Best open-source alternatives to Hotjar

PostHog is an open source platform for teams that want to understand and improve their products with analytics, experimentation, and operational tooling. It combines event-based product analytics, web analytics, session replay, feature flags, surveys, experiments, error tracking, and data warehousing in one system. The README positions it as a tool for product builders who need to measure user behavior, diagnose issues, and ship changes safely. The project can be used through PostHog Cloud or self-hosted in a hobby deployment. For self-hosting, the README describes a one-line Docker-based setup on Linux and points to documentation for local development, troubleshooting, and broader self-hosting guidance. It also notes that integrations can be added through JavaScript snippets, SDKs, or the API, supporting a wide range of frontend, mobile, and backend environments.

OpenReplay is a self-hostable session replay platform for web applications. It is aimed at developers and teams that need to understand user behavior, reproduce bugs, and investigate performance or UX problems without relying on third-party screen sharing tools. The project captures detailed client-side and technical context such as network activity, console logs, JavaScript errors, store actions and state, and performance metrics. It also emphasizes privacy controls, low tracking footprint, and deployment flexibility across major cloud providers or Kubernetes. OpenReplay Cloud is offered for users who prefer a hosted service instead of self-managing the stack.

HyperDX is an observability application that helps engineers investigate production issues by searching and visualizing telemetry data stored in ClickHouse. It is presented as a core component of ClickStack and is positioned as a fast, intuitive alternative for working with logs and traces on top of an existing ClickHouse cluster. The project is aimed at teams that need a unified way to work with logs, metrics, session replays, traces, dashboards, alerts, and APM-style request and database monitoring. It can be deployed as an all-in-one container or as part of a broader ClickStack setup, and it supports OpenTelemetry-based instrumentation through its collector endpoint and SDK integrations for common languages and platforms.

highlight.io is an open-source observability and monitoring platform aimed at developers who need to understand frontend and backend behavior in one place. It combines session replay, error monitoring, logging, and traces into a cohesive product, and it supports integrations and SDKs for collecting data from applications. The project is available as a hosted service and can also be self-hosted for hobby or enterprise use. The README describes a quick Docker-based deployment for a hobby instance, along with a more scalable enterprise self-hosted option, making it relevant both to teams evaluating the product and to organizations that want to run their own monitoring stack.

Traceway is an OpenTelemetry-native observability platform designed for teams that want logs, traces, metrics, session replay, exceptions, and AI tracing in one system. It is positioned as a self-hostable alternative to larger commercial observability platforms and as an easier replacement for stitching together multiple OSS tools. The project appears aimed at developers and organizations that already emit OTLP data, since it accepts native OTLP/HTTP ingestion and works without a Collector or vendor-specific SDKs. It supports self-hosting via Docker Compose as well as an embedded mode inside a Go application, and it also offers a hosted cloud service for users who prefer not to manage infrastructure.

Rejourney is a session replay and observability platform aimed at mobile and web applications. It provides SDKs and related backend/dashboard components to capture user sessions with high fidelity, surface crashes and errors in real time, and help teams analyze user behavior and app stability. The project appears designed for engineering and product teams that want to investigate incidents, understand user journeys, and improve conversion or retention. The README also emphasizes self-hosting and local development paths, including Docker Compose and Kubernetes-based deployment options, suggesting it can be operated in both managed and self-hosted environments.

RePlaya is a self-hosted session replay application for teams that want to capture and inspect browser interactions without running a traditional multi-service backend. It stores each session as a single append-only S2 stream, using that stream both as the recording store and as the source for playback. The project is designed around a simple deployment model: one Node server plus S2, with no separate database, object store, search index, or message bus. The software is aimed at operators who need to replay user sessions, watch active sessions live, and keep recordings in their own infrastructure. It provides a recorder snippet that can be embedded into web pages, supports tagging sessions with application identity metadata, and includes protections for sensitive data through input masking and ignore/block classes. The README emphasizes keeping read APIs private while exposing only collection endpoints publicly, and it documents deployment through local development or a Docker container.