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Comment by nm980 | Hacker News Reader

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?

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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 :)

There's a bunch more listed here as well https://github.com/oxnr/awesome-analytics

> 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.

It is US company. It does not matter where the servers are physically located.

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.

Some not-so-friendly men in suits will show up at your house. Afterwards you will most certainly comply.

I mean if you can even refuse that, this is national agency we talking about

They can physically tap global internet cable just because they can

ok if that possible, what makes EU agency not doing the same to EU base company then???

Well the EU absolutely could do the same thing. If an EU-based company had servers in the US, I would expect the EU could compel them to hand over data despite where the data is stored.

The EU doesn’t do law enforcement. That is a national concern. But a legal request from one country to another may well happen.

I misspoke there, I was meaning Europe and shouldn't have put EU.

Agreed, the union doesn't have any enforcement mechanism I'm aware of that would fit, but any country in Europe could do a similar thing to companies based in their borders.

The EU doesn't have something like the CLOUD Act, so they wouldn't be able to do that.

EU doesn’t have that kind of agency.

Member states have spy agencies, but they also signed treaties to join the EU. Having your spy agency violate international treaties isn’t something most governments allow.

If the company or individual is in a country, expect they can be compelled to hand over everything in their possession by a court order (or it can be siezed).

If the information is stored in a country, expect that the owner of the information can be compelled to hand it over by a court order (or it can be seized).

Probably randomly find 3kg of cocaine on your person.

Niche markets always allow good products to survive.

An EU server isn't enough. Those EU servers should be operated and maintained by an EU subsidy that licenses the tech from the US company. In other words, even if the US company wanted the data served by the EU company, they couldn't get to it.

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?

What are the privacy issues with GA and Clarity?

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.

This really does look like a great project!

Is it possible to use it server-side only, with no JavaScript required? I currently use Umami like that - it has an API, so I can send it page view events and custom events from server-side code. That means analytics can't be disabled by uBlock or the like, or by disabling JavaScript.

I also have my own analytics service on serverside, and it is sooo vastly different from the client-side analytics. The client side only sees ~5-10% of what I see on the server side -- even after filtering out bots and the like.

I'm going to add an API soon!

I'm using Clarity and was under the impression it was better than GA

Surprised no ones talked about Fathom Analytics. My alternative of choice.

Why do you prefer Fathom?

Just for the record, I use PostHog in my Europe-based startup. They have a EU region so it’s not a problem for us.

It is US company. Does not matter where server resides. If server is in EU but under US jurisdiction (US company) that can be (needs checking) treated as International Data Transfer.

There are some indications that this may soon no longer be sufficient.

What about Amplitude?

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?

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.

> 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.

Yes, I have seen organizations with websites that had 15+ trackers because every person in the company had their favourite tool.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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-h...

[2] https://github.com/PostHog/posthog?tab=readme-ov-file#open-s...

[3] https://github.com/plausible/analytics?tab=readme-ov-file#ca...

[4] https://ahrefs.com/

> "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.

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/ 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.

Yeah, this is why I think cloud-based with free self-hosted version doesn't work, because they are basically competing with themselves if the self-hosted version works too well.

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

Is sharing your data with a startup or small company any better than sharing it with a big corporation?

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.

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.

Startup have high chance being acquired. The new owner will get all your data, no matter you trust them or not.

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.

It's open source and locally hosted, you don't have to share your data with anyone.

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?

> Or you must share your data with a big corporation to use them?

I'm choking on the irony

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

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

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.

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?

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.

> actual Analytics

I've never used google analytics before. What's the marginal value over statsd?

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.

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

Clarity is more of a Hotjar competitor, right?

It also tracks page views, referrers, geographic location, and other analytics common to rybbit

Yes, it's very much like HotJar, focused on session capture & heatmap.

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.

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