Web analytics vs product analytics
Before picking a tool, decide which question you’re answering. Web analytics tells you how much traffic you get and where it comes from — pageviews, sources, devices, locations. Product analytics tells you what people do once they’re in: funnels, retention, the paths users take, and behavior tied to a person over time. Some tools do one well; few do both. The “best” tool is the one that matches your question.
All the tools below are open source and self-hostable, so your data can stay on your own infrastructure — the main reason teams move off Google Analytics. They differ most in scope and in how much you have to operate.
Product analytics
Pug
Open-source (AGPL-3.0) product analytics with unified profiles. It autocaptures clicks, scrolls, and form submissions, then gives you Trends, Funnels, Retention, Segmentation, User-flow Sankeys, and Top-K over the raw events. Its differentiator is operational: the whole thing runs as a single Go binary with Postgres, ClickHouse, and NATS, so self-hosting doesn’t mean operating a fleet of services. It’s in open beta today. Best for: teams that want product analytics they fully own without heavy ops. See how it stacks up as a Mixpanel alternative or vs PostHog.
PostHog
A broad, MIT-licensed product OS: product analytics plus session replay, feature flags, A/B experiments, and surveys in one platform. It’s mature and feature-rich. The trade-off is breadth and operational weight — PostHog steers production users toward its cloud rather than self-hosting at scale. Best for: teams that want replay, flags, and experiments alongside analytics. Full breakdown: PostHog alternative.
Web analytics
Plausible
Privacy-first, cookieless web analytics with a famously light script and a clean single-page dashboard. AGPL-3.0 and self-hostable (Community Edition). It’s deliberately simple — traffic, sources, pages, goals — not product behavior. Best for: marketing and site traffic without cookie banners. See Plausible vs product analytics.
Umami
Another lightweight, privacy-friendly web-analytics tool — simple, fast, and easy to self-host. Like Plausible, it answers “how much traffic and from where,” not “what do users do over time.” Best for: a minimal, no-cookie traffic dashboard.
Matomo
The most full-featured open-source web analytics platform and the closest direct Google Analytics replacement. GPL-licensed, self-hostable on PHP/MySQL, with marketing attribution, e-commerce reports, and a large plugin ecosystem (heatmaps and session recordings are paid add-ons). It’s mature but heavier to run. Best for: a comprehensive GA replacement for web and marketing. See Matomo vs product analytics.
How to choose
Start with the question. If you need website traffic and marketing reporting, a web-analytics tool (Plausible, Umami, Matomo) is the right shape. If you need to understand product usage — conversion funnels, retention, and behavior per person — choose a product-analytics tool. Then weigh operational cost: lightweight web-analytics tools are trivial to run, while product-analytics platforms vary from a single binary to a multi-service stack.
Whatever you pick, self-hosting an open source tool means your events stay on your own servers. If you’re moving off Google Analytics specifically, our free Google Analytics replacement guide walks through the migration, and the open source product analytics guide goes deeper on the product-analytics side.