Best open-source alternatives to Hotjar

OpenReplay is an open-source experience platform designed for teams that want to self-host user behavior analytics and support tooling on their own infrastructure. It combines session replay, product analytics, developer debugging tools, cobrowsing, and mobile replay so engineering, product, design, and support teams can investigate issues and understand user journeys without sending session data to a third party. The project emphasizes privacy, compliance, and deployment flexibility. It supports capture-time sanitization, private mode, role-based access, and SSO for enterprise use, and it can be deployed on cloud providers, Kubernetes, Docker, bare metal Ubuntu, or from source. The README also describes OpenReplay Cloud offerings for teams that prefer a managed service, including serverless, dedicated, and BYOC deployment models.

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.

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.

Countly is a privacy-focused analytics and customer engagement platform designed for organizations that want control over their data and deployment. The project emphasizes self-hosting, with deployment options for on-premises infrastructure or private cloud environments, and it is presented as suitable for teams that need flexibility, compliance, and long-term autonomy. The server repository provides the backend for Countly’s analytics product, including data collection, reporting, notifications, remote configuration, and user/application management. It exposes read and write APIs and is built around a plugin architecture, allowing teams to extend existing capabilities or add new ones. The README also positions the project as supporting multiple application types and use cases, from mobile and web analytics to crash reporting and customer engagement workflows.

Traceway is an observability platform built around OpenTelemetry for teams that want to capture and analyze application telemetry without stitching together multiple tools. It brings together logs, traces, metrics, session replay, exceptions, profiling, AI observability, and paging in a single system, and it emphasizes native OTLP/HTTP ingestion so users can point existing OTel exporters at it with minimal setup. The project is positioned for self-hosted deployments and for users who prefer a managed cloud option. The README highlights Docker-based installation, a SQLite/DuckDB option for simpler deployments, and an embedded Go mode for running Traceway inside an application process. It also describes agent-oriented CLI and skill integrations, symbolication tooling, and multi-tenant organization features with role-based access, suggesting it is aimed at production teams operating distributed systems.

PostHog is a product intelligence platform aimed at teams that want to understand user behavior, diagnose issues, and ship product changes from a single place. It brings together analytics, session replay, observability, surveys, workflows, and AI-assisted tools so users can connect product data with actions and decisions. The project is designed for both cloud usage and self-hosting. The README highlights a recommended cloud offering for quick setup, while also describing an advanced open-source hobby deployment path that can be installed on Linux with Docker. It also supports integration through SDKs, a web snippet, APIs, and an MCP setup for agentic workflows and developer tools.

Liwan is a web analytics application focused on privacy and simplicity. It is intended for website owners who want to track traffic without cookies, cross-site tracking, or persistent identifiers, while keeping data stored on their own server. The project emphasizes ease of deployment through a single self-contained binary and minimal setup requirements. It offers real-time dashboards, visitor and pageview reporting, referrer insights, and automatic bot filtering, and the README suggests it is lightweight enough to run on modest hardware such as a VPS, a Mac mini, or a Raspberry Pi.

Litlyx is an analytics platform aimed at website and web app owners who want a lightweight, cookie-free alternative to tools such as Google Analytics 4, PostHog, and Mixpanel. It provides a hosted cloud version as well as a self-hosted dashboard, making it suitable for teams that want either a managed service or control over their own deployment. The project works by adding a small script tag or installing the `litlyx-js` package, then initializing it with a workspace ID. Once connected, it tracks page visits, real-time users, unique visitors, and custom events, and it can also forward data to a self-hosted instance through configurable host, port, and security settings.

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.