I've been self hosting Rybbit on one of my own domains for a while now, and I figured it's worth writing about since it's exactly the kind of project I wish I had found earlier.

What it is

Rybbit is an open source, privacy friendly analytics platform. Think Google Analytics, but without the cookie banners, without sending your visitors' data to Google, and without the bloated dashboard that takes you ten clicks to find a simple number.

It's AGPL-3 licensed, written in TypeScript, and you can either use their hosted version or run it yourself on a small VPS.

Why I like it

I tried a few GA4 alternatives before landing on this one (Plausible, a couple of Cloudflare based setups), and Rybbit is the first one that actually covers everything I needed without paying for a higher tier:

  • Session replays, out of the box
  • Funnels, retention and user journey dashboards
  • Advanced filtering across more than 15 dimensions
  • Real time dashboard
  • 3 level location tracking (country, region, city) with proper map visualizations
  • Custom events with JSON properties
  • Error tracking

None of that is locked behind a paywall. Plausible's community edition, for comparison, strips most of this out. GA4 has some of these features but good luck finding them without a PhD in menu navigation.

The setup is genuinely quick. Clone the repo, run one script with your domain, and it spins up the whole stack (including a Caddy webserver that handles HTTPS for you) with Docker Compose:

git clone https://github.com/rybbit-io/rybbit.git
cd rybbit
chmod +x *.sh
./setup.sh your.domain.name

A few minutes later you have your own analytics instance, sign up, add your site, drop the tracking script, done. No cookie consent popup needed since it doesn't use cookies at all.

Who it's for

If you're running a few side projects or client sites and you're tired of Google sitting in the middle of your traffic data, or you just don't want to pay a monthly fee to Plausible for features that should be standard, give Rybbit a try. Self hosting it costs you a cheap VPS and a few minutes of setup, and you keep full ownership of the data.

13k+ stars on GitHub already, so I'm clearly not the only one who thinks this.