Rybbit

Rybbit is an open-source, cookieless web analytics platform positioned as a direct replacement for Google Analytics 4. We rate it 88/100 — the most polished privacy-friendly analytics product launched in the past 18 months, and the easiest first GA4 alternative to recommend to a non-technical client.

What is Rybbit?

Rybbit was built by indie developer Bill Yang (@yang_frog on X) and went public on April 15, 2025 after roughly 110 days of development. It hit 5,000 GitHub stars within nine days of launch, crossed 10,000 stars in under a year, and now sits above 11,000 stars with more than 4,000 organisations using it according to the company. The full source is published under AGPL-3 at github.com/rybbit-io/rybbit.

The pitch is simple: GA4 buries the metrics you actually care about under three layers of menus, and the open-source incumbents — Plausible, Umami, Pirsch — stop short of session replay, funnels and product analytics. Rybbit ships all of that out of the box behind a single intuitive dashboard, with a tracking script under 18 KB that loads in a single request and never sets a cookie.

Key Features of Rybbit

• Cookieless tracking by default: Rybbit never sets first-party cookies and ships zero third-party requests, which means GDPR and CCPA banners are not required out of the box.
• Real-time dashboards and live visitor count: Visitor counters, top pages and the 3D globe all refresh as events arrive — no two-minute Google Analytics delay.
• Session replay: Bundled into the Pro plan and the self-hosted edition, with playback that captures DOM, clicks, scrolls and rage clicks while masking inputs by default.
• Goals, funnels, retention and user journeys: Define multi-step flows like landing → pricing → checkout → purchase and see drop-off percentages at every stage.
• Web Vitals and error tracking: LCP, INP, CLS and JavaScript errors are captured by the same script — replacing the "need to install Sentry too" conversation for smaller teams.
• 3D globe visualisation: An interactive globe renders sessions in real time and toggles between 3D, 2D, country and subdivision views — easily the most-shared screenshot of the product on Twitter.
• Click-to-filter everything: Click any country, page, referrer or UTM in the dashboard and the entire view filters to that segment; filters stack and persist in URLs.
• Self-hosting parity: Unlike Plausible Community Edition, the self-hosted Rybbit build is feature-complete — it includes session replay, funnels and the dashboard the cloud customers see.

What Users Say About Rybbit

On r/selfhosted the launch thread crossed several hundred upvotes and the most-quoted comment summarised it as "the first one I'd actually replace Plausible with." On Product Hunt, Rybbit took #2 product of the day with reviewers praising the dashboard polish and the responsiveness of Bill Yang in the comments — multiple feature requests shipped within days. On Hacker News the typical critique was around AGPL-3 (some commercial deployments prefer MIT) and event-based billing on the cloud plan, but the technical execution drew almost universal praise. On AppSumo and Capterra the recurring complaint is that high-traffic, low-value pages can burn through the event allowance quickly, and that self-hosting requires comfort with Docker and Postgres.

Rybbit Pricing

Rybbit is open source and free to self-host. Cloud pricing is event-based and starts at $0/month for hobbyists, with credit-card-free signup.

Plan	Price	Key Limits
Free	$0/month	3,000 events/month, 1 site, 6-month data retention. No credit card required.
Standard	$13/month (or $10/mo annual)	100,000 events, up to 5 sites, 3 team members, 2-year retention.
Pro	$26/month (or $20/mo annual)	Unlimited sites, unlimited team members, session replay, 5-year retention. Higher event tiers up to 10M+/month available.
Self-hosted	Free (AGPL-3)	Full feature parity. Bring your own VPS, Postgres and ClickHouse.

Who Should Use Rybbit?

Best for: Indie founders, small SaaS teams, agencies installing analytics for clients, and privacy-conscious EU shops that want one tool for traffic plus product analytics without the GA4 onboarding tax. Particularly strong when you actively want to replace Plausible/Umami plus a session-replay tool plus a Web-Vitals dashboard with a single script.

Not ideal for: Enterprises with a long compliance review of AGPL-licensed code, very high-traffic content sites where event-based pricing punishes the long tail of pageviews, and teams already invested in GA4's BigQuery export pipeline for advanced attribution.

Pros and Cons

Pros:

• Cleanest dashboard among open-source GA alternatives — the click-to-filter interaction is genuinely faster than GA4.
• Self-hosted edition is feature-complete, including session replay (Plausible CE doesn't include funnels or replay).
• Active solo maintainer; release notes show weekly shipping cadence and PRs frequently merged within 24 hours.
• Lightweight script: under 18 KB and a single request — Web Vitals show no measurable impact in real-world tests.
• Free tier is genuinely usable for personal sites — 3,000 events/month with no credit card.

Cons:

• Event-based billing can feel restrictive for content sites — a viral post can blow through the allowance overnight.
• Self-hosting requires Docker, Postgres and ClickHouse — not a one-click install for non-technical founders.
• Smaller integration ecosystem than Plausible (no native Webflow or Ghost plugin yet at time of writing).
• AGPL-3 license can be a non-starter for some commercial deployments.
• Some advanced filter combinations are still behind a feature flag and take a few minutes to discover.

Alternatives to Rybbit

Plausible is the closest alternative — older, MIT-licensed cloud, but the Community Edition is deliberately stripped down and there's no session replay. Umami is even simpler and free to self-host but skips funnels, replay and Web Vitals. PostHog is the heavyweight option — strong product analytics and feature flags, but the dashboard is overwhelming for a marketing site. GA4 remains the default for Search Console integration and BigQuery export, neither of which Rybbit currently matches.

Verdict: Is Rybbit Worth It?

Yes — if you've ever opened GA4 and given up looking for a metric, Rybbit is worth installing this afternoon. We rate it 88/100: it's not yet the right pick for compliance-heavy enterprises or massive content publishers, but for the typical indie or small-team use case in 2026 it is the most opinionated and best-executed open-source analytics product on the market. The free tier is enough to evaluate seriously, and the self-hosted edition's feature parity is the rarest combination in this category.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is Rybbit free?

Yes. Rybbit Cloud has a free tier of 3,000 events/month with no credit card required, and the full open-source edition is free to self-host under AGPL-3. Paid cloud plans start at $13/month for 100,000 events.

Is Rybbit open source?

Yes — the entire codebase is published under the GNU AGPL-3 licence at github.com/rybbit-io/rybbit, and the self-hosted edition has full feature parity with Rybbit Cloud.

Does Rybbit use cookies?

No. Rybbit is fully cookieless and does not require a cookie banner under GDPR or CCPA in most jurisdictions because it never sets first-party cookies and never shares data with third parties.

How does Rybbit compare to Plausible?

Rybbit includes session replay, conversion funnels, retention and Web Vitals out of the box on both cloud and self-host. Plausible's Community Edition does not include any of those features. Plausible is older and has more integrations (Webflow, Ghost, Cloudflare Workers); Rybbit's dashboard is generally considered more polished.

Can I self-host Rybbit?

Yes. The official docker-compose stack runs the app, Postgres and ClickHouse on a single VPS. The self-hosted edition is feature-complete and includes session replay.

What platforms does Rybbit support?

Rybbit is a web-based dashboard accessed in any modern browser. The tracking script supports any HTML page and there are SDK wrappers for Next.js, React, Vue and Nuxt.