9 ms·

Show HN: Openpanel – An open-source alternative to Mixpanel

244 points by lindesvard 2y ago

I have created an open-source alternative to Mixpanel and will explain a bit about why I decided to do this. Mixpanel is a GREAT tool and quite easy to understand (compared to GA4 and similar). I have used Mixpanel extensively for one of my React Native apps, but the last invoice was $300, which was way over my budget. I think I was paying for MTU (monthly tracked users), which was around 7000-10k users. However, a downside of Mixpanel is that it is purely a product analytics tool; you don't get any basic web analytics similar to what GA4 or Plausible offers. Therefore, I have combined the best features of Mixpanel and Plausible to create what I believe is the ultimate experience in an analytics tool (product and web). The focus has always been: it should be easy yet also powerful. This has been a challenging balance, but I think I have managed to keep it somewhat simple. Key Features: - Privacy-first - Visualize your events like Mixpanel - Plausible-like overview - Self-hostable - Better support for React Native than Plausible - Real-time (no delays for events) Ability to access all individual events and sessions It's currently in beta and completely free during the beta period. Give it a spin: https://openpanel.dev https://openpanel.dev

tobase 2y ago
woop woop!
nojvek 2y ago
This is great. Analytics space has many players in all shapes and sizes. Mixpanel, Amplitude, Google analytics, simpleanalytics, Posthog, usefathom, plausible. If you include UI tracking then pendo.io, Fullstory, LogRocket. Many of them VC funded horses. As an ex-Mixpaneler and Mixpanel customer now, I wish Mixpanel wasn’t this expensive for a few 1000 users. But like any company in an economic market, they’ll charge for what customers will bear. Competition is wonderful. May the force be with you.
- lindesvard 2y ago
  Im a little fart in space for mixpanel but maybe, just maybe I can push their prices a bit!
pvlima 2y ago
That's really interesting! I've been using and developing Posthog-LLM for tracking LLM text events, and I'm excited to try this tool. A lightweight Posthog sounds great. The older Posthog versions were better for self-hosting because they were lighter, but the latest version is a bit too heavy.
- lindesvard 2y ago
  I better start working on self-hosting guide/script :D
RileyJames 2y ago
I’m looking for a tool like this. Previously used mixpanel (under free startup package), but dropped it after that expired because it was going to be $x,000 per month. (Tho I believe they significantly altered their pricing shortly after) But either way, we’d never spent enough time setting it up, and this weren’t getting a huge amount of value from it. We also use plausible, for web facing. But we need something more detailed for analytics within our product. I like the sound of this. But from using the demo dashboard I didn’t see the value I’d get from it. It was clear if I could track a user (or segment of users) journeys. Or see the journey of all users who completed a specific event. Can I create funnels? Can I measure performance over time easily? Can I put events into the timeline? (feature releases) Implementing a tool like this is a big commitment, so I’d need to be more convinced it’s the right tool for our needs before I took the plunge. I’d also start with the hosted solution, but I’d choose it because we could self host in the future if we felt necessary. An escape hatch.
- lindesvard 2y ago
  I hear you! The "demo" is basically just a demo for the shareable overview (plausible like screen). Here you have some screenshots what you can do: https://imgur.com/a/hxUPsvk https://imgur.com/a/hxUPsvk Features: - Create funnels, linear, bar, histogram, map, pie, area charts based on your events (similar to mixpanel reports) - List of all events (filter by any data point you send) - List of all your users (go into a specific users to see what they did) - Retention (if you use this you need to provide a user id) - Realtime dashboard
cheema33 2y ago
The website https://openpanel.dev https://openpanel.dev appears to be down. Maybe too many of us were hitting it.
paradite 2y ago
I've considered self-hosting plausible but ultimately decided to pay for subscription instead, because I think self-hosting would cause more in terms of VPS hosting. The minimum requirements (4GB RAM) are too high because of the need to run two databases: https://github.com/plausible/community-edition/blob/v2.0.0/docker-compose.yml https://github.com/plausible/community-edition/blob/v2.0.0/d... 4GB RAM costs $24/month on DigitalOcean: https://www.digitalocean.com/pricing/droplets https://www.digitalocean.com/pricing/droplets In comparison Plausible lowest tier is only $9/month. I think this project is not so different in terms of minimum spec. Would love to hear how others deal with the cost of self-hosting. Does it get cheaper as you self-host more apps? Do you pool with friends?
- slig 2y ago
  For way less than that you can get a 16gb/8vCPU ARM in Hetzner [1], and since it's for a analytics service, it doesn't matter it's not hosted close to your users. [1]: https://www.hetzner.com/cloud/ https://www.hetzner.com/cloud/
  - paradite 2y ago
    Thanks. Will check it out!
  - wcedmisten 2y ago
    And if you did want something closer, Hetzner offers USA based vCPU options that are still quite affordable compared to DO. There's a 4GB option for 9 Euros. I recently migrated my personal projects from DO to Hetzner for this reason
    - paradite 2y ago
      I had no idea DigitalOcean pricing has become so uncompetitive. I remember back a few years it was praised by people for how cheap it was.
      - cchance 2y ago
nightowl_games 2y ago
How does this compare to metabase?
KaoruAoiShiho 2y ago
Do you have a way to automatically prune old data? I ran into the problem with posthog where the old data just overflowed my db and made it inoperable and they had no way to prune it.
- lindesvard 2y ago
  Hmm seems odd? Currently I have none but will probably add a TTL to clickhouse on 5 years. And if you really need to prune data you could just use good ol SQL?
- XCSme 2y ago
  For my platform, I created some cron-jobs that run an SQL that deletes data older than X months.
spiderfarmer 2y ago
This is still not very affordable for my use case. My small network of sites does around 400.000 pageviews per day. $120 per month is pretty steep for something I look at only a couple of times per month. Ever since GA4 and the whole cookie banner thing I'm looking for something that is GDPR compliant, has basic functionality and is cheap. But every time I look it comes down to self hosting. Plausible relies on Clickhouse and I don't know Clickhouse. Umami relies on Mysql or Postgres with a pretty inefficient data scheme that cripples performance with the scale of my data. Can't these services be made a lot cheaper (and faster) by doing data sampling like Google Analytics did?
- lindesvard 2y ago
  Google is free since they sell your data. Clickhouse is expensive, compute on scale is expensive, development is expensive etc. Sounds like your best bet is to do self-hosting
- XCSme 2y ago
  > by doing data sampling like Google Analytics did? You can always conditionally include the tracker. So, you can include it with a 10% chance, then you will still get stats, but sampled. Doing this, you might miss some important events/sessions though.
racl101 2y ago
Will pay attention to this for sure.
jordo 2y ago
REALLY looking forward to trying this. Mixpanel has the most obscure pricing model of any SAAS i've ever tried to integrate with... When we 'upgraded' from their free tier to a paid tier we were DOWNGRADED from 20M events a month to 10K events a month. Does that make any sense??? They talk about 'transparent and easy to understand pricing', but immediately after I upgraded to a paid plan we were downgraded from 20M events to 10K events. We actually immediately cancelled our paid plan and went back to their free tier. To match what they provide in their free tier (20M events), the cost is $2,289 USD / month (no thanks). https://mixpanel.com/pricing/plan-builder/?dcv=growth https://mixpanel.com/pricing/plan-builder/?dcv=growth So basically we can either pay $2,289 USD / month, or pay nothing, and still get the same number of tracked events. Just bizzare... We've moved on, and I've been on the search for an alternative ever since.
- stevenicr 2y ago
  omg - I tried to sell a client into using mixpanel for about three months. I could never explain (or honestly understand) events, and even though I had raw server data, g analytics data and cloudflare analytics data - I still don't understand what constitutes an event or number of events, or what it may cost. So we just killed the google and cloudflare stats and never signed up for the free tier in the firs place. Free stats are fine.
- lindesvard 2y ago
  The pricing modal is a black hole sadly... I hope you will give openpanel a shot
  - jordo 2y ago
    Building a helm chart right now to see if I can get it self-hosted in our cluster... :D
    - lindesvard 2y ago
      Ping me on twitter if you need assistans! https://x.com/CarlLindesvard https://x.com/CarlLindesvard
alanzhuly 2y ago
Does the product support Webflow as well? We are looking for a Mixpanel alternative that can connect both webflow and our own website product.
XCSme 2y ago
Congrats on the release, I'm really impressed with OpenPanel so far! I have also been building a similar product for a long time (UXWizz), focused more on self-hosting, quantitative data and targeted at low to medium trafficked websites, but it is a paid product. How do you think monetization will pan out in the long-term with a free self-hosted option? I know PostHog also had a free self-hosted version, but since the self-hosted version competes directly with their main business model, they had to stop support for it. I also considered open-sourcing mine, but decided to keep it self-hosted only and paid. I feel like if I sell a hosted version, then my business goals won't be aligned with the goal of making the self-hosted version as good as it can be, without feature locks. I hope you can maintain this awesome pace and improve your product for many years to come!
- lindesvard 2y ago
  THanks for your kind words. There will always be people who wants to use cloud instead of self-hosting (me included if possible). So I hope this will be feasible. Worst case scenario is to keep some features exclusive for the cloud solution, but fingers crossed I get a good mix of cloud users and self-hosters.
deleted 2y ago
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weejewel 2y ago
Looks really good! How do you create funnels without cookies? In other words, how do you track sessions?
- lindesvard 2y ago
  Thanks! Similar to how Plausible is doing. Each user gets a unique identifier which is based on `hash(domain+useragent+ip+salt)` (the salt is generated each day).
  - metadat 2y ago
    If the salt changes daily, how is. It possible to know how many users returned after > 24 hrs? Edit: @lindesvard- Got it, thanks for clarifying!
    - lindesvard 2y ago
      You'll never know any returning users after salt changes. This is the hole point with privacy first. But you have options tho. Compared to other tools that is privacy first, you can actually pass your own user id. You can get this ID from where ever you want (db, cookie, localStorage. Its up to you whom implement it) But I want to have a middle ground where privacy is important but you have the options to decide what path you take.
      - pc86 2y ago
        So maybe an obvious question but just to be clear, if you pass your own user ID you can track that particular user's flow across multiple sessions/days/etc?
        lindesvard 2y ago
        Yes! So its a matter of priorities. Is privacy or retention most important? Than you can decide how to track users.
  - 2y ago
ralusek 2y ago
If we use your hosted version, what will the pricing be when it's out of beta. I always think these services should basically be like 2x cost of underlying S3 or whatever storage you're using, but they end up being like 100x+
- lindesvard 2y ago
  So you can start by using the beta if you want to try it. I dont think I'll take any money until after summer (I have no rush here) Currently the pricing looks like this: No tiers, you get everything. You only pay for events. So everything except events are unlimited. 5000 events - free 10,000 - $5 100,000 - $10 200,000 - $20 500,000 - $40 1,000,000 - $60 2,000,000 - $80 5,000,000 - $120 10,000,000 - $150 I hope to push the pricing model for things below 1m events. But its so hard for me to set a pricing model before getting to know how much resources I need. / edit format
  - slig 2y ago
    I pay around $180/m for Clicky for 800k events per day. Looking forward trying your service and eventually try to self host it. Thanks!
    - XCSme 2y ago
      That's quite a good deal for 24M events per month, especially if they have a long retention time (2-3 years).
    - lindesvard 2y ago
      800k a day? That’s a lot of events. Need to start optimizing things then
- dylan604 2y ago
  2x cost of S3 does not include whatever compute cost that is also incurred nor the cost of dev's time, marketing costs, or any other business expenses. When running a business, you see why the markups are applied for much less sinister reasons than maximizing profits. if you want to sustain your business on sales alone without being propped up by investment, you have to price your product/service appropriately to cover all business expenses.
klaussilveira 2y ago
This doesn't seem to be buffering inserts to ClickHouse: https://github.com/Openpanel-dev/openpanel/blob/c90848765a6aa30fceb5860a2a7f30612841299b/packages/db/src/services/event.service.ts#L284 https://github.com/Openpanel-dev/openpanel/blob/c90848765a6a... So any major website will have problems with it. I would suggest moving this into a stream (NATS, Kafka) or just having some sort of service that buffers events, then offloads to Clickhouse in batch.
- lindesvard 2y ago
  Correct! Currently no batching but no need to make things complicated for now. Can extend the current redis queue to batch request or clickhouse batch engine. Looking forward to have these problems hehe. Please DM if you want to chat about best approach!
  - klaussilveira 2y ago
    Won't this be a problem as soon as a website reaches, say, 600 RPS? Which is not much.
    - lindesvard 2y ago
      I have time to grow. Don’t think I’ll hit this level just yet.
      - FridgeSeal 2y ago
        As someone using clickhouse, for similar event ingestion stuff - I’d lean towards implementing it sooner rather than later. It’s not too hard, and it can surprising _how much more_ Clickhouse likes bulk queries.
        lindesvard 2y ago
        Sure thing! Will look into it more during the coming weeks. Feels like I have the most of the dashboard complete now. But I really want to start giving the native app some love as well
dimitry12 2y ago
Looks great as a self-host alternative if/when you make self-hosting feasible.
- lindesvard 2y ago
  When* Before beta is over it’ll be easily self-hosted. But since it free now there is no need for self-hosting. Will make it easy to export/import your events between instances
  - dimitry12 2y ago
    Awesome!
  - michaelmior 2y ago
    > since it free now there is no need for self-hosting. It's awesome that you're offering this for free for now, but I don't think that means there's no need to self-host. There are many reasons people might not want to hand over data to a third party.
    - lindesvard 2y ago
      True, I guess I need to prioritize this a bit
    - Aeolun 2y ago
      Jup, my main use case for these things is bypassing all the approvals necessary to send stuff to a third party.
t4m2x 2y ago
I run a saas where we host a number of websites, can I use this for us to track visits, events etc across multiple sites? We want aggregated results not per site metrics
- lindesvard 2y ago
  I have plans to support this!
Marciplan 2y ago
you should reach out to the founders of cal.com and documen.so on Twitter. They’re big on promoting this kind of stuff :)
- lindesvard 2y ago
  Will print screen this and tag them. Let’s see what happens hehe
- Peer_Rich 2y ago
  hello
  - lindesvard 2y ago
    hehe no need for the print screen then :)
rmdes 2y ago
Waiting for the self-hosted version... would be great to be able to deploy this with Kubernetes too
- lindesvard 2y ago
  Noted
a13n 2y ago
The group-level / account-level stuff is pretty big for B2B SaaS companies to be able to consider using it. And it's tucked away on one of Mixpanel's higher price plans.
- lindesvard 2y ago
  Have missed this feature. Would love to hear more and how I could implement this feature. Is it a flag/field in the SDK that tells you I’m from a specific company or is it some black magic?
  - FridgeSeal 2y ago
    They usually use something akin to Segments “group” event type, which associated a user id with (depending on the platform) one or more “group ids”. These could correlate to company/team/region/etc. Having implemented something similar-ish recently, we went the route of requiring callers to ”do the work” of telling us which group the user belongs to. Figuring it out is unnecessarily difficult and prone to issues.
    - lindesvard 2y ago
      I like this approach a lot. Only downside is that you cannot dynamically change groups and what not in a later stage. But if each events were associated directly to a group (by the caller) this would be quite easy to implement.
  - a13n 2y ago
    Yeah generally the customer will specify which "group" a user belongs to when calling your SDK/API. Mixpanel's docs: https://docs.mixpanel.com/docs/data-structure/advanced/group-analytics#group-keys-in-project-settings https://docs.mixpanel.com/docs/data-structure/advanced/group... Segment's docs: https://segment.com/docs/connections/spec/group/ https://segment.com/docs/connections/spec/group/ In B2B SaaS, it's a lot more important to understand which customers are using which features, not which users. One customer can have many users, and one user can belong to multiple companies. This is pretty much a must have for B2B SaaS even though it's always tucked away in expensive plans with tools like Mixpanel and Amplitude.
FlamingMoe 2y ago
Nice UI. Is some of this forked from Plausible?
- lindesvard 2y ago
  Not a single line of code is from plausible. But definitely inspired by thier overview and how the avoid cookies
bravura 2y ago
What does "privacy first" mean in this case? My understanding is the plausible, unlike GA, doesn't use cookies. Does that mean web analytics are IP-only? [edit: Or does it mean no third party sees your analytics?]
- openplatypus 2y ago
  Privacy means very different things to different people. On basic level it is just that your data is not used/sold beyond basic, statistical analysis of visitors. That's it. Cookie can be "private" in this context, if they are SameSite and httpOnly with short life. In terms of law, Privacy is very different thing. In case of GDPR in the EU it is set of rules and laws that you have to comply with. Just because you don't use cookies or host in EU, doesn't mean you are automatically GDPR compliant. We built Wide Angle Analytics, and we invested in strict compliance. We hired experienced DPO (one of requeirements), host in EU on EU cloud, not just EU located servers. We document every data processing activity and do not engage in any international data transfer ( in context of GDPR). Plus much more. Cookieless does not mean privacy. There is lot of snake oil out there.
- lindesvard 2y ago
  @openplatypus have some good point but I want to clarify what I mean by "privacy first" User information - By default we do not store or log any user related information. All information that is stored in our DB is general information. We see this as a important privacy for your visitors. Data - Your data will never be sold or given to a third party. You'll be able to export, import and delete all data related to your projects. Cookie - We do not use any cookies or localStorage to keep track of your users -- Their are some big downsides with privacy first since you wont be able to track users over several days (get retention and what not). So I have decided to give my customers the option to do what they want. If this is an important metric to them they can decide to pass a profileId to the SDK. Then we'll use this ID and will be able to track that users over several days. This is an opt-in feature and thats also why I say "Privacy first".
afro88 2y ago
What's the advantage of using this over PostHog?
- Brajeshwar 2y ago
  Not OP but here are my personal thoughts. I love PostHog (and using in almost all of our web assets/products) but it is overkill for most usage, especially small and personal projects/websites/apps. I'd gladly settle for something simpler like Plausible or this one, perhaps, start with their hosted SaaS version and if need to, we can host it ourselves.
- lindesvard 2y ago
  Posthog is great and I love it. But as others have mentioned. It’s way too complex and advanced for most use cases and that’s where we differ. Heard that posthog also is very resource heavy when self-hosting it.
psovit 2y ago
A few months back we were also planning to start a similar project which would include an interactive AI that can give answers / charts etc. based on user prompts from the provided events. But we scraped that project and started something else entirely. Glad to see this project - would definitely try it out when you have the self hosting option ready.
- lindesvard 2y ago
  I have thought about adding AI. But don’t want to add it just for the sake of it. Hoping to find good use cases. Will make a big update when it’s easier to self-host.
- XCSme 2y ago
  Something like this? https://docs.uxwizz.com/guides/ask-ai https://docs.uxwizz.com/guides/ask-ai
chucky 2y ago
This looks great! As an engineer who has used Mixpanel at multiple companies it has always annoyed me that what you get for what you pay seems quite poor, so I'm very happy to see some alternatives. I'm also happy to note that you are from (the wrong part of ;)) Sweden.
- lindesvard 2y ago
  Glad to hear! Foot note: And to be clear, I live in Stockholm but from Skåne ;)
debuggerpk 2y ago
how does this compare to https://posthog.com https://posthog.com ?
- lindesvard 2y ago
  Mainly the difference is that openpanel is a bit more lightweight and easier to grasp. Posthog is a great product and really like it. Just want something more hands on but have the power to visualize data. So I don't see posthog as a competitor at all. My focus is more about hitting the perfect spot between plausible and mixpanel.

244 points by lindesvard 2y ago

tobase 2y ago

woop woop!

nojvek 2y ago

This is great. Analytics space has many players in all shapes and sizes. Mixpanel, Amplitude, Google analytics, simpleanalytics, Posthog, usefathom, plausible. If you include UI tracking then pendo.io, Fullstory, LogRocket. Many of them VC funded horses. As an ex-Mixpaneler and Mixpanel customer now, I wish Mixpanel wasn’t this expensive for a few 1000 users. But like any company in an economic market, they’ll charge for what customers will bear. Competition is wonderful. May the force be with you.

lindesvard 2y ago
Im a little fart in space for mixpanel but maybe, just maybe I can push their prices a bit!

pvlima 2y ago

That's really interesting! I've been using and developing Posthog-LLM for tracking LLM text events, and I'm excited to try this tool. A lightweight Posthog sounds great. The older Posthog versions were better for self-hosting because they were lighter, but the latest version is a bit too heavy.

lindesvard 2y ago
I better start working on self-hosting guide/script :D

RileyJames 2y ago

I’m looking for a tool like this. Previously used mixpanel (under free startup package), but dropped it after that expired because it was going to be $x,000 per month. (Tho I believe they significantly altered their pricing shortly after) But either way, we’d never spent enough time setting it up, and this weren’t getting a huge amount of value from it. We also use plausible, for web facing. But we need something more detailed for analytics within our product. I like the sound of this. But from using the demo dashboard I didn’t see the value I’d get from it. It was clear if I could track a user (or segment of users) journeys. Or see the journey of all users who completed a specific event. Can I create funnels? Can I measure performance over time easily? Can I put events into the timeline? (feature releases) Implementing a tool like this is a big commitment, so I’d need to be more convinced it’s the right tool for our needs before I took the plunge. I’d also start with the hosted solution, but I’d choose it because we could self host in the future if we felt necessary. An escape hatch.

lindesvard 2y ago
I hear you! The "demo" is basically just a demo for the shareable overview (plausible like screen). Here you have some screenshots what you can do: https://imgur.com/a/hxUPsvk https://imgur.com/a/hxUPsvk Features: - Create funnels, linear, bar, histogram, map, pie, area charts based on your events (similar to mixpanel reports) - List of all events (filter by any data point you send) - List of all your users (go into a specific users to see what they did) - Retention (if you use this you need to provide a user id) - Realtime dashboard

cheema33 2y ago

The website https://openpanel.dev https://openpanel.dev appears to be down. Maybe too many of us were hitting it.

paradite 2y ago

I've considered self-hosting plausible but ultimately decided to pay for subscription instead, because I think self-hosting would cause more in terms of VPS hosting. The minimum requirements (4GB RAM) are too high because of the need to run two databases: https://github.com/plausible/community-edition/blob/v2.0.0/docker-compose.yml https://github.com/plausible/community-edition/blob/v2.0.0/d... 4GB RAM costs $24/month on DigitalOcean: https://www.digitalocean.com/pricing/droplets https://www.digitalocean.com/pricing/droplets In comparison Plausible lowest tier is only $9/month. I think this project is not so different in terms of minimum spec. Would love to hear how others deal with the cost of self-hosting. Does it get cheaper as you self-host more apps? Do you pool with friends?

slig 2y ago
For way less than that you can get a 16gb/8vCPU ARM in Hetzner [1], and since it's for a analytics service, it doesn't matter it's not hosted close to your users. [1]: https://www.hetzner.com/cloud/ https://www.hetzner.com/cloud/
- paradite 2y ago
  Thanks. Will check it out!
- wcedmisten 2y ago
  And if you did want something closer, Hetzner offers USA based vCPU options that are still quite affordable compared to DO. There's a 4GB option for 9 Euros. I recently migrated my personal projects from DO to Hetzner for this reason
  - paradite 2y ago
    I had no idea DigitalOcean pricing has become so uncompetitive. I remember back a few years it was praised by people for how cheap it was.
    - cchance 2y ago

nightowl_games 2y ago

How does this compare to metabase?

KaoruAoiShiho 2y ago

Do you have a way to automatically prune old data? I ran into the problem with posthog where the old data just overflowed my db and made it inoperable and they had no way to prune it.

lindesvard 2y ago
Hmm seems odd? Currently I have none but will probably add a TTL to clickhouse on 5 years. And if you really need to prune data you could just use good ol SQL?
XCSme 2y ago
For my platform, I created some cron-jobs that run an SQL that deletes data older than X months.

spiderfarmer 2y ago

This is still not very affordable for my use case. My small network of sites does around 400.000 pageviews per day. $120 per month is pretty steep for something I look at only a couple of times per month. Ever since GA4 and the whole cookie banner thing I'm looking for something that is GDPR compliant, has basic functionality and is cheap. But every time I look it comes down to self hosting. Plausible relies on Clickhouse and I don't know Clickhouse. Umami relies on Mysql or Postgres with a pretty inefficient data scheme that cripples performance with the scale of my data. Can't these services be made a lot cheaper (and faster) by doing data sampling like Google Analytics did?

lindesvard 2y ago
Google is free since they sell your data. Clickhouse is expensive, compute on scale is expensive, development is expensive etc. Sounds like your best bet is to do self-hosting
XCSme 2y ago
> by doing data sampling like Google Analytics did? You can always conditionally include the tracker. So, you can include it with a 10% chance, then you will still get stats, but sampled. Doing this, you might miss some important events/sessions though.

racl101 2y ago

Will pay attention to this for sure.

jordo 2y ago

REALLY looking forward to trying this. Mixpanel has the most obscure pricing model of any SAAS i've ever tried to integrate with... When we 'upgraded' from their free tier to a paid tier we were DOWNGRADED from 20M events a month to 10K events a month. Does that make any sense??? They talk about 'transparent and easy to understand pricing', but immediately after I upgraded to a paid plan we were downgraded from 20M events to 10K events. We actually immediately cancelled our paid plan and went back to their free tier. To match what they provide in their free tier (20M events), the cost is $2,289 USD / month (no thanks). https://mixpanel.com/pricing/plan-builder/?dcv=growth https://mixpanel.com/pricing/plan-builder/?dcv=growth So basically we can either pay $2,289 USD / month, or pay nothing, and still get the same number of tracked events. Just bizzare... We've moved on, and I've been on the search for an alternative ever since.

stevenicr 2y ago
omg - I tried to sell a client into using mixpanel for about three months. I could never explain (or honestly understand) events, and even though I had raw server data, g analytics data and cloudflare analytics data - I still don't understand what constitutes an event or number of events, or what it may cost. So we just killed the google and cloudflare stats and never signed up for the free tier in the firs place. Free stats are fine.
lindesvard 2y ago
The pricing modal is a black hole sadly... I hope you will give openpanel a shot
- jordo 2y ago
  Building a helm chart right now to see if I can get it self-hosted in our cluster... :D
  - lindesvard 2y ago
    Ping me on twitter if you need assistans! https://x.com/CarlLindesvard https://x.com/CarlLindesvard

alanzhuly 2y ago

Does the product support Webflow as well? We are looking for a Mixpanel alternative that can connect both webflow and our own website product.

XCSme 2y ago

Congrats on the release, I'm really impressed with OpenPanel so far! I have also been building a similar product for a long time (UXWizz), focused more on self-hosting, quantitative data and targeted at low to medium trafficked websites, but it is a paid product. How do you think monetization will pan out in the long-term with a free self-hosted option? I know PostHog also had a free self-hosted version, but since the self-hosted version competes directly with their main business model, they had to stop support for it. I also considered open-sourcing mine, but decided to keep it self-hosted only and paid. I feel like if I sell a hosted version, then my business goals won't be aligned with the goal of making the self-hosted version as good as it can be, without feature locks. I hope you can maintain this awesome pace and improve your product for many years to come!

lindesvard 2y ago
THanks for your kind words. There will always be people who wants to use cloud instead of self-hosting (me included if possible). So I hope this will be feasible. Worst case scenario is to keep some features exclusive for the cloud solution, but fingers crossed I get a good mix of cloud users and self-hosters.

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weejewel 2y ago

Looks really good! How do you create funnels without cookies? In other words, how do you track sessions?

lindesvard 2y ago
Thanks! Similar to how Plausible is doing. Each user gets a unique identifier which is based on `hash(domain+useragent+ip+salt)` (the salt is generated each day).
- metadat 2y ago
  If the salt changes daily, how is. It possible to know how many users returned after > 24 hrs? Edit: @lindesvard- Got it, thanks for clarifying!
  - lindesvard 2y ago
    You'll never know any returning users after salt changes. This is the hole point with privacy first. But you have options tho. Compared to other tools that is privacy first, you can actually pass your own user id. You can get this ID from where ever you want (db, cookie, localStorage. Its up to you whom implement it) But I want to have a middle ground where privacy is important but you have the options to decide what path you take.
    - pc86 2y ago
      So maybe an obvious question but just to be clear, if you pass your own user ID you can track that particular user's flow across multiple sessions/days/etc?
      - lindesvard 2y ago
        Yes! So its a matter of priorities. Is privacy or retention most important? Than you can decide how to track users.
- 2y ago

ralusek 2y ago

If we use your hosted version, what will the pricing be when it's out of beta. I always think these services should basically be like 2x cost of underlying S3 or whatever storage you're using, but they end up being like 100x+

lindesvard 2y ago
So you can start by using the beta if you want to try it. I dont think I'll take any money until after summer (I have no rush here) Currently the pricing looks like this: No tiers, you get everything. You only pay for events. So everything except events are unlimited. 5000 events - free 10,000 - $5 100,000 - $10 200,000 - $20 500,000 - $40 1,000,000 - $60 2,000,000 - $80 5,000,000 - $120 10,000,000 - $150 I hope to push the pricing model for things below 1m events. But its so hard for me to set a pricing model before getting to know how much resources I need. / edit format
- slig 2y ago
  I pay around $180/m for Clicky for 800k events per day. Looking forward trying your service and eventually try to self host it. Thanks!
  - XCSme 2y ago
    That's quite a good deal for 24M events per month, especially if they have a long retention time (2-3 years).
  - lindesvard 2y ago
    800k a day? That’s a lot of events. Need to start optimizing things then
dylan604 2y ago
2x cost of S3 does not include whatever compute cost that is also incurred nor the cost of dev's time, marketing costs, or any other business expenses. When running a business, you see why the markups are applied for much less sinister reasons than maximizing profits. if you want to sustain your business on sales alone without being propped up by investment, you have to price your product/service appropriately to cover all business expenses.

klaussilveira 2y ago

This doesn't seem to be buffering inserts to ClickHouse: https://github.com/Openpanel-dev/openpanel/blob/c90848765a6aa30fceb5860a2a7f30612841299b/packages/db/src/services/event.service.ts#L284 https://github.com/Openpanel-dev/openpanel/blob/c90848765a6a... So any major website will have problems with it. I would suggest moving this into a stream (NATS, Kafka) or just having some sort of service that buffers events, then offloads to Clickhouse in batch.

lindesvard 2y ago
Correct! Currently no batching but no need to make things complicated for now. Can extend the current redis queue to batch request or clickhouse batch engine. Looking forward to have these problems hehe. Please DM if you want to chat about best approach!
- klaussilveira 2y ago
  Won't this be a problem as soon as a website reaches, say, 600 RPS? Which is not much.
  - lindesvard 2y ago
    I have time to grow. Don’t think I’ll hit this level just yet.
    - FridgeSeal 2y ago
      As someone using clickhouse, for similar event ingestion stuff - I’d lean towards implementing it sooner rather than later. It’s not too hard, and it can surprising _how much more_ Clickhouse likes bulk queries.
      - lindesvard 2y ago
        Sure thing! Will look into it more during the coming weeks. Feels like I have the most of the dashboard complete now. But I really want to start giving the native app some love as well

dimitry12 2y ago

Looks great as a self-host alternative if/when you make self-hosting feasible.

lindesvard 2y ago
When* Before beta is over it’ll be easily self-hosted. But since it free now there is no need for self-hosting. Will make it easy to export/import your events between instances
- dimitry12 2y ago
  Awesome!
- michaelmior 2y ago
  > since it free now there is no need for self-hosting. It's awesome that you're offering this for free for now, but I don't think that means there's no need to self-host. There are many reasons people might not want to hand over data to a third party.
  - lindesvard 2y ago
    True, I guess I need to prioritize this a bit
  - Aeolun 2y ago
    Jup, my main use case for these things is bypassing all the approvals necessary to send stuff to a third party.

t4m2x 2y ago

I run a saas where we host a number of websites, can I use this for us to track visits, events etc across multiple sites? We want aggregated results not per site metrics

lindesvard 2y ago
I have plans to support this!

Marciplan 2y ago

you should reach out to the founders of cal.com and documen.so on Twitter. They’re big on promoting this kind of stuff :)

lindesvard 2y ago
Will print screen this and tag them. Let’s see what happens hehe
Peer_Rich 2y ago
hello
- lindesvard 2y ago
  hehe no need for the print screen then :)

rmdes 2y ago

Waiting for the self-hosted version... would be great to be able to deploy this with Kubernetes too

lindesvard 2y ago
Noted

a13n 2y ago

The group-level / account-level stuff is pretty big for B2B SaaS companies to be able to consider using it. And it's tucked away on one of Mixpanel's higher price plans.

lindesvard 2y ago
Have missed this feature. Would love to hear more and how I could implement this feature. Is it a flag/field in the SDK that tells you I’m from a specific company or is it some black magic?
- FridgeSeal 2y ago
  They usually use something akin to Segments “group” event type, which associated a user id with (depending on the platform) one or more “group ids”. These could correlate to company/team/region/etc. Having implemented something similar-ish recently, we went the route of requiring callers to ”do the work” of telling us which group the user belongs to. Figuring it out is unnecessarily difficult and prone to issues.
  - lindesvard 2y ago
    I like this approach a lot. Only downside is that you cannot dynamically change groups and what not in a later stage. But if each events were associated directly to a group (by the caller) this would be quite easy to implement.
- a13n 2y ago
  Yeah generally the customer will specify which "group" a user belongs to when calling your SDK/API. Mixpanel's docs: https://docs.mixpanel.com/docs/data-structure/advanced/group-analytics#group-keys-in-project-settings https://docs.mixpanel.com/docs/data-structure/advanced/group... Segment's docs: https://segment.com/docs/connections/spec/group/ https://segment.com/docs/connections/spec/group/ In B2B SaaS, it's a lot more important to understand which customers are using which features, not which users. One customer can have many users, and one user can belong to multiple companies. This is pretty much a must have for B2B SaaS even though it's always tucked away in expensive plans with tools like Mixpanel and Amplitude.

FlamingMoe 2y ago

Nice UI. Is some of this forked from Plausible?

lindesvard 2y ago
Not a single line of code is from plausible. But definitely inspired by thier overview and how the avoid cookies

bravura 2y ago

What does "privacy first" mean in this case? My understanding is the plausible, unlike GA, doesn't use cookies. Does that mean web analytics are IP-only? [edit: Or does it mean no third party sees your analytics?]

openplatypus 2y ago
Privacy means very different things to different people. On basic level it is just that your data is not used/sold beyond basic, statistical analysis of visitors. That's it. Cookie can be "private" in this context, if they are SameSite and httpOnly with short life. In terms of law, Privacy is very different thing. In case of GDPR in the EU it is set of rules and laws that you have to comply with. Just because you don't use cookies or host in EU, doesn't mean you are automatically GDPR compliant. We built Wide Angle Analytics, and we invested in strict compliance. We hired experienced DPO (one of requeirements), host in EU on EU cloud, not just EU located servers. We document every data processing activity and do not engage in any international data transfer ( in context of GDPR). Plus much more. Cookieless does not mean privacy. There is lot of snake oil out there.
lindesvard 2y ago
@openplatypus have some good point but I want to clarify what I mean by "privacy first" User information - By default we do not store or log any user related information. All information that is stored in our DB is general information. We see this as a important privacy for your visitors. Data - Your data will never be sold or given to a third party. You'll be able to export, import and delete all data related to your projects. Cookie - We do not use any cookies or localStorage to keep track of your users -- Their are some big downsides with privacy first since you wont be able to track users over several days (get retention and what not). So I have decided to give my customers the option to do what they want. If this is an important metric to them they can decide to pass a profileId to the SDK. Then we'll use this ID and will be able to track that users over several days. This is an opt-in feature and thats also why I say "Privacy first".

afro88 2y ago

What's the advantage of using this over PostHog?

Brajeshwar 2y ago
Not OP but here are my personal thoughts. I love PostHog (and using in almost all of our web assets/products) but it is overkill for most usage, especially small and personal projects/websites/apps. I'd gladly settle for something simpler like Plausible or this one, perhaps, start with their hosted SaaS version and if need to, we can host it ourselves.
lindesvard 2y ago
Posthog is great and I love it. But as others have mentioned. It’s way too complex and advanced for most use cases and that’s where we differ. Heard that posthog also is very resource heavy when self-hosting it.

psovit 2y ago

A few months back we were also planning to start a similar project which would include an interactive AI that can give answers / charts etc. based on user prompts from the provided events. But we scraped that project and started something else entirely. Glad to see this project - would definitely try it out when you have the self hosting option ready.

lindesvard 2y ago
I have thought about adding AI. But don’t want to add it just for the sake of it. Hoping to find good use cases. Will make a big update when it’s easier to self-host.
XCSme 2y ago
Something like this? https://docs.uxwizz.com/guides/ask-ai https://docs.uxwizz.com/guides/ask-ai

chucky 2y ago

This looks great! As an engineer who has used Mixpanel at multiple companies it has always annoyed me that what you get for what you pay seems quite poor, so I'm very happy to see some alternatives. I'm also happy to note that you are from (the wrong part of ;)) Sweden.

lindesvard 2y ago
Glad to hear! Foot note: And to be clear, I live in Stockholm but from Skåne ;)

debuggerpk 2y ago

how does this compare to https://posthog.com https://posthog.com ?

lindesvard 2y ago
Mainly the difference is that openpanel is a bit more lightweight and easier to grasp. Posthog is a great product and really like it. Just want something more hands on but have the power to visualize data. So I don't see posthog as a competitor at all. My focus is more about hitting the perfect spot between plausible and mixpanel.