Submitted 3 weeks ago by Goldflag@lemmy.world to selfhosted@lemmy.world
https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/52e9cd8c-047b-4538-896b-6b3a1c1515bc.png
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!
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
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.
Do you use fingerprinting instead? Or what’s the mechanism you use?
GoAccess uses your server side access log.
I would love for this to work on yunohost.
You mentioned being annoyed at Plausible. What did you not like about it?
I haven’t tried Plausible, but it seemed popular
it didn’t have enough features, especially since the community version is heavily nerfed (it’s missing even funnels)
Question is the self-hosted version less featured than the paid hosted version?
This looks amazing btw.
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
@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:
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 repository while running them as a network service appears to conflict with the license terms.
There are really only two compliant scenarios here:
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?
That’s excellent and very clear, thank you for the explanation.
The free self hosted version is heavily limited. I will stick with Plausible which may be simpler but also doesn’t want to push me into a subscription.
Plausible is at least honest about it being an “open core” business model. They openly document what’s missing and why (funding sustainability).
The premium features are likely not in the AGPL repo at all - they’re genuinely separate proprietary code. They seem to be AGPL compliant because they’re transparent that community edition is a subset, not claiming “everything’s there, just toggled off”.
hmm interesting im using matomo but im not liking how its increasingly becoming bloated and subscription based
You can try goaccess.io or plausible.io aswell. Ribbit is very cool though!
Thats fuckin baller!!
🐸
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.
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.
variety is the spice of life.
Matomo*
What’s the advantages over awstats?
from what i know, awstats gets analytics from server-side logs while Rybbit uses a client side script. So not really and apples to apples comparison
The same advantages as all free and open source solution, it’s free and open source. That means how much it’s going to cost to your business is directly under your control. You can make a decision on how you acquire hardware based on your business’s needs. If you want to add or change features you can decide how to do that based on the deals you have with your programmers (like pick the developer you have with the best skills and the lowest cost), and then you get to control how much it costs you and how reliable the result is going to be.
If you feel like the support you get from customer service from Amazon or Google or Microsoft is reliable enough and you don’t need more reliability then go ahead and stick with paid products. But if you already have a team of really expensive and talented engineers you might as well let them solve problems with free and open source equipment.
I think he’s referring to en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AWStats
This looks… Great? Nice work
How would this compare to something like PostHog?
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.
Just a word of warning for everyone: The free self hosted version is heavily limited. I will stick with Plausible which may be simpler but also doesn’t want to push me into a subscription.
as opposed to plausible community edition which is even more limited and is only updated a couple times a year?
The community edition allows me to have multiple sites, multiple users and is way easier to set up. If I ever need additional features like funnels I would need a subscription for both - Plausible is less expensive.
Is it “reebit”? OR “Raybit” ?
it’s “ribbit”
it looks beautiful!! do you plan on making the wcv available for the self hosted version in the future?
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?
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.
Hey thanks so much for the engagement. I was trying to run it on a VPS that cost $35/year. 2GiB of RAM wasn’t quite enough to make it work for me, granted that was with the webserver and ancillary supporting services.
I’ll find an opportunity to test it out though, as rybbit looks great. I appreciate the mention on the other FOSS products, that’s a good look for you. I have plenty of experience with umami already. Cheers!
Docker is a security risk. Is it possible to install securely?
Docker is a security risk? … excuse me, what? Can’t you just, idunno, secure the environment that docker runs in? Use rootless images? Use immutable images?
And, are you asking for something that runs on bare metal? Couldn’t you just install the ISO that the dockerfile uses, then convert the dockerfile logic to an sh script?
Doker pull is insecure
It’s the download that’s not verified
In its default state i think thats fair. Example docker bypasses most firewalls as it runs before iptables rules process. So if you don’t either use 127.0.0.1:port:port (many compose files offered by projects do not do this) or add specialized iptables rules to fix that up you can end up directly exposing services with meaning to or even realizing.
And yeah privilege escalation etc. There are solutions like what you mentioned but it can be a lot of work to set all that up so most people won’t
I imagine you can use Podman instead
I think that has the same problems, no? Or does podman do signature verification on all the layers it downloads from the container repo?
This looks great. I’m interested in building similar dashboards but for a different use case. Are you using a particular typescript framework for this?
Next.js, TailwindCSS, shadcn. the usual stuff
I know modern tools get a lot of hate on Lemmy, but tainwind and shadcn have been amazing to work with. Next.js has been a little bumpy the last few years, but if you know what you’re doing, you can deliver a great UX with React. I’ve been enjoying Vite + React for anything that doesn’t need SSR.
Is there any plans for a data migration feature from Plausible?
I don’t think that’s plausible.
We have data migration plans in work but it doesn’t appear that a plausible migration is possible
I’ve been using Plausible for a long time, will definately be checking this out.
OpenBSD does not have a docker engine. Can this be installed without docker?
How can I run this on unraid, and can I point it at multiple domains and sub-domains?
Its a docker compose deployment so should just work on any system with docker installed. Copy the docker compose file and env file if it has one, and run ‘docker compose up -d’ in that directory.
It can collect analytics from multiple places.
Goldflag@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
A few more screenshots in case you don’t want to leave the site Image Image Image Image Image
MakingWork@lemmy.ca 3 weeks ago
I have no idea how to use this, but this is amazing!
bear@lemmy.blahaj.zone 3 weeks ago
What should we try with the live demo? Neat stuff, it’s this a long-term project?
helix@feddit.org 3 weeks ago
You’re awesome. Thanks!