TL;DR:
Open-source analytics tools are increasingly popular for teams that need to track and analyze user behavior and website traffic. With privacy concerns rising and regulations like GDPR, self-hosted solutions offer better control and flexibility than traditional tools such as Google Analytics, which lack customization and can raise privacy issues.
In this guide, we'll discuss the best open-source analytics tools, highlight their features, and help you choose the right one for your needs.
Open-source analytics tools are platforms that allow teams to track, analyze, and visualize user data with complete access to the source code. These tools give businesses the flexibility to modify, customize, and extend the platform according to their specific needs without being restricted by the limitations of closed-source solutions.
While Google Analytics is one of the most widely used web analytics solutions, it’s not the gold standard. It limits your customizability and often compromises user privacy by tracking personal data. Also, while Google Analytics offers powerful functionality, it may not integrate seamlessly with other tools or meet your business's specific needs.
On the other hand, open-source analytics tools give you the flexibility to:
When you’re choosing an open-source analytics platform, it's essential to take a look at several key factors to make sure the tool aligns with your business needs. Here are the main criteria we use to evaluate these platforms:
One of the main benefits of open-source analytics tools is the privacy control they offer. It’s important to choose a platform that respects user privacy and complies with GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation). In your search, look for tools that allow you to control data collection practices, anonymize user data, and ensure compliance with privacy regulations. Features like data retention settings, opt-out capabilities, and customizable tracking controls are essential.
The core advantage of open-source platforms is their ability to be fully customized to meet specific business requirements. Since the source code is available, you can modify it to track custom events that are of interest to your business. This flexibility extends to integrating APIs or plugins to enhance functionality, so whether you’re focused on product analytics, user behavior tracking, or monitoring website traffic, open-source platforms allow you to adapt and expand the toolset to suit your unique data needs.
As your business grows, your analytics tool should be able to scale with it. Make sure the platform can handle increasing volumes of data and seamlessly integrate with data warehouses or other storage solutions. A scalable analytics platform should support large datasets and complex queries and provide fast processing.
When choosing your open-source analytics platform, another factor you should consider is ease of deployment. Look for platforms that easily integrate into your current setup and offer clear documentation or pre-configured packages to help simplify the setup process.
You also need to think about the features your company needs to thrive. Here are a few that we think should be added to that “non-negotiable” list:
Your chosen platform should provide the tools necessary to track, analyze, and visualize meaningful data to help you achieve your business goals.
Category: Experimentation and Product Analytics
What It Is:
Eppo is a next-generation open-source analytics platform designed for teams focused on A/B testing, feature flagging, and advanced product analytics. It provides an integrated environment where product and data teams can experiment and analyze key metrics to optimize the user experience and feature performance.
Key Features Include:
Best For:
Startups, data science teams, and enterprises prioritizing experimentation, scalability, and a privacy-friendly approach to product analytics.
Category: Product and Website Analytics
What It Is:
PostHog is an open-source platform offering all-in-one product and website analytics. It provides teams with tools to understand user behavior and product performance, including event pipelines, feature flags, and session recording. Its built-in features make it easy to track user journeys, identify conversion bottlenecks, and measure the impact of product changes.
Key Features:
Best For:
Engineering and product teams are looking for a comprehensive, self-hosted analytics solution that can track detailed user behavior and experiment outcomes.
Category: Website Analytics
What It Is:
Matomo is an open-source website analytics platform that provides businesses with a Google Analytics alternative that focuses on user privacy. It offers a range of features, including e-commerce tracking, real-time analytics, and integrations with platforms like WordPress and WooCommerce.
Key Features:
Best For:
Marketing teams and website owners looking for a customizable, privacy-focused, open-source solution to track website traffic and performance while maintaining GDPR compliance.
Category: Business Intelligence and Dashboarding
What It Is:
Metabase is an open-source business intelligence (BI) platform that helps organizations visualize data and create interactive dashboards without needing advanced technical skills. Its drag-and-drop interface makes it easy for non-technical users to analyze data. At the same time, the SQL editor provides more advanced users with the flexibility to perform custom queries and create complex visualizations.
Key Features:
Best For:
Organizations are looking to democratize data analysis and provide easy-to-use tools for teams at all technical levels to create and share visualizations and reports.
Category: Privacy-First Website Analytics
What It Is:
Plausible Analytics is a privacy-first website analytics tool that provides metrics like pageviews, bounce rates, and visit duration while prioritizing full GDPR compliance. Unlike traditional tools, Plausible doesn’t rely on cookies, which makes it a great option for privacy-conscious businesses that want to gather data without compromising user privacy.
Key Features:
Best For:
Small businesses, hobbyists, and privacy-conscious website owners are looking for a straightforward, privacy-friendly alternative to more complex tools like Google Analytics.
Category: Dashboarding and Data Observability
What It Is:
Grafana is an open-source data observability platform that allows teams to monitor, visualize, and analyze their data in real-time. It integrates seamlessly with a wide range of data sources and provides useful visualization tools like graphs, charts, and alerts. Grafana is particularly suited for engineering and DevOps teams who need real-time insights into their systems and infrastructure.
Key Features:
Best For:
Engineering, DevOps, and data science teams need real-time monitoring and robust data visualizations to track system performance and business metrics.
Category: Business Intelligence and Dashboarding
What It Is:
Apache Superset is an open-source business intelligence (BI) tool designed for large datasets and complex data analytics. Superset is particularly useful for organizations with experienced data teams looking for high-performance, SQL-based data analysis.
Key Features:
Best For:
Enterprises with experienced data teams that require a highly scalable, flexible platform for BI, dashboards, and SQL-based analytics.
Category: Privacy-Focused Website Analytics
What It Is:
Umami is a lightweight, open-source website analytics tool designed for privacy-conscious website owners who want a simple, self-hosted solution. It tracks website metrics without the use of cookies or collecting any personal data to help you maintain full GDPR compliance. Umami focuses on providing clear, actionable insights while maintaining fast performance with minimal setup required.
Key Features:
Best For:
Small businesses, bloggers, and privacy-conscious website owners need a no-fuss, self-hosted analytics tool that respects user privacy without compromising on data insights.
Category: Dashboarding and Business Intelligence
What It Is:
Redash is an open-source dashboarding and business intelligence platform that allows users to connect to a variety of data sources and create visual reports and queries. Redash is designed for teams that want flexibility in how they interact with data and has tools for both SQL-based queries and visual data exploration.
Key Features:
Best For:
Data teams that need flexibility in accessing and analyzing large datasets and prefer using SQL for data queries and reporting.
Category: Privacy-First Website Analytics
What It Is:
Umami is an open-source, privacy-first website analytics tool that prioritizes simplicity and control. It offers flexibility in how you track user behavior, with a key feature being its ability to track custom events which is something that’s not as easily customizable in many other lightweight analytics tools.
Key Features:
Best For:
Small businesses, developers, or privacy-conscious website owners are looking for an open-source, customizable alternative to larger analytics tools.
Category: Product Analytics
What It Is:
Countly is an open-source product analytics platform designed to track mobile app and web analytics. It offers a range of tools for analyzing user behavior, measuring retention, and diagnosing issues through crash analytics. It’s particularly useful for organizations focusing on mobile app development but is flexible enough to support both web and app analytics.
Key Features:
Best For:
Teams focused on mobile app development or those needing comprehensive product analytics and user behavior insights.
Category: Website Analytics
What It Is:
Open Web Analytics (OWA) is a free, open-source alternative to Google Analytics designed for self-hosted analytics. It offers basic website tracking, heatmaps, and click-tracking features that make it easy to monitor user interactions on your site. While less feature-rich than other tools like Matomo, it still has a simple, user-friendly option for basic web analytics.
Key Features:
Best For:
Developers and teams looking for a basic, self-hosted web analytics solution with heatmap and click-tracking functionality. It is ideal for small businesses that don’t need complex tracking capabilities.
Choosing the right analytics platform for your team is a big decision. Depending on your needs, budget, and priorities, your chosen platform should help you make data-driven decisions without compromising your goals.
Eppo is an open-source analytics platform designed to help teams prioritize experimentation and make smarter, data-driven decisions. We offer a scalable, privacy-friendly solution for A/B testing, custom events, and real-time metrics. With seamless integration into data warehouses and an intuitive interface, we work hard to make it easy for both technical and non-technical teams to gain valuable insights. Request a demo today to see how Eppo can come alongside you in your experimentation efforts to boost your productivity.