Best Self Hosted Alternatives to Hotjar

PostHog is an open-source platform that helps teams understand product usage, ship safely, and improve reliability. It combines analytics, experimentation, replay, and data tooling in a single stack that can be self-hosted.

Key Features

• Event-based product analytics with dashboards, funnels, cohorts, and SQL querying
• Web analytics for traffic and performance-focused reporting
• Session replay to review real user sessions for debugging and UX insights
• Feature flags for controlled rollouts and targeting specific users or cohorts
• Experimentation and A/B testing with statistical impact measurement
• Error tracking with alerting to help identify and fix issues
• Surveys and feedback collection integrated into product workflows
• Data warehouse and lightweight CDP features to combine product events with external data

Use Cases

• Measure activation, retention, and conversion across product journeys
• Roll out new features gradually using flags and validate changes via experiments
• Diagnose bugs and UX issues by correlating errors with session replays

Limitations and Considerations

• Open-source “hobby” self-host deployments are commonly positioned for smaller event volumes and may require more operational work at scale

PostHog is well-suited for product engineers and data teams who want an integrated, self-hostable analytics and experimentation toolkit. It provides a unified view across product usage data and operational signals to support faster, safer product iteration.

Rybbit is an open-source, privacy-friendly web and product analytics platform designed as a modern alternative to Google Analytics. It provides actionable insights without relying on cookies, helping teams understand user behavior while reducing privacy and compliance overhead.

Key Features

• Cookieless tracking designed to be privacy friendly
• Core web analytics metrics (sessions, unique users, pageviews, bounce rate, session duration)
• Real-time dashboard with live activity
• Funnels, goals, user journeys, and retention analysis
• Custom events with JSON properties
• Advanced filtering across multiple dimensions
• Location analytics with country/region/city and map visualizations
• Session details and session replays for behavioral analysis
• User profiles and organization support (multi-site)
• Public dashboards and built-in bot detection

Use Cases

• Privacy-friendly analytics for websites and SaaS products without cookie banners
• Conversion and product analysis using funnels, goals, journeys, and retention
• UX and troubleshooting workflows using session replays and session timelines

Limitations and Considerations

• Some features (such as Web Vitals) may be limited to paid/hosted tiers depending on deployment and plan

Rybbit fits teams that want a simpler, more intuitive analytics experience than traditional enterprise tools while maintaining strong privacy defaults. It can be used for both small sites and multi-site organizations needing real-time, event-based insights.

Countly Community Edition is a privacy-first analytics and customer engagement platform used to collect, analyze, and act on first-party data from mobile, web, desktop, and connected devices. It provides a modular server and dashboard designed for teams that want data ownership and flexible deployment.

Key Features

• Event, session, and view tracking with interactive dashboards and reporting
• Crash and error analytics for multiple platforms via Countly SDKs
• Engagement tools including push notifications, in-app ratings, and surveys/feedback
• Remote configuration to change app behavior and messaging without redeploying
• Alerts, scheduled email reports, and integrations via webhooks and APIs
• Data management tools to plan events/segmentations and improve data quality
• Privacy and compliance capabilities such as consent collection and data subject request handling
• Plugin-based architecture for extending and customizing the server and UI

Use Cases

• Product analytics for mobile and web apps with privacy and data ownership requirements
• Monitoring app stability and diagnosing crashes across supported client platforms
• Running targeted engagement campaigns (push, in-app prompts) driven by user behavior

Limitations and Considerations

• Some advanced capabilities and features are reserved for commercial Countly editions
• Operational requirements depend on the chosen deployment and data volume (database sizing, retention, and scaling planning)

Countly Community Edition fits teams looking for an extensible analytics stack that combines measurement and engagement in one platform. Its API-first and plugin-based design makes it suitable for integrating with existing systems while maintaining control over collected data.

Open Web Analytics (OWA) is a self-hosted web analytics platform designed as an alternative to services like Google Analytics. It lets you collect and analyze website and application usage data while keeping ownership and control of your analytics data.

Key Features

• First-party JavaScript tracking client for websites
• Track visitors, pageviews, e-commerce transactions, and custom actions
• Manage and track multiple websites from a single OWA server instance
• Reporting dashboard with customizable reports
• Heatmaps for understanding on-page engagement
• “Domstream” session recordings for replay-style analysis
• Visitor geolocation reporting
• REST API for administration and analytics data access
• Multi-user reporting interface
• Extensible module system for adding custom functionality

Use Cases

• Privacy-conscious analytics for business and personal websites
• Product and content optimization using dashboards, heatmaps, and session recordings
• Centralized analytics for agencies or teams managing multiple sites

OWA is a mature, extensible analytics suite for teams that want detailed website insights without sending data to third-party analytics providers. It combines classic traffic reporting with behavioral tools like heatmaps and session recordings in one deployable package.

Garmin Grafana is a Dockerized data pipeline that logs into Garmin Connect, fetches health and activity metrics from your Garmin account, and stores them in an InfluxDB database for visualization in Grafana. It is designed for long-term tracking and custom dashboards beyond what the Garmin app offers.

Key Features

• Automated periodic syncing of Garmin Connect data into InfluxDB
• Prebuilt Grafana dashboard provisioning for health and fitness trend visualization
• Collects a wide range of metrics such as heart rate, steps, sleep (including SpO2 and HRV), stress, Body Battery, calories, and activity minutes
• Workout and activity timeline support, including GPS/pace/altitude/HR for recorded activities
• Historical backfilling (bulk fetching) to populate older data
• Multi-user instance setup for multiple Garmin accounts
• Data export options (for example CSV) to support external analysis

Use Cases

• Build a personal long-term health and fitness dashboard using Grafana
• Maintain a private local archive of Garmin health metrics and workouts
• Analyze trends and correlations across sleep, stress, HRV, training load, and recovery over months/years

Limitations and Considerations

• Depends on Garmin Connect access and may break if Garmin changes its APIs or login/2FA flows
• Initial setup may require interactive authentication (including 2FA) to generate and store tokens

Garmin Grafana is a strong fit for Garmin device users who want ownership of their time-series health data and flexible Grafana visualizations, with automation for ongoing syncing and optional historical imports.

Litlyx is a privacy-first web and product analytics platform designed to collect actionable usage insights without cookies or consent banners. It provides a modern dashboard for traffic and event analytics, and can be deployed as a fully self-hosted stack.

Key Features

• Cookie-free, privacy-focused analytics designed for GDPR-friendly deployments
• Automatic tracking of page views and key visitor metrics (e.g., unique and real-time users)
• Custom event tracking with optional metadata for richer product analytics
• Funnels and conversions built from tracked events
• AI-powered dashboard features for exploring and summarizing analytics
• Multiple integration options, including script tag and JavaScript/TypeScript package
• Shareable reporting for teams or clients

Use Cases

• Replace Google Analytics-style tracking for privacy-sensitive websites
• Track product usage with custom events and conversion funnels
• Provide client-friendly analytics reports from a self-managed dashboard

Limitations and Considerations

• Advanced analysis depends on consistent event naming and metadata design
• AI-driven insights may require additional configuration and may not fit all compliance policies

Litlyx fits teams that want straightforward web analytics with custom events and modern reporting while minimizing cookie and consent complexity. It is a strong choice for organizations needing a self-managed, privacy-oriented alternative to common analytics SaaS tools.

Swetrix is an open-source, privacy-focused web analytics platform that collects anonymised, cookie-less metrics about website traffic, sessions, performance and client-side errors. It provides both a self-hostable Community Edition and a managed cloud offering with additional features.

Key Features

• Cookie-less, privacy-first tracking that collects anonymised pageviews, events and session data without cross-device identifiers
• Core analytics: top pages, traffic sources, UTM campaigns, geolocation and device/browser breakdowns
• Session analytics and user flows to visualise journeys and pageview sequences
• Funnels, goals and custom events for conversion tracking and behaviour analysis
• Real-user performance monitoring (TTFB, DNS, TLS, render and other frontend timing metrics)
• Client-side error tracking with aggregation by page, browser, device and geolocation
• Feature flags and rollout controls to target segments and measure feature impact
• Experiments / A/B testing (managed cloud) with exposure tracking and statistical comparisons
• Revenue analytics integrations (Stripe, Paddle) and CSV/API data export for portability
• Lightweight TypeScript tracking script and real-time React dashboard built for low overhead
• Deployable via Docker with a backend API, MySQL for core data, ClickHouse for analytics storage and Redis for caching

Use Cases

• Privacy-compliant website analytics for small businesses, blogs and SaaS sites that want to avoid cookie banners
• Monitoring frontend performance and client-side errors to detect regressions and improve page speed
• Running feature flags and A/B experiments (cloud) to optimize conversions and measure feature impact

Limitations and Considerations

• The Community Edition (self-hosted) provides core analytics, sessions, funnels, performance and error tracking but lacks some managed-cloud features (experiments, revenue analytics, AI insights, and built-in alert/email reports)
• GeoIP accuracy in self-hosted deployments depends on the chosen GeoIP database and may be less precise than the managed cloud's premium DB
• Scaling analytics requires appropriate ClickHouse and infrastructure configuration; self-hosters must manage upgrades, backups and operational costs

Swetrix bundles core web analytics, performance monitoring and error tracking in a privacy-first package suitable for self-hosting or using a managed cloud. It focuses on essential, low-footprint analytics while offering expanded features in its cloud offering.

StreamyStats is a statistics and analytics service for Jellyfin that collects playback and library data to provide dashboards and visualizations. It also optionally adds AI-powered chat and recommendations by embedding library items and using semantic search.

Key Features

• Overview dashboard with key metrics, live sessions, and recommendations
• User-specific watch history, viewing statistics, and filtering
• Library and client statistics, including watch-time graphs
• Multi-server and multi-user support
• Imports existing data from Jellystat and Jellyfin Playback Reporting plugin
• Optional AI chat with function calling tools for semantic library search, stats queries, and personalized recommendations
• Optional embedding pipeline using OpenAI-compatible APIs for vector similarity recommendations

Use Cases

• Monitor Jellyfin usage trends across users, clients, and libraries
• Discover what content is most watched and how watch time changes over time
• Provide personalized watch recommendations and semantic search for large media libraries

Limitations and Considerations

• AI features require enabling and configuring an OpenAI-compatible provider and embeddings storage
• Project is maintained as a hobby project, so stability and release cadence may vary

StreamyStats is a strong fit for Jellyfin administrators who want deeper usage insights than the built-in UI provides, with the option to layer on semantic search and recommendation features. It can run in Docker for a straightforward deployment and scales primarily with library size and collected playback history.

Cially is an open-source analytics dashboard for Discord servers that combines a bot, an API, and a full-stack web application to surface real-time insights and historical statistics about server activity. It captures events, stores structured records, and resolves IDs to human-readable entities to present engagement and growth metrics.

Key Features

• Real-time collection of Discord events via a dedicated bot and internal API
• Message analytics, activity insights, and growth/engagement metrics for servers
• Full-stack Next.js web dashboard with user search, UI customization, and reports
• Pocketbase-backed storage providing a lightweight embedded database and auth
• ID resolution between bot and web app so names and latest states are always accurate
• Docker-friendly deployment and configuration for self-hosted environments
• Privacy-first defaults: message content is not stored unless explicitly enabled

Use Cases

• Community managers tracking message activity, peak times, and member engagement
• Moderators auditing joins/leaves and activity trends to inform moderation policies
• Server owners measuring growth and the impact of events, campaigns, or changes

Limitations and Considerations

• License restricts commercial use (Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.0), which may limit some deployments
• Designed for small-to-medium servers; very large servers may require tuning or more robust storage/retention strategies

Cially is suitable for teams and communities that need transparent, privacy-conscious analytics for Discord. It focuses on actionable metrics and simplifies deployment for self-hosting while prioritizing control over collected data.