Analytics

Privacy-first analytics has become the fastest-growing segment in open source tooling, accelerated by GDPR enforcement actions that levied over EUR 4 billion in fines through 2025. Self-hosted alternatives to Google Analytics, Mixpanel, and Amplitude -- such as Plausible, Umami, Matomo, and PostHog -- let teams collect behavioral data without sending it to third-party servers. This eliminates cookie consent banners in many jurisdictions since the data never leaves your infrastructure. Plausible and Umami focus on lightweight, privacy-respecting web analytics with script sizes under 1 KB, while PostHog provides a full product analytics suite with session replay, feature flags, and A/B testing. Self-hosting analytics gives engineering teams direct SQL access to raw event data, enabling custom queries and integrations that SaaS dashboards cannot support. Running these tools on your own infrastructure also means no sampling of high-traffic data -- every event is captured and queryable. Docker and single-binary deployments make it possible to run a production analytics stack on a $5/month VPS for small sites, or scale to ClickHouse-backed clusters for millions of daily events. When evaluating self-hosted analytics, consider data retention needs, real-time versus batch processing, and whether you need web analytics only or full product analytics with funnels and cohort analysis. The open source analytics landscape gives teams a genuine choice between simplicity and depth, without compromising on data ownership.