Rybbit - Open source Google Analytics replacement
from Goldflag@lemmy.world to selfhosted@lemmy.world on 22 Nov 02:35
https://lemmy.world/post/39137192

Hi guys, I’ve been working on a self-hostable web analytics platform since the start of this year after being frustrated with Google Analytics and Plausible.

I’ve packed a bunch of cool web analytics features into Rybbit, but I’ve tried very hard to keep the interface simple to use,

https://github.com/rybbit-io/rybbit

Check it out!

#selfhosted

threaded - newest

Goldflag@lemmy.world on 22 Nov 02:48 next collapse

A few more screenshots in case you don’t want to leave the site <img alt="" src="https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/842fccc2-7ebf-4979-bcae-de1b51a6bce9.png"> <img alt="" src="https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/7a1612ed-6819-43ec-a479-c71f27223058.png"> <img alt="" src="https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/0ce7c094-c7d4-4864-b7f3-52ca968191c6.png"> <img alt="" src="https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/4665890b-fe21-4891-a1ee-010e0118c221.png"> <img alt="" src="https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/c861d306-b53c-44d2-ab5e-3dee7158eb68.png">

MakingWork@lemmy.ca on 22 Nov 04:20 next collapse

I have no idea how to use this, but this is amazing!

bear@lemmy.blahaj.zone on 22 Nov 08:32 next collapse

What should we try with the live demo? Neat stuff, it’s this a long-term project?

helix@feddit.org on 22 Nov 13:20 collapse

You’re awesome. Thanks!

lung@lemmy.world on 22 Nov 02:54 next collapse

Wow holy crap, great work - the world badly needs this. Im assuming the mechanism is the same, you inject a js script into your site. I’m also very interested in pure server side solutions for analytics, but they can’t hit all the features you did in a generic way afaik

Goldflag@lemmy.world on 22 Nov 03:00 next collapse

Yea, we use a client-side script like almost everyone else. The major difference is that we don’t use cookies so you can avoid a lot of the cookie banner/GDPR nonsense.

Rybbit definitely isn’t the first open source cookieless web analytics platform (Plausible and Umami are the two other big ones), but it’s probably the most “all-in-one” of all these alternatives.

criss_cross@lemmy.world on 22 Nov 11:56 collapse

Do you use fingerprinting instead? Or what’s the mechanism you use?

x00z@lemmy.world on 22 Nov 13:09 collapse

GoAccess uses your server side access log.

mesamunefire@piefed.social on 22 Nov 03:04 next collapse

I would love for this to work on yunohost.

artyom@piefed.social on 22 Nov 04:17 collapse
solrize@lemmy.ml on 22 Nov 03:21 next collapse

Aren’t there already tons of these already? Piwik has been around for a quite a while, plus there are others mentioned in the comments.

_cryptagion@anarchist.nexus on 22 Nov 04:20 collapse

variety is the spice of life.

lIlIlIlIlIlIl@lemmy.world on 22 Nov 03:47 next collapse

How would this compare to something like PostHog?

Goldflag@lemmy.world on 22 Nov 04:07 collapse

Posthog makes it almost impossible to actually self-host since they try to push you onto the cloud as much as possible. They say that the self-hosted version only works well up until 100k events … which is insane since their cloud free tier is 1 million events. It’s actually the reason why I built Rybbit. I tried to self-host posthog on my server but it ran it up to 100% CPU on 8 cores and didn’t even work.

Ok posthog rant done.

The other main difference is that Posthog has like 10+ different products all in one. Their web analytics is good, but it’s just kind of bland (imo) because it’s not their main focus.

jarhead@pie.jarofmilk.cloud on 22 Nov 03:52 next collapse

Thats fuckin baller!!

Goldflag@lemmy.world on 22 Nov 03:55 collapse

🐸

otter@lemmy.ca on 22 Nov 04:10 next collapse

You mentioned being frustrated at Plausible. What did you not like about it?

I haven’t tried Plausible, but it seemed popular

Goldflag@lemmy.world on 22 Nov 04:42 collapse

it didn’t have enough features, especially since the community version is heavily nerfed (it’s missing even funnels)

baatliwala@lemmy.world on 22 Nov 05:04 next collapse

This looks… Great? Nice work

osprior@lemmy.world on 22 Nov 05:34 next collapse

Question is the self-hosted version less featured than the paid hosted version?

This looks amazing btw.

Goldflag@lemmy.world on 22 Nov 05:38 collapse

Only very slightly so. One of the reasons I created Rybbit is because platforms like plausible and fathom have much inferior self-hosted versions (very limited featureset and basically never updated). We have a comparison here

osprior@lemmy.world on 22 Nov 05:55 next collapse

That’s excellent and very clear, thank you for the explanation.

spacelord@sh.itjust.works on 22 Nov 11:25 collapse

@Goldflag

I appreciate the intent behind Rybbit, but I have to respectfully disagree with the “only very slightly so” characterization. Looking at your official comparison table, the self-hosted version is missing:

  • Pages View
  • Web Vitals
  • Email reports
  • Google Search Console integration
  • VPN/Crawler/ASN tracking
  • Google/GitHub OAuth
  • Email support

That’s 7 significant features—which seems more than “very slightly” different.

More importantly, this raises AGPL compliance questions. Under AGPLv3 Section 13, if users interact with modified AGPL software over a network (your cloud version), you’re required to make the complete corresponding source code available to those users. If these cloud-only features are integrated into the same AGPL-licensed codebase, withholding them from the public repo while running them as a network service appears to conflict with the license terms.

There are really only two compliant scenarios here:

  1. These features exist in the public repo but are just marketed as “cloud-only” (in which case the comparison table’s misleading)
  2. These features are truly separate proprietary code that interfaces with Rybbit without being part of the AGPL-licensed work (which would require careful architectural separation)

If it’s neither—if these are AGPL-covered features running in your cloud service but withheld from the repo—that’s exactly the “loophole” the AGPL was designed to close. The irony is that you criticized Plausible and Fathom for having “much inferior self-hosted versions,” yet this appears to be a similar approach.

Could you clarify the licensing status of these cloud-only features? Are they in the public repo but disabled by default, or are they proprietary additions that don’t derive from the AGPL codebase?

ripcord@lemmy.world on 22 Nov 13:24 collapse

Thank you for your service.

starkzarn@infosec.pub on 22 Nov 05:49 next collapse

Glad to see you post this here. I’ve been experimenting with selfhosted analytics for a while now and have attempted your project here a couple times. The thing that kills me is the Clickhouse requirement. It makes it impossible to host on a lightweight VPS. Like why should my analytics platform require so much more compute than my simple static site? Am I missing something?

Goldflag@lemmy.world on 22 Nov 05:56 collapse

Clickhouse definitely takes a lot of resources! There’s unfortunately no way around that, though in my experience it runs fine on the cheapest Hetzner instances which are like $3-4 a month for 2GB of RAM. How lightweight is your VPS?

And yea, you don’t need clickhouse for a simple static site. I chose clickhouse because it Postgres or MySQL does not scale well since the main site I personally use Rybbit for sends around 20 million events a month.

It pains me to plug my competitors, but check out Umami or Goatcounter if you want a platform that uses postgres.

houjou@jlai.lu on 22 Nov 08:52 next collapse

it looks beautiful!! do you plan on making the wcv available for the self hosted version in the future?

parmesancrabs@sh.itjust.works on 22 Nov 10:39 next collapse

Aways a fan of alternate options, this looks quite tidy! I had a few thoughts / queries. Not at my system right now but I will test it out later.

I noticed in the screenshots you have a “users” page - but with a cookieless tracking system I would have assumed it wouldn’t be reliable to identify a long term user past individual sessions? Are you doing some hefty finger printing?

Looking at your features table has a few statements that might need adjusting. Such as GA4’s segmentation sequencing / filtering can be quite complex, I’d argue its not limited and potentially more advanced than Rybbit (not tested yet). It also has a user exploration feature.

Do you have any plans for a drag and drop style report creation, so that I could create reports with any dimensions / metrics and filter accordingly? I think that would bring a lot of flexibility to the platform for an individuals bespoke needs.

cupcakezealot@piefed.blahaj.zone on 22 Nov 11:27 collapse

hmm interesting im using matomo but im not liking how its increasingly becoming bloated and subscription based

helix@feddit.org on 22 Nov 13:20 collapse

You can try goaccess.io or plausible.io aswell. Ribbit is very cool though!