Countly
Privacy-first product analytics you can run on your own servers, plus push, surveys, and A/B testing
Countly is a product analytics and customer engagement platform for mobile apps, websites, desktop applications, and connected devices. It combines event analytics, funnels, cohorts, retention, crash reporting, push notifications, in-app messaging, surveys, and A/B testing in one system, and it is unusual in the category because the same product can be self-hosted on your own infrastructure under an open source license (Countly Lite) or bought as a managed private cloud (Countly Flex) or a commercially licensed on-premise deployment (Countly Enterprise).
Overview
Most product analytics vendors run one multi-tenant cloud and ask you to ship your event stream to it. Countly was built on the opposite assumption: that a meaningful set of buyers, in banking, health, telecoms, government, gaming, and anything sold into the EU public sector, cannot or will not send raw behavioral data to a third party. The company has held that position since 2013, and the product is designed around it. There is an open source server you can install yourself, a managed private cloud where each customer gets an isolated instance rather than a shared tenant, and a fully self-hosted commercial edition where the vendor has no access to your data at all.
The second thing that distinguishes Countly is scope. It is not only an analytics dashboard. The same server that computes funnels and retention also sends push notifications, renders in-app content, runs NPS and rating surveys, collects crash reports with symbolication, and serves remote config values that power A/B tests. For a mobile team that would otherwise buy an analytics tool, a push provider, a crash reporter, and a feature flag service, that consolidation is the actual purchase reason. The trade-off is that no single module is as deep as the specialist product it replaces.
The commercial shape changed materially in 2026. Countly Flex, the managed private cloud, dropped its free tier and restructured into a base plan called Advanced Analytics with two paid capability bundles layered on top: Adaptivity (A/B testing, personalization, journeys, feedback) and Intelligence (drill, funnels, cohorts, and AI-assisted exploration). Flex now starts at $175 per month with a 14 day trial. That entry point is real and self-serve, but it is high enough that a small business evaluating Countly is realistically choosing between paying $175 a month for a managed instance or self-hosting Lite for free and accepting that funnels, cohorts, drill, and user profiles are Enterprise features that Lite does not include.
Best for
Mobile and multi-platform product teams with a data residency, regulatory, or sovereignty constraint that rules out sending raw events to a US cloud, and teams that want analytics, push, surveys, and A/B testing from one server instead of four vendors.
Not the right fit for
- Teams looking for a free or cheap hosted product analytics tool; the free tier on Flex was removed in 2026 and paid Flex starts at $175 per month, so the only free path is self-hosting Lite yourself.
- Anyone who wants funnels, cohorts, drill, or user profiles without paying; those depend on a granular data store that the open source Lite edition does not include.
- Small teams without any operations capability who choose the self-hosted route; running Countly means running and backing up MongoDB, and that is a real ongoing job.
- Web-only marketing teams who want page and campaign analytics; Countly can do web analytics, but the product's centre of gravity is app instrumentation and the setup cost is higher than a purpose-built web tool.
- Organizations that want a warehouse-native analytics layer sitting on Snowflake or BigQuery; Countly is a self-contained system with its own database, not a semantic layer over yours.
- Buyers who need a large third-party integration marketplace; the integration surface is narrower than the hosted incumbents and more is done through the API.
How it works
- 1
You install a Countly server or provision a Flex instance, then integrate one of the SDKs. There are official SDKs for iOS, Android, Web (JavaScript), React Native, Flutter, Unity, Node.js, .NET, Java, Python, and several others, and they share a common feature set: sessions, custom events, view tracking, user properties, crash reporting, push, remote config, and feedback widgets. The SDK batches requests and queues them offline, which matters for mobile apps on unreliable networks.
- 2
Incoming requests are written to MongoDB. Aggregate metrics (sessions, users, events by segment, device and geography breakdowns) are precomputed into collections that make the standard dashboards fast regardless of volume. The deeper analysis features, drill, funnels, cohorts, flows, and user profiles, read from a second store of granular event records, which is why those features exist only in the commercial editions: Lite does not maintain that granular layer.
- 3
Analysis happens through named modules rather than one query builder. Drill lets you filter raw events by any property without writing a query. Funnels define an ordered sequence of steps and report conversion and drop-off. Cohorts define a behavioral rule (did X, did not do Y within N days) and produce a live membership list. Flows shows the actual paths users take between views. Retention reports daily, weekly, and monthly return curves.
- 4
Cohorts are the hinge between analysis and action, because they are addressable. A cohort of users who started checkout and did not finish can be the audience for a push notification, an in-app message from Content Builder, a survey, or a multi-step Journey. That loop, define a segment from behavior and then message it from the same tool, is the part of Countly that a pure analytics product cannot do without a second vendor.
- 5
Data governance is a first-class module rather than a settings page. Data Manager lets you rename, merge, and block events and properties after the fact; filtering rules drop unwanted requests at ingest; Compliance Hub tracks consent per user and handles export and erasure requests; audit logs record every operator action. On self-hosted deployments none of this data leaves your network.
Feature breakdown
28 features in 4 modulesCore analytics
The always-on aggregate layer that every edition includes.- Sessions and users
- Daily, weekly, and monthly active users, session counts, session duration, new versus returning, and time of day, computed as precomputed aggregates so dashboards stay fast at high volume.
- Custom events with segmentation
- Any event can carry key/value segments and a numeric sum or duration, so a single purchase event doubles as a revenue metric broken down by plan, country, or app version.
- Views and view tracking
- Screen and page views recorded with time spent, giving the same navigation picture for an app that pageviews give for a website.
- Real-time and online users
- A live count of currently active users and events arriving now, useful during a release or a campaign send rather than as a daily habit.
- Dashboards and custom widgets
- Multiple dashboards per team, each assembled from widgets over any event, metric, or segment, with per-group visibility controls.
- Formulas
- Derive custom metrics by combining existing ones arithmetically, for example events per session or revenue per active user, without exporting to a spreadsheet.
- Alerts and email reports
- Threshold and percentage-change alerts on any metric, plus scheduled email digests so stakeholders get numbers without logging in.
Deep analysis (Intelligence)
The granular layer, bundled into Enterprise and sold as the Intelligence capability on Flex.- Drill
- Filter and break down raw event records by any recorded property without writing a query, which is where most ad hoc investigation actually happens.
- Funnels
- Ordered multi-step conversion analysis with drop-off at each step, segmentable by device, version, country, or any user property.
- Cohorts
- Behavioral rules of the form did X and did not do Y within a time window, producing a live audience that other modules can target.
- Retention
- Classic daily, weekly, and monthly return curves, with cohort definitions based on first session or on a chosen event.
- Flows
- A Sankey-style view of the paths users actually take between screens, which surfaces the routes nobody designed and everybody uses.
- User profiles
- Individual records with properties, device history, session history, and full event timeline, the view support teams use when a specific customer reports a problem.
- Slipping away
- A standing list of users who have not returned within a chosen window, which is a churn signal that can be pushed straight into a re-engagement campaign.
- AI Agent Cee
- Natural language querying and configuration over your own data, added as the AI layer of the Intelligence bundle rather than as a separate product.
Engagement (Adaptivity)
Acting on a segment from inside the same system that defined it.- Push notifications
- iOS and Android push with cohort targeting, scheduling, localization, rich media, geolocation triggers, and an optional approval workflow before a send goes out.
- Content Builder and in-app messages
- Design in-app content without shipping an app update, targeted by cohort and triggered by behavior.
- Journeys
- Multi-step automated workflows that react to real-time user actions, chaining messages, waits, and branches rather than firing single blasts.
- Surveys, NPS, and ratings
- In-app feedback widgets covering star ratings, Net Promoter Score, and multi-question surveys, with responses tied back to the user profile.
- Remote config and A/B testing
- Serve configuration values to the SDK and split traffic across variants, measuring the effect on any tracked event; the same mechanism doubles as a feature flag system.
- Smart Variables
- Dynamic values that adapt app logic and interface per user, extending remote config from static flags into per-user personalization.
Stability and data operations
Crash reporting, governance, and the plumbing of running your own analytics server.- Crash and error reporting
- Fatal and non-fatal exceptions, native C++ minidumps, and JavaScript errors, grouped and ranked, with symbolication to map stack traces back to source.
- Data Manager
- Rename, merge, block, or transform events and properties after collection, which is how you recover from an instrumentation mistake without a code release.
- Filtering and blocking rules
- Drop requests, events, or sessions at ingest by rule, keeping test traffic and bots out of the data and off your data point meter.
- Compliance Hub
- Per-user consent tracking by feature, plus export and erasure request handling, built for GDPR and similar regimes rather than bolted on.
- Audit logs and two-factor authentication
- Every operator action is logged and attributable, with 2FA, reCAPTCHA, and group-based permissions on the dashboard.
- Data migration and consolidate
- Move data between Countly servers and unify multiple apps into a single view, which matters when you self-host and change infrastructure.
- White labeling and hooks
- Rebrand the dashboard and trigger outbound HTTP calls or emails on defined conditions, both used heavily by agencies and by product teams wiring Countly into existing workflows.
Use cases
5 documentedHead of product at a regional banking app
Compliance will not approve sending raw customer behavior to a US-hosted analytics vendor, but the team still needs funnels for the loan application flow and retention curves by segment.
Countly Enterprise runs inside the bank's own data centre, so no event data leaves the network. The product team gets funnels, cohorts, and drill, and the compliance team gets audit logs, consent records, and a vendor with no access to the data.
Mobile game studio consolidating four vendors
The studio pays separately for analytics, a push service, a crash reporter, and a remote config tool, and the four systems disagree about who a user is.
A single Countly integration replaces all four. A cohort of players who reached level five and stopped becomes the direct audience for a push campaign, and crash spikes are visible against the same app version breakdown as retention.
Bootstrapped SaaS team on a hard budget
The team wants app analytics but cannot justify $175 a month, and already runs its own infrastructure.
Countly Lite is self-hosted on an existing server for the cost of the VM. The team gets sessions, events, views, crash reports, and push, and accepts that funnels, cohorts, and drill are not available without upgrading, doing that analysis by exporting events instead.
IoT and connected device company
Devices in the field report telemetry and usage, but consumer product analytics tools assume a phone or a browser and price per monthly active user in a way that does not fit a fleet.
Countly's event model and self-hosted deployment handle device-originated events without a per-seat pricing mismatch, and the same server sends remote config values back to the fleet.
Agency running analytics for multiple client apps
Each client wants its own dashboard, its own data separation, and reporting that carries the agency's branding rather than a vendor's.
One Countly deployment hosts multiple apps with group-based permissions per client, white labeled to the agency, with scheduled email reports going to client stakeholders who never log in.
Pricing
from Free if self-hosted (Lite); managed Flex starts at $175 per monthThree editions. Countly Lite is free and open source under AGPLv3, self-hosted, and limited to the aggregate analytics layer. Countly Flex is a managed private cloud priced by monthly active users and data points, with a base Advanced Analytics plan and two paid capability bundles (Adaptivity and Intelligence) added on top. Countly Enterprise is a self-hosted commercial license with all capabilities included, priced by quote and billed annually.
| Plan | Price | Includes |
|---|---|---|
| Lite | $0 self-hosted, open source |
Excludes the granular data layer, so drill, funnels, cohorts, flows, and user profiles are not available. |
| Flex | From $175 per month, managed private cloud |
Monthly billing, cancel anytime, 14 day trial. Exceeding your tier's usage limit locks server access until the next cycle rather than generating an overage invoice. |
| Enterprise | Custom quote billed annually, self-hosted |
The edition most Countly customers with a regulatory constraint actually buy; expect a demo and a sales conversation rather than a checkout page. |
Billing notes
- Flex meters two things at once, monthly active users and data points, so a low-MAU app that fires many events per user can hit a limit earlier than the headline MAU number suggests.
- Hitting a Flex usage limit temporarily locks dashboard access until the cycle resets. Plan headroom before a launch or a marketing push.
- Flex prices vary by hosting region because the underlying infrastructure cost does; the same tier is not the same price everywhere.
- Adaptivity and Intelligence are separate line items on Flex. A team that assumes funnels and cohorts are included in the $175 base will find they are not.
- Enterprise is annual and quote-only, with no published list price. Countly is bootstrapped rather than venture funded, which historically has meant less aggressive discounting than growth-stage rivals.
- Self-hosting Lite is free in licence terms but not in cost: a server, MongoDB, backups, upgrades, and someone's time are the real bill.
- The AGPLv3 licence on Lite carries copyleft obligations; if you modify the server and expose it over a network, the licence has requirements. Read it before building on top of it.
Value assessment: Countly's value depends almost entirely on which edition you are talking about. Self-hosted Lite is one of the few genuinely capable free analytics servers, and for a team with infrastructure skills it delivers sessions, events, crashes, and push for the price of a VM. Managed Flex is not cheap at $175 per month for a base plan that excludes funnels and cohorts, and against Mixpanel's or PostHog's free and low tiers it loses on price outright. What you are actually buying at that price is isolation: your own instance, your choice of region, and no shared multi-tenant store. If data residency is a requirement rather than a preference, that premium is the whole point and it is reasonable. If it is not, the hosted incumbents give more analytics per dollar.
Strengths & limitations
Strengths
- Genuine self-hosting, including a free open source edition, which very few product analytics tools still offer credibly.
- Analytics and engagement in one system: a cohort defined from behavior is immediately addressable by push, in-app message, survey, or journey.
- Breadth across mobile, web, desktop, and IoT from one server, with mature first-party SDKs on all of them.
- Crash reporting with symbolication built in, so app stability and product behavior share a single app version and device breakdown.
- Data governance treated as product surface: Data Manager, filtering rules, Compliance Hub, and audit logs rather than a privacy checkbox.
- Isolated per-customer instances on Flex, which is materially different from a shared multi-tenant cloud when a security review is involved.
- Bootstrapped and independent since 2013, with no acquirer roadmap risk hanging over the product.
Limitations
- The hosted free tier was removed in 2026, so the cheapest managed entry point is now $175 per month, which puts Countly out of reach for many small teams that would have trialled it.
- Lite lacks the granular data store, so funnels, cohorts, drill, flows, and user profiles are simply absent from the free edition. This is the single most misunderstood thing about Countly.
- On Flex, funnels and cohorts sit in the paid Intelligence bundle rather than the base plan, so the real cost of a comparable analytics setup is above the advertised entry price.
- Self-hosting means operating MongoDB. Reviewers repeatedly report friction with the Docker image, memory pressure, and incompatibility with some managed MongoDB providers, and the minimum viable server is larger than teams expect once push notifications are enabled.
- Exceeding a Flex usage limit locks dashboard access until the next cycle rather than degrading gracefully, which is a harsher failure mode than an overage charge.
- The integration ecosystem is thin next to Mixpanel, Amplitude, or Segment-connected tools; more connections have to be built against the API or through hooks.
- The interface is module-based rather than a single flexible query surface, so analysts used to composing arbitrary queries in one place find it fragmented.
- Documentation and community support skew toward developers; a non-technical marketer will need engineering help to get past the first dashboard.
Head-to-head comparisons
6 alternativesCountly vs Heap
from Free up to 10,000 monthly sessions; the Growth tier is commonly reported at around $3,600 per yearOpposite philosophies of data collection. Heap autocaptures every interaction so you can define events retroactively without instrumenting them first, which suits web product teams who do not want to plan a tracking plan in advance. Countly requires deliberate instrumentation through its SDKs, which is more work up front but gives cleaner data and works identically on mobile, desktop, and IoT where autocapture does not. Heap is cloud-only; if self-hosting or data residency is on your requirements list, Countly is the only one of the two still in the conversation.
Full Countly vs Heap comparisonCountly vs June
from No longer sold (product wound down 8 August 2025); the last published self-serve price was $149 per month on the Growth plan before it was retired in October 2024June is a lightweight, opinionated analytics layer for B2B SaaS that gives you company-level reports out of the box with minimal setup. Countly is a heavier platform covering mobile, crash reporting, push, and surveys, with a self-hosted option. A small SaaS team that wants useful reports on Friday afternoon should look at June; a team shipping a mobile app under a compliance constraint should look at Countly. There is very little overlap in the buyers.
Full Countly vs June comparisonCountly vs Mixpanel
from $0 (Free plan, 1M events per month), Growth starts at $0 and scales with volumeMixpanel is the deeper and faster analysis tool: better ad hoc querying, a more mature funnel and retention engine, and a free tier that lets a small team get real work done at zero cost. Countly's answers are self-hosting, an isolated private cloud, and the engagement layer Mixpanel does not have (push, in-app content, surveys, A/B testing from the same system). Choose Mixpanel for analytical depth on a budget; choose Countly when the data cannot leave your control or when you want to consolidate four mobile vendors into one.
Full Countly vs Mixpanel comparisonCountly vs Amplitude
from $0 (Free, 2M events per month forever); Plus starts at $0 with the first 2M events freeAmplitude is the enterprise standard for behavioral analysis, with stronger cohort and predictive tooling and a much larger integration surface. Countly competes on deployment model rather than analytical depth: Amplitude is cloud-only, Countly can run entirely inside your network. Teams that need sophisticated analysis and can accept a US-hosted vendor pick Amplitude; teams whose blocker is where the data lives pick Countly and accept a less refined analysis layer.
Full Countly vs Amplitude comparisonCountly vs PostHog
from $0 (generous monthly free tiers; pay only past the allowance)The closest philosophical rival, and the harder comparison for Countly. PostHog is also open source and self-hostable, with a generous free cloud tier, plus session replay, feature flags, and experiments in one product. PostHog's centre of gravity is web and product-led SaaS; Countly's is mobile and regulated deployment, with better native mobile SDKs, push notifications, and crash reporting with symbolication. If you are a web SaaS team, PostHog is usually the better and cheaper answer. If you ship native mobile apps into a regulated market, Countly fits better.
Full Countly vs PostHog comparisonCountly vs Matomo
from Free self-hosted (Community edition), or 29 euros per month for Matomo Cloud at 50,000 hitsBoth are self-hostable and privacy-first, but they answer different questions. Matomo is a Google Analytics replacement: sessions, channels, campaigns, and page reports for a website. Countly is product analytics: events, funnels, retention, and cohorts across apps, plus the engagement layer. A marketing team measuring a website should run Matomo; a product team measuring an application should run Countly. Organizations with a strict data residency policy frequently run both.
Full Countly vs Matomo comparisonImplementation & onboarding
- Setup time
- A Flex instance and a first SDK integration can be live in a day. Self-hosting Lite or Enterprise is a genuine infrastructure project: provisioning, MongoDB, TLS, backups, and upgrade planning, typically a few days for someone who has done it before and longer for someone who has not. The instrumentation work, deciding which events to fire and what properties to attach, is the part that takes weeks regardless of edition.
- Learning curve
- Moderate. The aggregate dashboards are readable immediately. The harder skill is event design, because Countly rewards a small number of well-segmented events and punishes a sprawl of one-off event names; Data Manager exists precisely because most teams get this wrong first. Operators of self-hosted deployments need MongoDB familiarity as an ongoing requirement, not a one-time one.
- Onboarding
- Flex is self-serve with a 14 day trial and community Discord support, with paid support tiers and one-time onboarding services available. Enterprise includes a dedicated customer success manager, guided deployment, and SLA-backed support. Lite has documentation and community help only.
- Migration notes
- Countly provides a data migration tool for moving between Countly servers, which makes going from a self-hosted Lite instance to Flex or Enterprise straightforward. Coming from another vendor is harder: historical events can be replayed through the ingest API, but aggregate metrics from Mixpanel or Amplitude will not reconcile exactly because of differing session and active-user definitions. Plan to run both in parallel for a cycle and treat the first month of Countly numbers as a new baseline rather than a continuation.
Platform, API & security
- Platforms
- iOS, macOS, watchOS, tvOSAndroidWeb (JavaScript SDK)React Native, Flutter, Cordova, IonicUnity and UnrealDesktop (Windows, macOS, Linux)Node.js, Java, .NET, Python, PHPIoT and connected devices
- API
- A documented write API for ingesting events and user data, a read API for retrieving aggregated and raw data, and a management API for creating apps, users, and configuration. Hooks fire outbound HTTP requests or emails on defined conditions, and the plugin architecture allows custom server-side extensions on self-hosted deployments, which is the main reason engineering teams pick it.
- Compliance
- GDPRCCPAHIPAA-capable when self-hostedCOPPAISO 27001
- Data residency
- Flex offers a choice of hosting regions with isolated per-customer instances. Enterprise and Lite run entirely on your own infrastructure, so residency is whatever you decide and the vendor has no access to the data.
- SSO
- Single sign-on and two-factor authentication available on commercial editions, with group-based role permissions on the dashboard.
- Security notes
- Compliance Hub records consent per user per feature and processes export and erasure requests. Audit logs make every operator action attributable. Filtering rules can drop sensitive requests before they are stored, and self-hosted deployments keep the entire event stream inside the customer network, which is the reason most regulated buyers evaluate Countly at all.
Support & resources
- Channels
- Community Discord and forumEmail and ticket support on paid plansDedicated customer success manager on EnterprisePaid one-time onboarding and professional services
- Documentation
- Extensive developer documentation covering server installation, every SDK, plugin development, and the APIs. It is written for engineers, which is appropriate for the product but leaves non-technical users under-served.
- Community
- An active open source community around the GitHub server repository and the SDK repositories, plus a Discord that serves as the default support channel for Lite users. Community size is smaller than PostHog's or Matomo's, so obscure questions can take a while to get answered.
Company
- Founded
- 2013
- Headquarters
- London, United Kingdom
- Ownership
- Independent, bootstrapped (Countly Ltd, registered in England and Wales)
- Founders
- Onur Alp Soner, Gorkem Cetin
- Employees
- ~50 (est. 2026)
- Funding
- Bootstrapped with no disclosed venture funding; the company grew from an open source project into an enterprise business on revenue rather than rounds.
Timeline
- 2013Founded by Onur Alp Soner and Gorkem Cetin as an open source self-hosted mobile analytics server; Countly Ltd incorporated in the UK.
- 2014Enterprise Edition introduced after inbound demand from large organizations wanting commercial support and the granular data layer.
- 2017Scope broadens beyond mobile to web and desktop analytics, with the plugin architecture opening the server to custom extensions.
- 2020Engagement modules mature: push notifications, surveys, NPS, ratings, and remote config with A/B testing built on the same server as analytics.
- 2023Community Edition rebranded as Countly Lite; Countly Flex launched as a managed private cloud with per-customer instance isolation.
- 2025AI Agent Cee added for natural language exploration of your own data, positioned as part of the analysis layer rather than a separate product.
- 2026Flex restructured around Advanced Analytics plus the Adaptivity and Intelligence bundles, with a faster query engine; the Flex free tier is discontinued and paid Flex starts at $175 per month.
Integrations
- Jira
- Slack
- Adjust
- Firebase Cloud Messaging
- Apple Push Notification service
- Zapier
- Webhooks and outbound hooks
- Google BigQuery (via export)
- Amazon S3 (data export)
- Grafana (via API)
- Unity and Unreal engines
- MongoDB (as the underlying data store)
Frequently asked questions
12 questionsWhat is Countly used for?
Countly is used to measure how people use mobile apps, websites, desktop software, and connected devices, and then to act on what it finds. It records sessions, custom events, and screen views, reports funnels, retention, cohorts, and user paths on commercial editions, captures crashes with symbolication, and sends push notifications, in-app messages, and surveys to segments defined from that behavior.
Is Countly free?
Countly Lite is free forever, but it is self-hosted open source under AGPLv3, so you supply the server and MongoDB. The hosted product, Countly Flex, no longer has a free tier; that was removed in 2026 and paid Flex now starts at $175 per month with a 14 day trial. If you want free Countly, you are self-hosting it.
How much does Countly cost?
Countly Flex, the managed private cloud, starts at $175 per month for the Advanced Analytics base plan, priced by monthly active users and data points, with Adaptivity and Intelligence sold as additional capability bundles. Countly Enterprise, the self-hosted commercial edition, is quote-only and billed annually with everything included. Countly Lite costs nothing in licence fees.
What is the difference between Countly Lite, Flex, and Enterprise?
Lite is free, open source, self-hosted, and limited to the aggregate analytics layer. Flex is a managed private cloud with an isolated instance per customer, usage-based pricing, and capability bundles you add on. Enterprise is the same full-featured software licensed commercially and deployed on your own infrastructure with support and an SLA. The practical dividing line is the granular data store: Lite does not have it, so Lite does not have drill, funnels, cohorts, flows, or user profiles.
Does Countly Lite include funnels and cohorts?
No. Funnels, cohorts, drill, flows, and user profiles all depend on a secondary database of granular event records that only the commercial editions maintain. This is the most common surprise for teams who install Lite expecting a free Mixpanel. Lite gives you sessions, events with segmentation, views, crash reports, push, and dashboards.
Can Countly be self-hosted?
Yes, and it is one of the few product analytics platforms where self-hosting is a first-class deployment rather than a legacy option. Both Lite and Enterprise install on your own servers, running on Node.js with MongoDB as the data store. No event data reaches Countly the company in either case, which is the main reason regulated organizations choose it.
Is Countly GDPR compliant?
It is built for it. Compliance Hub tracks consent per user per feature and handles data export and erasure requests, filtering rules can drop sensitive data before storage, and audit logs record operator actions. On a self-hosted deployment the data never leaves your infrastructure at all, which removes the international transfer question entirely. As always, controller obligations remain yours.
Countly vs Mixpanel: which should I choose?
Mixpanel is the better pure analysis tool, with faster ad hoc querying, a deeper funnel and retention engine, and a free tier that a small team can actually use. Countly wins on deployment model and scope: self-hosting or an isolated private cloud, plus push notifications, surveys, crash reporting, and A/B testing from the same system. If your data can live in a shared US cloud, Mixpanel gives more analytics per dollar. If it cannot, Countly is one of very few real options.
Countly vs PostHog: what is the real difference?
Both are open source and self-hostable, and PostHog has a more generous free cloud tier plus session replay and feature flags. The split is platform focus. PostHog is strongest for web and product-led SaaS. Countly is strongest for native mobile: better first-party mobile SDKs, push notifications, and crash reporting with symbolication, and a deployment story aimed at regulated industries. Web SaaS teams usually end up on PostHog; mobile teams under compliance constraints usually end up on Countly.
What does Countly run on and how hard is it to operate?
The server is Node.js with MongoDB. Operating it means running and backing up MongoDB, which is the honest cost of self-hosting. Community reports flag friction with the Docker image, memory pressure when push notifications are enabled, and incompatibility with some managed MongoDB providers. Budget more than the documented minimum specification and treat upgrades as scheduled work.
Who owns Countly?
Countly Ltd, an independent company registered in England and Wales and headquartered in London, founded in 2013 by Onur Alp Soner and Gorkem Cetin. It is bootstrapped with no disclosed venture funding and has not been acquired, which is unusual in a category where most rivals have taken large rounds or been bought.
What happens if I exceed my Flex plan limits?
Flex meters both monthly active users and data points. Exceeding your tier's limit temporarily locks server access until the next billing cycle rather than charging an overage. That is a harsher failure than most vendors apply, so size the plan with headroom before a launch, a campaign, or a seasonal spike.
Editorial verdict
Countly is the answer to a specific question: what do you use when the behavioral data cannot leave your control? On that question it is one of a very small number of credible options, and it goes further than its self-hosted peers by putting push notifications, in-app content, surveys, A/B testing, and crash reporting on the same server as the analytics, so a cohort you define is a cohort you can message. Thirteen years of independent, bootstrapped development shows in the breadth of the SDKs and the seriousness of the governance tooling. The problem is the middle of the market. The 2026 removal of the Flex free tier and a $175 per month entry price that still excludes funnels and cohorts means a small business without a data residency requirement will get more analytics for less money from Mixpanel, PostHog, or Amplitude, and a small business with no operations capability should not casually take on self-hosted MongoDB. Buy Countly when regulation, sovereignty, or vendor consolidation on mobile is the actual constraint. If it is not, buy something cheaper.
Written by the SaaSTracker editorial team. Awards, when shown, are judged against the published criteria in our methodology.