Best Self Hosted Alternatives to FullStory

PostHog is a self-hostable product analytics platform for capturing product usage events and turning them into insights and experiments. It combines behavioral analytics, user experience tooling, and rollout controls so teams can measure, debug, and improve products in one place.

Key Features

• Event capture via web/mobile SDKs and server-side APIs, with schema-free events and properties
• Product analytics: trends/insights, funnels, retention, cohorts, paths, and user/person profiles
• Session Replay to diagnose UX issues with event timelines and playback
• Feature Flags for controlled rollouts, targeting, and multivariate releases
• A/B testing/experimentation with metrics and analysis tied to captured events
• Dashboards and saved insights for sharing across teams
• Data warehouse/export options (e.g., external destinations) and integrations for ingestion and activation
• Privacy controls (e.g., data minimization and masking options) and team access management

Use Cases

• Analyze activation and conversion funnels and improve onboarding
• Debug user-reported issues by correlating events with session replays
• Safely roll out and test new features using feature flags and experiments

PostHog is well-suited for teams that want a unified, developer-friendly analytics stack that can run on their own infrastructure while supporting common product growth and reliability workflows.

Plausible Analytics is a lightweight web analytics platform designed to provide essential website insights without cookies or personal data collection. It offers a fast, simple dashboard for tracking traffic sources, pageviews, and conversions, and can be deployed on your own infrastructure.

Key Features

• Cookie-less, privacy-first measurement (built to avoid collecting personal data)
• Single-page, fast-loading dashboard for key traffic and content metrics
• Goal and event tracking (including custom events) for conversion measurement
• Campaign tracking via UTM parameters and referrer/source reporting
• Filters and segmentation (e.g., by page, referrer, country, device)
• Supports multiple sites with shared access for teams
• Public shared dashboards for read-only reporting
• Integrations for popular site builders and frameworks (script snippet and proxies)
• Import tooling to migrate from Google Analytics (documented migration options)

Use Cases

• Privacy-friendly traffic and content performance tracking for marketing sites
• Measuring conversions (sign-ups, downloads, outbound clicks) without heavy tooling
• Sharing read-only analytics dashboards with clients or stakeholders

Limitations and Considerations

• Focuses on essential web analytics; it is not a full product analytics suite (e.g., deep user profiles/session replay)
• Some advanced reporting requires configuring goals/events rather than automatic “everything” collection

Plausible is well-suited for teams that want understandable metrics, low operational overhead, and a privacy-centric approach. It’s commonly chosen as a simpler alternative to heavier analytics platforms while still supporting goals, campaigns, and sharing.

Matomo is a web analytics platform that helps you measure website and app traffic, user behavior, and conversions while keeping full ownership of your analytics data. It provides a full reporting UI, customizable dashboards, and advanced tracking features commonly used in product and marketing analytics.

Key Features:

• JavaScript tracking and server-side tracking via HTTP APIs for pageviews, events, goals, and ecommerce
• Custom dashboards and a broad set of built-in reports (traffic sources, pages, campaigns, devices, locations)
• Goals and conversion tracking, including funnels and ecommerce analytics
• Tag Manager to deploy and manage marketing/analytics tags without editing site code
• Heatmaps and session recording (available as Matomo features/add-ons in the ecosystem)
• Privacy tooling such as IP anonymization, consent management support, and Do Not Track handling
• Extensible plugin architecture for adding reports, widgets, and integrations

Use Cases:

• Replace Google Analytics for privacy-conscious website measurement and compliance needs
• Track marketing campaigns and conversions (UTM campaigns, goals, funnels, ecommerce)
• Provide internal stakeholders with role-based access to analytics dashboards and exports

Limitations and Considerations:

• Some advanced capabilities (e.g., heatmaps/session recording) may require additional Matomo components/add-ons and increase storage/compute needs

Matomo fits teams that want a mature analytics suite with strong privacy controls, flexible tracking options, and extensibility through plugins. It is widely used for both content sites and conversion-driven properties where data ownership and configurability matter.

Vince is a self-hosted product analytics service for websites and applications. It collects event and pageview data and provides analysis tools—such as funnels and retention—to help teams understand user behavior and product performance.

Key Features

• Event and pageview tracking for web products
• Dashboards and charts for exploring product usage
• Funnel analysis to measure conversion across steps
• Retention/cohort-style analysis to understand returning users
• Data filtering/segmentation for deeper behavioral insights
• Self-managed deployment via the project’s repository assets

Use Cases

• Track feature adoption and engagement for a SaaS or internal app
• Measure onboarding performance with funnel steps and drop-offs
• Monitor product changes by comparing retention and usage trends over time

Limitations and Considerations

• Feature depth and ecosystem (integrations, plugins, governance) may be smaller than large commercial analytics suites; validate required reports and integrations against the current project status.

Vince is a practical option for teams that want product analytics capabilities—events, funnels, and retention—while keeping control of their analytics stack. It is best suited for lightweight-to-midweight product analytics needs where owning the data pipeline and infrastructure is important.

Usertour is an open-source platform for creating in-app guidance such as product tours, onboarding flows, and contextual UI hints for your web application. It provides a builder and runtime that lets you design step-by-step walkthroughs and trigger them based on user context, helping teams onboard users and drive feature adoption.

Key Features

• Create step-by-step product tours/walkthroughs that attach to specific UI elements
• Targeting/segmentation to show flows to specific user cohorts and states
• Event- and context-based triggering for starting tours at the right moment
• Basic performance/usage insights to understand tour completion and drop-off
• Embeddable client snippet/SDK to run tours inside your app
• Admin UI to manage, edit, and publish onboarding content

Use Cases

• Onboard new users with a guided “first-run” checklist and tour
• Announce and explain new features with contextual walkthroughs
• Reduce support load by adding in-app, just-in-time guidance

Limitations and Considerations

• Feature depth and integrations may be lighter than mature commercial onboarding suites; evaluate SDK capabilities and analytics needs for your product.

Usertour is a good fit for teams that want control over onboarding UX and data while running product tours on their own infrastructure. It’s especially useful for SaaS products that need contextual, role-based guidance without relying on third-party hosted tooling.