Also one thing to add here is that the client libraries are a lot of the work and you can use the snowplow js/ios/python etc.. no matter what server-side setup

Also one thing to add here is that the client libraries are a lot of the work and you can use the snowplow js/ios/python etc.. no matter what server-side setup you use. I like to think of snowplow as pushing the open-source analytics standard and then hopefully an ecosystem of server-side products grows around that, led by their own product. We're doing something as dumb as using logs from cloud storage and parsing those with a ~100 line python script into a DB. S3/GCS deal with the collector uptime and as long as you aren't time-sensitive it is a great solution. The biggest issue with self-hosted analytics is visualizing/sharing the results with non-tech parts of the team. Piwik has some advantages here because it's closer to Google Analytics or Mixpanel than to a DB of event rows...