Open Analytics

Open Analytics is an open-source, privacy-first web analytics platform built as a straight replacement for Google Analytics. It tracks visitors with a lightweight, cookieless script, shows what's happening on your site in real time, and ties traffic all the way through to actual revenue. Because it never collects personal data, sites running it don't need a consent banner, and the whole platform can be self-hosted from the public GitHub repo if you'd rather keep analytics on infrastructure you control. It positions itself squarely for site owners who want Google-level answers about their traffic without Google-level surveillance of their visitors.

The pain it goes after is one most site owners know well. Google Analytics 4 is heavy, confusing, and built for an ad ecosystem rather than for the person who just wants to know which pages convert. The privacy-focused alternatives fixed the bloat, but many of them stopped at pageviews and referrers. Open Analytics tries to hold both ends at once, keeping the script tiny and the data anonymous while still answering harder questions, like which campaign actually produced paying customers and where a funnel is leaking. That's the specific gap it's built for, GA4-level depth without the GA4 baggage.

Setup is deliberately minimal. You add one script tag, or run one command in your terminal, and there's no SDK, tag manager, or build step involved. The tracking script comes in around 2KB compressed and loads asynchronously, so it won't drag down page speed or your Core Web Vitals. Instead of cookies, visitors are identified anonymously with daily-rotating hashes, which is what lets the platform stay GDPR compliant while still following a single session from landing page to conversion. It also honors Global Privacy Control and Do Not Track signals rather than quietly working around them. If your stack is more terminal than tag manager, the one-command install path will feel right at home.

The feature set runs deeper than most lightweight analytics tools. There's a live globe showing where current visitors are right now, funnel and conversion tracking to find where people drop off, and visitor journeys that follow each anonymous visitor through their session path. Revenue attribution connects to Stripe, Polar, Lemon Squeezy, and Paddle, so you can trace real money back to the campaign or page that produced it instead of guessing from pageview counts. Core Web Vitals, meaning LCP, INP, CLS, and TTFB, are measured on real visits rather than lab runs. An AI chat lets you ask questions about your data in plain English, alerts can go to Slack, Telegram, or email, dashboards can be shared publicly through a read-only link, and there are importers for Plausible and Fathom if you're migrating from either one.

It fits indie makers, SaaS founders, and small teams who've grown tired of wrestling GA4, along with anyone whose privacy posture rules out consent banners and ad-tech tracking. Team accounts come with owner, admin, and viewer roles, so a small company can share dashboards without handing everyone full control. Subscription and ecommerce businesses get particular value from the payment integrations, since revenue attribution is the feature that turns analytics from a curiosity into a decision tool. Agencies juggling several client sites can lean on the higher tiers too, since the Pro plan removes the site cap entirely.

What makes it stand out among the privacy-analytics crowd is the combination of self-hosting and depth. Plausible and Fathom cover pageviews well, but Open Analytics layers on revenue attribution, per-visitor journeys, and AI-assisted querying, and in that comparison set it's the option you can actually run on your own servers. The company is also blunt about its business model. There's no free hosted tier at all, which it frames as a guarantee that your traffic data is never the product being sold to someone else. The homepage leans into all of this with a feature-by-feature comparison against Google Analytics 4, Plausible, Fathom, and DataFast, where it's the only column with self-hosting checked, and its $9 entry point even undercuts Fathom's $15 starting price.

Hosted pricing starts at $9 a month for the Starter plan with 50K events and 3 sites, moves to $19 for Growth with 500K events and 10 sites, and tops out at $49 for Pro with 5M events and unlimited sites. Annual billing takes roughly 17% off those numbers. Every feature ships on every plan, with the tiers differing only by event volume and site count, so you're never paying extra to unlock funnels or attribution. And if a subscription doesn't appeal, the code is open source, so self-hosting remains a genuine path rather than a marketing line. That posture, paid hosting or free self-hosting with nothing in between, keeps the incentives easy to reason about.