Hi guys, I’ve been working on a self-hostable web analytics platform since the start of this year after being frustrated with Google Analytics and Plausible.
I’ve packed a bunch of cool web analytics features into Rybbit, but I’ve tried very hard to keep the interface simple to use,
https://github.com/rybbit-io/rybbit
Check it out!
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A few more screenshots in case you don’t want to leave the site
You’re awesome. Thanks!
Wow holy crap, great work - the world badly needs this. Im assuming the mechanism is the same, you inject a js script into your site. I’m also very interested in pure server side solutions for analytics, but they can’t hit all the features you did in a generic way afaik
Yea, we use a client-side script like almost everyone else. The major difference is that we don’t use cookies so you can avoid a lot of the cookie banner/GDPR nonsense.
Rybbit definitely isn’t the first open source cookieless web analytics platform (Plausible and Umami are the two other big ones), but it’s probably the most “all-in-one” of all these alternatives.
GoAccess uses your server side access log.
Question is the self-hosted version less featured than the paid hosted version?
This looks amazing btw.
Only very slightly so. One of the reasons I created Rybbit is because platforms like plausible and fathom have much inferior self-hosted versions (very limited featureset and basically never updated). We have a comparison here
@Goldflag
I appreciate the intent behind Rybbit, but I have to respectfully disagree with the “only very slightly so” characterization. Looking at your official comparison table, the self-hosted version is missing:
- Pages View
- Web Vitals
- Email reports
- Google Search Console integration
- VPN/Crawler/ASN tracking
- Google/GitHub OAuth
- Email support
That’s 7 significant features—which seems more than “very slightly” different.
More importantly, this raises AGPL compliance questions. Under AGPLv3 Section 13, if users interact with modified AGPL software over a network (your cloud version), you’re required to make the complete corresponding source code available to those users. If these cloud-only features are integrated into the same AGPL-licensed codebase, withholding them from the public repo while running them as a network service appears to conflict with the license terms.
There are really only two compliant scenarios here:
- These features exist in the public repo but are just marketed as “cloud-only” (in which case the comparison table’s misleading)
- These features are truly separate proprietary code that interfaces with Rybbit without being part of the AGPL-licensed work (which would require careful architectural separation)
If it’s neither—if these are AGPL-covered features running in your cloud service but withheld from the repo—that’s exactly the “loophole” the AGPL was designed to close. The irony is that you criticized Plausible and Fathom for having “much inferior self-hosted versions,” yet this appears to be a similar approach.
Could you clarify the licensing status of these cloud-only features? Are they in the public repo but disabled by default, or are they proprietary additions that don’t derive from the AGPL codebase?
Thank you for your service.
Everything is in the repo and cloud features are just toggled off in the self-hosted build.
@Goldflag,
Thanks for clarifying! Good to hear everything’s in the repo and that it’s truly AGPL compliant.
Since as self-hosters we already carry the burden of maintenance, updates, security, and infrastructure costs that cloud users don’t, would you consider documenting how to enable the cloud features in self-hosted setups?
I see the docs cover basic environment variables, but not for Pages View, Web Vitals, or VPN/ASN tracking. Even if some features need extra config (SMTP, OAuth creds), having that documented would help those of us willing to do the work.
That would truly differentiate Rybbit from Plausible/Fathom—not just code parity, but empowering self-hosters with full feature access.
Cloud features aren’t just a toggle away for self-hosters because setting CLOUD=true enables unwanted restrictions like Stripe billing endpoints and event limits—it was intended as a binary switch for enabling the entire cloud infrastructure.
Rybbit wasn’t architected so self-hosters could modularly enable advanced features. To solve this, I’ve forked the project and made all enterprise features modular and enabled by default, so people can test them.
Of course, it would be desirable that @Goldflag implements this himself because I’m sure he could do it more elegantly and maintain it properly as part of the official project going forward.
That’s excellent and very clear, thank you for the explanation.
I would love for this to work on yunohost.
hmm interesting im using matomo but im not liking how its increasingly becoming bloated and subscription based
You can try https://goaccess.io/ or https://plausible.io/ aswell. Ribbit is very cool though!
Thats fuckin baller!!
🐸
Aways a fan of alternate options, this looks quite tidy! I had a few thoughts / queries. Not at my system right now but I will test it out later.
I noticed in the screenshots you have a “users” page - but with a cookieless tracking system I would have assumed it wouldn’t be reliable to identify a long term user past individual sessions? Are you doing some hefty finger printing?
Looking at your features table has a few statements that might need adjusting. Such as GA4’s segmentation sequencing / filtering can be quite complex, I’d argue its not limited and potentially more advanced than Rybbit (not tested yet). It also has a user exploration feature.
Do you have any plans for a drag and drop style report creation, so that I could create reports with any dimensions / metrics and filter accordingly? I think that would bring a lot of flexibility to the platform for an individuals bespoke needs.
This looks… Great? Nice work
Glad to see you post this here. I’ve been experimenting with selfhosted analytics for a while now and have attempted your project here a couple times. The thing that kills me is the Clickhouse requirement. It makes it impossible to host on a lightweight VPS. Like why should my analytics platform require so much more compute than my simple static site? Am I missing something?
Clickhouse definitely takes a lot of resources! There’s unfortunately no way around that, though in my experience it runs fine on the cheapest Hetzner instances which are like $3-4 a month for 2GB of RAM. How lightweight is your VPS?
And yea, you don’t need clickhouse for a simple static site. I chose clickhouse because it Postgres or MySQL does not scale well since the main site I personally use Rybbit for sends around 20 million events a month.
It pains me to plug my competitors, but check out Umami or Goatcounter if you want a platform that uses postgres.
Hey thanks so much for the engagement. I was trying to run it on a VPS that cost $35/year. 2GiB of RAM wasn’t quite enough to make it work for me, granted that was with the webserver and ancillary supporting services.
I’ll find an opportunity to test it out though, as rybbit looks great. I appreciate the mention on the other FOSS products, that’s a good look for you. I have plenty of experience with umami already. Cheers!
I’ve been using Plausible for a long time, will definately be checking this out.
What’s the advantages over awstats?
from what i know, awstats gets analytics from server-side logs while Rybbit uses a client side script. So not really and apples to apples comparison
This looks great. I’m interested in building similar dashboards but for a different use case. Are you using a particular typescript framework for this?
Next.js, TailwindCSS, shadcn. the usual stuff
I know modern tools get a lot of hate on Lemmy, but tainwind and shadcn have been amazing to work with. Next.js has been a little bumpy the last few years, but if you know what you’re doing, you can deliver a great UX with React. I’ve been enjoying Vite + React for anything that doesn’t need SSR.
Is there any plans for a data migration feature from Plausible?
We have data migration plans in work but it doesn’t appear that a plausible migration is possible
I don’t think that’s plausible.
Aren’t there already tons of these already? Piwik has been around for a quite a while, plus there are others mentioned in the comments.
variety is the spice of life.
Matomo*
Just a word of warning for everyone: The free self hosted version is heavily limited. I will stick with Plausible which may be simpler but also doesn’t want to push me into a subscription.
as opposed to plausible community edition which is even more limited and is only updated a couple times a year?
The community edition allows me to have multiple sites, multiple users and is way easier to set up. If I ever need additional features like funnels I would need a subscription for both - Plausible is less expensive.
