Open Analytics Review (2026): Pricing, Features & Honest Verdict

Open Analytics is a cookieless, privacy-first web analytics platform and a direct Google Analytics replacement. We found it fast, complete and honest about charging from day one. Best for: indie founders and small product teams who want funnels and revenue attribution without a consent banner. Price: From $9/mo (free plan: no). Rating: 7.5/10.

What is Open Analytics?

Open Analytics is a web analytics product built by OpenLabs that drops a single lightweight script on your site and reports realtime visitors, funnels, conversions and revenue without setting a cookie. It launched on Product Hunt on 16 August 2026 and took the top of the analytics category on day one. The pitch is narrow and clear: everything Google Analytics gives you, minus the consent banner, minus the sampling, and minus the part where your visitors are the product.

The company behind it is OpenLabs, and the code is public. The repository at OpenLabs-so/openanalytics is licensed AGPL-3.0 and had 203 stars when we checked, with commits landing the same day as the launch. That matters for two reasons. You can run the whole thing on your own infrastructure with your own keys, and you can read exactly what the tracker collects instead of taking a privacy page on faith. The hosted version is the same product with OpenLabs running the servers.

What are Open Analytics’s key features?

A realtime dashboard with a live globe

The default view is live. Visitors appear as they land, plotted on a globe, with referrer, device and country attached. Every query runs against ClickHouse, the column store built for exactly this shape of workload, and the vendor claims a year of events answers before a spinner appears. In our reading of the product pages the realtime view is the headline, and it is on every paid plan rather than gated to the top tier, which is not how most analytics vendors package it.

Funnels, visitor journeys and conversions

You can build a funnel across pages and custom events and watch where people fall out. Visitor journeys show the actual path a session took rather than an aggregate. Custom events are added with an HTML attribute, data-oa-event, so a marketer can instrument a button without opening a code editor or waiting on a deploy. That is a small design decision that removes a real bottleneck in small teams.

Revenue attribution through Stripe

Connect Stripe and the dashboard ties payments back to the campaign, referrer or channel that produced them. This is the feature that separates Open Analytics from the simpler privacy tools. Plausible and Fathom will tell you a page got traffic. Open Analytics is trying to tell you which traffic paid you. Revenue attribution is included on the $9 plan, which is unusual, since competitors that offer it at all tend to put it on a business tier.

Cookieless identity that respects browser privacy signals

No cookie is set and no IP address is stored. Visitors are counted with a daily-rotating salted hash, so no profile follows anyone between days or between sites. The company also honours Global Privacy Control and Do Not Track, and says those visits are not recorded at all, in the browser and again at the server. It states plainly that this makes its numbers slightly lower than a cookie-based tool would report, and that the gap is opt-outs being respected rather than data going missing. Vendors rarely volunteer a reason their own numbers look worse.

Self-hosting, an MCP server and shareable boards

Because the project is AGPL, self-hosting is a real option and not a marketing word. The repository description also lists an MCP server, which means an agent like Claude can query your analytics directly instead of you exporting a CSV. On the hosted side you get three years of history, team roles for owner, admin and viewer with nobody charged per seat, and a read-only board you can share by link that needs no account and reaches nothing else in your site.

How much does Open Analytics cost?

Open Analytics starts at $9 per month for Starter, which covers 50,000 events a month across 3 sites. Growth is $19 a month for 500,000 events and 10 sites. Pro is $49 a month for 5 million events and unlimited sites. Annual billing is a flat 17% off on every tier, which works out to $90, $190 and $490 a year. We checked the arithmetic on all three and it is the pay-for-ten-months-use-twelve model, consistent to the dollar. There is also a “let’s talk” option above Pro for custom volumes.

There is no free plan, and the company does not hide behind that. Its own FAQ says every plan is paid from the first day, with the reasoning spelled out: free analytics is usually paid for with your visitors’ data, and here the subscription is the whole business. Agree with it or not, that is a more coherent position than a free tier that quietly monetises traffic. Note also that every feature ships on every plan. The tiers buy volume and sites, not capability, so a $9 customer gets funnels, revenue attribution and Core Web Vitals on day one.

Against the field, $9 for 50,000 events is aggressive. Plausible’s entry plan is $9 a month for 10,000 pageviews, and Fathom’s floor is $15 a month for 100,000 pageviews. At launch there is also a code, PH50OFF, taking 50% off any plan and locked in for life, which makes Starter $4.50 a month for anyone who moves early. Discounts pinned to a launch window are the cheapest this product will ever be, and a lifetime lock is worth taking seriously if you were going to buy anyway.

How does Open Analytics price out per event?

We ran the per-unit rate across all three tiers, because credit and volume ladders invert more often than vendors realise. This one does not. Starter works out at $0.00018 per event, Growth at $0.000038, and Pro at $0.0000098. Each step down is a real discount rather than a repackaged one: Growth is about 4.7 times cheaper per event than Starter, and Pro is about 3.9 times cheaper than Growth. Nothing gets worse as you spend more, and no tier charges more money for the same allowance.

The sites allowance moves in step too, from 3 to 10 to unlimited, and no plan charges per seat. So the only reason to move up is that you outgrew the event count or the site count, which is how a volume ladder is supposed to read. If your event count sits near a boundary, the annual discount is 17% and the tier step is roughly double the price, so it is usually cheaper to pay monthly at the higher tier than to lock a year at the lower one and overrun.

One thing to watch: the billing unit is events, not pageviews. A pageview is one event, but every custom event you instrument consumes the same allowance. Instrument aggressively and 50,000 events is fewer visitors than it sounds. Meter your first month before committing to an annual plan.

Does Open Analytics’s own comparison table hold up?

The site carries a table putting Open Analytics against Google Analytics and three privacy-first tools across thirteen capabilities and a starting price. We check these whenever a vendor publishes one, because roughly one row in three fails. This one came back clean on the rows we could verify independently.

The table lists Plausible at “$9, 10k views”. Plausible’s own pricing page renders $9 for Starter, $14 for Growth and $19 for Business, with Starter set at 10,000 monthly pageviews. That checks out. The table lists Fathom at “$15, 100k views”. Fathom publishes its full tier ladder as structured data on its pricing page, and the entry row reads 100,000 pageviews at $15 a month or $150 a year with 50 sites included. That checks out to the dollar as well. The DataFast row, claimed at “$9, 10k events”, renders client-side on DataFast’s site and we could not confirm it, so we are not vouching for that one either way.

Where the framing is looser is the unit. Open Analytics is comparing its 50,000 events against Plausible’s and Fathom’s pageviews, and those are not the same thing. On pageviews alone the advantage is real and large. Once you add custom events, revenue events and outbound clicks, your event count climbs above your pageview count and the gap narrows. The numbers in the table are accurate. The five-times headline they imply is a best case, not a typical one.

Who is Open Analytics best for?

Use Open Analytics if you run a small SaaS or a content site, you sell through Stripe, and you have been putting off replacing Google Analytics because the privacy alternatives could not tell you which channel actually produced revenue. It is also a strong fit if you operate in the EU and want the consent banner gone rather than merely compliant, or if you are the sort of team that would rather self-host than trust a data processor.

Skip Open Analytics if you need a free tier, because there is not one and the company has no plans for one. Skip it if you depend on Google Analytics integrations with Google Ads, Search Console conversions or BigQuery exports, since replacing GA means leaving that graph behind. And approach with some caution if you need a vendor with years of operating history: the public repository was created on 11 August 2026, five days before launch, so the open-source project is new even if the hosted product is further along.

What are the best Open Analytics alternatives?

Plausible is the closest match on philosophy and the most established. It is open source, cookieless, and starts at $9 a month for 10,000 pageviews, rising to $14 and $19 for Growth and Business. It is the safer institutional choice, with years of track record. It gives you less on revenue attribution and a smaller pageview allowance at the same entry price.

Fathom Analytics starts at $15 a month for 100,000 pageviews with 50 sites included, going to $60 for a million and $200 for ten million, with extra site packs at $10 a month per 50. If you run many small sites, Fathom’s site allowance is the most generous in this group by a distance, and its pricing is published as clean structured data rather than hidden behind a slider. It is the pick for agencies.

Google Analytics remains free and remains the default, and for a marketing team living inside Google Ads it is difficult to leave. The cost is paid elsewhere: consent banners, sampled reports, an interface most people dislike, and a business model where your visitor data is the consideration. Open Analytics exists precisely because that trade stopped feeling like a bargain.

Final verdict: is Open Analytics worth it?

Open Analytics is a well-built product with an unusually honest pricing page. Everything on the feature list ships on the cheapest plan, the per-event rate improves properly as you scale, the annual discount reconciles exactly, and the company states outright that it has no free tier and explains why. It also volunteers that its numbers will read lower than a cookie-based tool because it honours opt-out signals, which is the opposite of how most analytics vendors talk about their own accuracy.

The caution is age, not quality. A five-day-old public repository and a launch-day pricing promo describe a company at the very start, and analytics is a category where you are trusting someone with a data series you cannot rebuild later. Buy it monthly, export your history, and treat the AGPL licence as your insurance policy: if OpenLabs disappears, the software does not. For a small team selling through Stripe that wants revenue attribution without a consent banner, $9 a month is a good trade and we would take it. For anyone who needs a free tier or a vendor with a decade behind it, look at Plausible first.