Product analytics you own end to end
Measure what people actually do inside your product — funnels, retention, user flows, and per-person profiles — over your own raw events. Pug is an open-source, self-hostable product analytics tool, free during open beta.
What product analytics is
Behaviour inside your product, tied to a person over time.
Product analytics answers questions about what users do — which steps they complete, where they drop off, whether they come back — by recording events and attributing them to individual people and cohorts. That makes it different from web analytics, which counts traffic. Most teams end up running both; this page is about the product side, and the tool you run it on.
Six ways to turn events into answers
Every insight runs over the same raw events and profiles — define a segment once, apply it anywhere.
Trends
Time-series of any event. Count, unique users, avg per user, or sum/avg/min/max of a numeric property. Break down by up to 5 properties.
Funnels
Conversion across ordered steps, with drop-off and average time between steps.
Retention
Cohort heatmap from a start event and a return event — who comes back, and when.
Segmentation
One aggregate sliced by any dimension — built for KPI tiles and scorecards.
User flow
A Sankey of the paths users actually take between events — where they go next, where they drop.
Top K
Ranked values of any property — top pages, top referrers, top products — with an “others” bucket.
Three inputs, one event model
Autocapture gives you events immediately; custom events and identity make them yours.
Autocapture
After one init(), the Web SDK captures page views, clicks, scrolls, form submits, and rage/dead clicks — no per-event instrumentation.
Custom events
Call track() for the actions that matter to you — signup, order_completed — each with its own properties.
Identity
identify() merges anonymous activity into one profile, so every event ties to a person over time — see user analytics.
A product analytics tool you run yourself
Open source is what turns analytics from a vendor service into something you control. Pug self-hosts as a single Go binary backed by PostgreSQL, ClickHouse, and NATS — no fleet of services, and every event stays on your infrastructure.
Product analytics tools, compared
Honest, side-by-side looks at how Pug stacks up against the tools teams usually weigh — including where each of them is still the better choice.
Pug vs PostHog
A focused product-analytics tool vs a broad platform with replay, flags, and experiments.
Compare Proprietary SaaSPug vs Mixpanel
Open and self-hostable vs a proprietary, cloud-only product-analytics SaaS.
Compare Own your dataPug vs Google Analytics
Behaviour and profiles, unsampled, on your servers — not aggregate traffic in Google’s cloud.
CompareProduct analytics, answered.
What is product analytics?
Product analytics measures what people actually do inside your product — the events they fire, the funnels they move through, whether they come back — tied to a person over time. It answers behavioural questions (where do users drop off, which features drive retention) that aggregate web analytics can’t.
How is product analytics different from web analytics?
Web analytics measures traffic — pageviews, sources, devices. Product analytics measures behaviour — funnels, retention, user flows — attributed to individual users and cohorts. Most teams run both; see the full breakdown in product analytics vs web analytics.
Is Pug a free product analytics tool?
Yes. Self-host under AGPL-3.0 free forever with no event limits, or use the managed cloud, free during open beta. There’s no per-event bill when you run it yourself.
What is the best open source product analytics tool?
It depends on how much you want to operate. PostHog is a broad platform; Pug is a focused, self-hostable tool that runs as a single Go binary. The comparison pages and tools roundup walk through the trade-offs.
Can I self-host product analytics?
Yes — that’s the point of Pug. The whole stack is one Go binary backed by PostgreSQL, ClickHouse, and NATS, so every event stays on your own infrastructure. See self-hosted analytics for the details.
Product analytics you actually own.
Open source, self-hostable on one Go binary, and free during open beta. See your first events in minutes.