable industry for many companies to operate in.

XCSme 1y ago

I can only speak for myself (I made UXWizz): I feel like interest has always been there for different platforms, most are still too simple or too complex and hard to set up and use. In my case, I am simply focused on the self-hosting niche, trying to make the best self-hosting experience. I have an advantage here, because most other tools earn their money from their cloud version, so they don't really want you to self-host, thus usually provide different "open-source" versions and rarely provide support for it. Also, because "cloud-focused" analytics are built for scale, they are actually not optimal for tracking smaller amounts of traffic (most websites don't have millions of visitors per month), so they use more resources for running scale-proof stacks.

have_orange 1y ago
I'm working on releasing a product and I am trying to figure out between: self-hosted and SAAS model. My question is: I want to release it as self-hosted, but I think the risk of giving the customer the source code is too high... they can just release it as open-source or sell it at a lower price, so my business is dead? how do you do it? Is it worth trying to obfuscate code or compile it as a binary so they cannot access the code? Also, with it being self-hosted, how are you chargin a monthly fee? If you are chargin for a monthly fee, can't the customer just remove the product licence validity check? e.g. they remove verification that they have purchased a licence? Any insight highly appreciated.
- XCSme 1y ago
  You can't beat piracy. Look at video-games. Just make it easier to install and set-up when purchasing than when pirating. Also, the automatic updater only works with a valid license key and support is also only provided with a valid key. I don't charge monthly, I charge for having an active support/updates period, eg: https://license-api.uxwizz.com/support/prices https://license-api.uxwizz.com/support/prices
  - have_orange 1y ago
    OK, firstly thank you so much for the reply! I have also sent you a DM on X to try and get your input, but you already replied here so cheers! So I was focused on the wrong thing… focusing on rem ing the possibility of fraud/theft/piracy etc… but what you are saying is focus on charging for product updates I.e. new releases which require a valid key + direct support. Thanks for helping me get this straight in my head. I feel that selling as a self-hosted model will allow me to operate as a solo founder without the overhead of legal complications with GDPR/Security certifications/ owning the liability of having my customers data… if it is self-hosted they can do what the fuck they want with their own customer data and I don’t need to own that liability… this was my thinking… but then obviously I made the error of focusing too much on trying to avoid theft. Thanks again. I have followed you on X, would be great to connect there. Wishing you lots of continued success! Appreciate your time and advice. Matt