Rybbit

Last reviewed Aug 26, 2026 · 792 words

Pick Rybbit over Plausible or Umami when you want product analytics (funnels, user journeys, retention, per-visitor sessions) and not just pageviews, and you are willing to run ClickHouse to get it. Pick Umami when you want a pageview counter that idles on 200 MB. That is the whole decision, and everything below is detail. Rybbit is the newest of the three by a wide margin (first released in 2024), it is AGPL-licensed with about 13,000 stars, and it has the nicest dashboard of any self-hosted analytics tool I have used; it also has the heaviest footprint of the cookieless trio, and both facts come from the same design choice.

Rybbit is Umami plus product analytics, priced in ClickHouse

The cookieless, no-consent-banner pitch is the same as Plausible and Umami: a small script, no cookies, no cross-site tracking, visitors counted by daily-rotating salted hashes rather than persistent identifiers, which is what lets sites in the EU run it without a banner. Where Rybbit differs is the second half of the product: a Sessions view that walks a visitor's path page by page, funnels you define after the fact from any sequence of pages or events, a user-journey diagram, goals, retention cohorts, Web Vitals, a JavaScript error tab, and a live-visitor globe that is pure theatre and that I nonetheless leave open on a second monitor. Session replay arrived later than the rest and is the one feature I treat as a bonus rather than a reason to install.

Storing per-session event streams and answering funnel queries over them is a columnar-database job, and the cost of doing that well is why ClickHouse is mandatory. Plausible made the same call; Umami chose Postgres and stays lighter as a result.

Two databases and a setup script

The stack is a Next.js client, a backend service, Postgres for sites and users, ClickHouse for events, and Caddy bundled in for TLS. The project ships a setup.sh in the repository that writes the .env and compose file and starts everything: clone the repo, run the script with your domain, and it obtains a certificate and brings the dashboard up. Register the first account at your domain immediately; that account becomes the admin, and I disable further signups right after.

Then add a site in the dashboard and paste its script into your pages:

<script src="https://analytics.example.com/api/script.js" data-site-id="1" defer></script>

If you already front everything with your own reverse proxy, the setup script has a flag to skip the bundled Caddy, and you proxy to the app's port yourself.

Sizing: the minimum is 512 MB, the comfortable number is 2 GB

ClickHouse allocates generously and merges data in the background, and on a 1 GB VPS I watched it get killed by the OOM killer twice in one busy afternoon. 2 GB with a swap file is the smallest box I would run Rybbit on for a site doing 100,000 pageviews a month. Disk is cheap by comparison; compressed events run to a rough 1 GB per few million, but set a retention window in the settings rather than keeping raw events forever, because the daily aggregates are small and the event stream is not. Difficulty is "Medium" in the listing, and that is fair: the install is easy, the operating cost is ClickHouse.

A newer project: what that means in practice

Rybbit is well-funded by open-source standards and moves fast, which cuts both ways. Features arrive monthly; so do migrations, and the release notes deserve a read before every docker compose pull. There is a hosted cloud with a free tier, and the self-hosted version is not feature-gated against it, which is a better deal than several rivals offer. What it lacks is a decade of edge cases handled, the plugin ecosystem of Matomo, and the boringness that makes Plausible the safe recommendation. If you want to switch from Google Analytics with the least drama, the Google Analytics alternatives page ranks the options; Rybbit is the one to pick when the shortlist reads "modern, and does funnels".

What I'd do

For a personal blog: Umami, and keep the ClickHouse budget for something else. For a SaaS or an app where "which onboarding step loses people" is a question you actually ask: Rybbit on a 2 GB box, event retention set to 90 days, signups disabled, behind your own proxy. It is the only self-hosted analytics tool where I stopped missing the product-analytics half of Mixpanel, and the only price is a second database.