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Show HN: Openpanel – An open-source alternative to Mixpanel

by lindesvard on 5/21/24, 6:43 PM with 99 comments

• by jordo on 5/22/24, 5:13 PM

  REALLY looking forward to trying this. Mixpanel has the most obscure pricing model of any SAAS i've ever tried to integrate with... When we 'upgraded' from their free tier to a paid tier we were DOWNGRADED from 20M events a month to 10K events a month. Does that make any sense??? They talk about 'transparent and easy to understand pricing', but immediately after I upgraded to a paid plan we were downgraded from 20M events to 10K events.

  We actually immediately cancelled our paid plan and went back to their free tier. To match what they provide in their free tier (20M events), the cost is $2,289 USD / month (no thanks). https://mixpanel.com/pricing/plan-builder/?dcv=growth

  So basically we can either pay $2,289 USD / month, or pay nothing, and still get the same number of tracked events. Just bizzare... We've moved on, and I've been on the search for an alternative ever since.

• by klaussilveira on 5/21/24, 9:33 PM

  This doesn't seem to be buffering inserts to ClickHouse: https://github.com/Openpanel-dev/openpanel/blob/c90848765a6a...

  So any major website will have problems with it. I would suggest moving this into a stream (NATS, Kafka) or just having some sort of service that buffers events, then offloads to Clickhouse in batch.

• by nojvek on 5/22/24, 10:20 AM

  This is great.

  Analytics space has many players in all shapes and sizes.

  Mixpanel, Amplitude, Google analytics, simpleanalytics, Posthog, usefathom, plausible.

  If you include UI tracking then pendo.io, Fullstory, LogRocket.

  Many of them VC funded horses.

  As an ex-Mixpaneler and Mixpanel customer now, I wish Mixpanel wasn’t this expensive for a few 1000 users. But like any company in an economic market, they’ll charge for what customers will bear.

  Competition is wonderful. May the force be with you.

• by paradite on 5/22/24, 1:43 PM

  I've considered self-hosting plausible but ultimately decided to pay for subscription instead, because I think self-hosting would cause more in terms of VPS hosting.

  The minimum requirements (4GB RAM) are too high because of the need to run two databases:

  https://github.com/plausible/community-edition/blob/v2.0.0/d...

  4GB RAM costs $24/month on DigitalOcean: https://www.digitalocean.com/pricing/droplets

  In comparison Plausible lowest tier is only $9/month.

  I think this project is not so different in terms of minimum spec.

  Would love to hear how others deal with the cost of self-hosting. Does it get cheaper as you self-host more apps? Do you pool with friends?

• by chucky on 5/22/24, 6:06 AM

  This looks great! As an engineer who has used Mixpanel at multiple companies it has always annoyed me that what you get for what you pay seems quite poor, so I'm very happy to see some alternatives.

  I'm also happy to note that you are from (the wrong part of ;)) Sweden.

• by t4m2x on 5/21/24, 10:23 PM

  I run a saas where we host a number of websites, can I use this for us to track visits, events etc across multiple sites? We want aggregated results not per site metrics

• by RileyJames on 5/22/24, 11:41 AM

  I’m looking for a tool like this. Previously used mixpanel (under free startup package), but dropped it after that expired because it was going to be $x,000 per month. (Tho I believe they significantly altered their pricing shortly after)

  But either way, we’d never spent enough time setting it up, and this weren’t getting a huge amount of value from it.

  We also use plausible, for web facing. But we need something more detailed for analytics within our product.

  I like the sound of this. But from using the demo dashboard I didn’t see the value I’d get from it.

  It was clear if I could track a user (or segment of users) journeys.

  Or see the journey of all users who completed a specific event.

  Can I create funnels?

  Can I measure performance over time easily?

  Can I put events into the timeline? (feature releases)

  Implementing a tool like this is a big commitment, so I’d need to be more convinced it’s the right tool for our needs before I took the plunge. I’d also start with the hosted solution, but I’d choose it because we could self host in the future if we felt necessary. An escape hatch.

• by XCSme on 5/23/24, 1:00 AM

  Congrats on the release, I'm really impressed with OpenPanel so far!

  I have also been building a similar product for a long time (UXWizz), focused more on self-hosting, quantitative data and targeted at low to medium trafficked websites, but it is a paid product.

  How do you think monetization will pan out in the long-term with a free self-hosted option? I know PostHog also had a free self-hosted version, but since the self-hosted version competes directly with their main business model, they had to stop support for it.

  I also considered open-sourcing mine, but decided to keep it self-hosted only and paid. I feel like if I sell a hosted version, then my business goals won't be aligned with the goal of making the self-hosted version as good as it can be, without feature locks.

  I hope you can maintain this awesome pace and improve your product for many years to come!

• by ralusek on 5/21/24, 8:55 PM

  If we use your hosted version, what will the pricing be when it's out of beta.

  I always think these services should basically be like 2x cost of underlying S3 or whatever storage you're using, but they end up being like 100x+

• by a13n on 5/22/24, 1:27 AM

  The group-level / account-level stuff is pretty big for B2B SaaS companies to be able to consider using it. And it's tucked away on one of Mixpanel's higher price plans.

• by psovit on 5/22/24, 4:02 AM

  A few months back we were also planning to start a similar project which would include an interactive AI that can give answers / charts etc. based on user prompts from the provided events. But we scraped that project and started something else entirely. Glad to see this project - would definitely try it out when you have the self hosting option ready.

• by pvlima on 5/22/24, 10:42 AM

  That's really interesting! I've been using and developing Posthog-LLM for tracking LLM text events, and I'm excited to try this tool. A lightweight Posthog sounds great. The older Posthog versions were better for self-hosting because they were lighter, but the latest version is a bit too heavy.

• by debuggerpk on 5/22/24, 7:43 AM

  how does this compare to https://posthog.com ?

• by rmdes on 5/21/24, 11:47 PM

  Waiting for the self-hosted version... would be great to be able to deploy this with Kubernetes too

• by KaoruAoiShiho on 5/22/24, 3:44 PM

  Do you have a way to automatically prune old data? I ran into the problem with posthog where the old data just overflowed my db and made it inoperable and they had no way to prune it.

• by bravura on 5/22/24, 2:47 AM

  What does "privacy first" mean in this case?

  My understanding is the plausible, unlike GA, doesn't use cookies.

  Does that mean web analytics are IP-only?

  [edit: Or does it mean no third party sees your analytics?]

• by cheema33 on 5/22/24, 1:29 PM

  The website https://openpanel.dev appears to be down. Maybe too many of us were hitting it.

• by alanzhuly on 5/23/24, 12:55 AM

  Does the product support Webflow as well? We are looking for a Mixpanel alternative that can connect both webflow and our own website product.

• by FlamingMoe on 5/22/24, 2:24 AM

  Nice UI. Is some of this forked from Plausible?

• by Marciplan on 5/21/24, 11:39 PM

  you should reach out to the founders of cal.com and documen.so on Twitter. They’re big on promoting this kind of stuff :)

• by weejewel on 5/21/24, 8:52 PM

  Looks really good!

  How do you create funnels without cookies? In other words, how do you track sessions?

• by dimitry12 on 5/21/24, 9:35 PM

  Looks great as a self-host alternative if/when you make self-hosting feasible.

• by afro88 on 5/22/24, 3:19 AM

  What's the advantage of using this over PostHog?

• by spiderfarmer on 5/22/24, 4:45 PM

  This is still not very affordable for my use case. My small network of sites does around 400.000 pageviews per day. $120 per month is pretty steep for something I look at only a couple of times per month.

  Ever since GA4 and the whole cookie banner thing I'm looking for something that is GDPR compliant, has basic functionality and is cheap.

  But every time I look it comes down to self hosting.

  Plausible relies on Clickhouse and I don't know Clickhouse. Umami relies on Mysql or Postgres with a pretty inefficient data scheme that cripples performance with the scale of my data.

  Can't these services be made a lot cheaper (and faster) by doing data sampling like Google Analytics did?

• by nightowl_games on 5/22/24, 2:57 PM

  How does this compare to metabase?

• by racl101 on 5/22/24, 4:55 PM

  Will pay attention to this for sure.

• by tobase on 5/22/24, 9:03 AM

  woop woop!