# OpenPanel

> OpenPanel is an open source web and product analytics platform, positioned by its maker as an alternative to Mixpanel, that combines a Plausible-style traffic overview with event tracking, funnels, retention, conversion trends, user profiles, groups, and opt-in session replay. It tracks without cookies using a daily-rotating hashed identifier, runs its cloud on Hetzner servers in Germany, is licensed under AGPL-3.0 so anyone can self-host it with unlimited events, and prices its cloud purely on monthly event volume from $2.50 a month for 5,000 events, with unlimited users, projects, dashboards, and tracked profiles on every tier.

- Category: Product Analytics & Session Replay (https://saastracker.org/categories/product-analytics)
- Website: https://openpanel.dev
- Starting price: $2.50 per month billed monthly for 5,000 events, or $25 per year billed annually; self-hosting is free
- Free plan: No free cloud tier. Self-hosting is free with unlimited events, and open source projects that meet the vendor's criteria can apply for free cloud access up to 2.5 million events a month.
- Free trial: 30 days on the cloud; the homepage and pricing page say no credit card is required
- Founded: 2023, HQ: Stockholm, Sweden, Ownership: Independent, founder-owned (OpenPanel AB)
- Profile last reviewed: 2026-09-26
- Canonical profile: https://saastracker.org/products/openpanel

## Key facts

| Attribute | Value | Source |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Starting price | $2.50/mo for 5,000 events, or $25/yr billed annually | openpanel.dev/pricing, 2026-09-26 |
| Pricing meter | Events per month only; users, projects, dashboards, and profiles unlimited | openpanel.dev/pricing, 2026-09-26 |
| Free trial | 30 days, no credit card required | openpanel.dev/pricing, 2026-09-26 |
| Free plan | None on cloud; free self-hosting with unlimited events | openpanel.dev/pricing, 2026-09-26 |
| Self-hosting | Yes, AGPL-3.0 license | github.com/Openpanel-dev/openpanel, 2026-09-26 |
| API access | REST track, import, export, insights, and manage APIs on all plans | openpanel.dev/docs/api-reference/rate-limits, 2026-09-26 |
| Session replay retention | 30 days, no cap on replays | openpanel.dev/docs/session-replay, 2026-09-26 |

## Overview

OpenPanel is a young product with a clear origin story. Its founder, Carl-Gerhard Lindesvärd, says he started it in late 2023 after his Mixpanel startup program ended and a recipe app with around 10,000 monthly users and 200,000 to 300,000 events a month produced a bill he considered unreasonable for an app that made no money. The public GitHub repository dates from February 2024, the cloud launched as a free beta in March 2024, and the company behind it, OpenPanel AB, is registered in Stockholm. As of September 2026 the repository has roughly 7,000 stars, around 490 forks, and commits landing within the past week, which is the evidence that matters for a product this new: it is actively built, and it is built mostly by one person with a small group of contributors.

The pitch is two tools in one. Web analytics tools like Plausible and Umami give you a clean page of traffic numbers and stop there; product analytics tools like Mixpanel give you events, funnels, and retention but treat the marketing site as an afterthought. OpenPanel tries to cover both from one tracking script: an overview of visitors, referrers, UTM campaigns, geography, and devices, plus custom events with properties, identified user profiles, account-level groups for B2B products, funnels, retention cohorts, conversion-over-time charts, revenue events, and session replay. It adds a few things neither camp usually has at this price, notably event and funnel notifications into Slack, Discord, or a webhook, a Google Search Console integration, and a hosted MCP server that lets Claude, Cursor, or another AI client query your analytics directly.

The commercial model is deliberately simple and deliberately not free. The cloud has no free tier; the vendor says it wants users who are serious about the product and needs the revenue to maintain it. Instead there is a 30 day trial that the homepage says needs no credit card, followed by a single plan priced only by monthly events: $2.50 for 5,000, $20 for 100,000, $90 for 1 million, $350 for 10 million, and $900 for 50 million, with yearly billing at ten times the monthly price. Self-hosting the AGPL code is free with unlimited events. That makes OpenPanel far cheaper than Mixpanel once you are past Mixpanel's 1 million event free tier, and more expensive than Mixpanel below it, which is the single most important thing a small team should work out before choosing.

The trade for the low price is maturity. There are no feature flags and no experiment engine (A/B testing here means breaking a conversion chart down by a variant property you set yourself), no SOC 2 report or SSO on the public site, a Kotlin SDK the docs say is not yet published to Maven, and a support model built on documentation, GitHub issues, Discord, and email on paid plans. Self-hosters get stable tagged Docker images, while the builds from every commit sit behind a $20 a month supporter program. None of that is disqualifying for a startup or an indie product, but it is a different risk profile from a vendor with a hundred engineers and a trust center.

## How it works

1. You create a project and add either a script tag or one of the SDKs: JavaScript for web, Node, Next.js, Astro, Express, Python, Ruby, Rust, Java, React Native, Swift for Apple platforms, and Kotlin for Android, plus a WordPress plugin. The script tag tracks page views automatically, and options switch on outgoing link tracking and attribute-based click tracking without writing event code. Anything that matters to the product is sent as a named event with properties, and an identify call attaches events to a known user profile across devices.

2. Anonymous visitors are identified without cookies. OpenPanel hashes the user agent, IP address, and project ID with a salt that rotates at midnight UTC, discards the raw IP after deriving geolocation, and so produces a device ID that is stable within a day and unlinkable after it. Sessions end after 30 minutes of inactivity and are created only for client events, so backend events attach to existing sessions rather than inventing new ones. Where a jurisdiction requires consent anyway, the SDK can queue everything until you call ready().

3. Events land in ClickHouse, with Postgres holding configuration and Redis handling caching and queues. The dashboard reads that store for a web overview (visitors, sessions, bounce rate, referrers, UTMs, geography, devices, entry and exit pages), a real-time view, user profiles with session history, groups for companies or workspaces, and a report builder for line, bar, funnel, retention, conversion, and sankey-style flow charts that can be arranged into dashboards and shared by public or password-protected link.

4. Findings move out through three routes. Notification rules fire on a matching event in real time, or on a completed funnel after the session ends, and post to Slack, Discord, or any webhook with a templated or JavaScript-transformed payload. A REST API covers tracking, importing, exporting raw events and chart data, per-dimension insights, and project management. And a hosted MCP server with 38 tools exposes funnels, retention, profiles, top pages, and Search Console data to AI assistants, alongside an optional in-dashboard AI chat that, on the cloud, sends the relevant data slice to OpenAI.

## Best for

Startups, indie developers, and small SaaS or ecommerce teams who want one cookieless, EU-hosted tool covering both the marketing site and the in-product funnel, who value predictable event-based pricing with unlimited seats, and who either have enough volume that Mixpanel's paid tier would cost several times more or have the skills to self-host under the AGPL.

## Not the right fit for

- Very small products that fit inside Mixpanel's 1 million event free tier; OpenPanel has no free cloud plan, and the same 1 million events costs $90 a month here.
- Teams that need feature flags, randomized experiments with statistical significance, surveys, or in-app guides; OpenPanel has none of these, and its A/B testing is a chart breakdown by a variant property you assign elsewhere.
- Buyers whose procurement asks for a SOC 2 report, ISO 27001, SAML single sign-on, or a named account team; none of these is published, and the vendor is a very small Swedish company.
- Native Android teams expecting a mature, published SDK; the docs state the Kotlin SDK is not yet published to Maven.
- Anyone who wants replay as a debugging tool; replay is opt-in, masks all text by default, and is kept for 30 days, with no console, network, or error capture documented.

## Features

### Product analytics

Events, people, and accounts, with the standard product questions answered on complete, unsampled data.

- **Event tracking with properties**: Named events carry arbitrary properties, global properties can be attached to every event, and numeric profile properties can be incremented or decremented, which is the raw material for every other report.
- **Funnels**: Multi-step conversion built directly from existing events, with each step able to be one event or a group of events, property filters per step, breakdowns by any property, and time between steps. The vendor says funnels use every event with no sampling.
- **Retention cohorts**: Pick any start event and any return event, and OpenPanel groups users into cohorts by when they did the first and shows the share who did the second in each following period, filterable by plan, source, or custom property.
- **Conversion over time**: A trend view of a start-to-end conversion rate by day, week, or month, with average, best, and worst periods and breakdowns by device, country, campaign, or an experiment variant property.
- **User profiles and identity**: Identified users get a profile with properties, event history, sessions, and metrics across devices; anonymous visitors are tracked by the daily device ID until identified.
- **Groups for B2B accounts**: Users can be linked to one or more groups such as a company, workspace, or team, with group properties like plan or seats, so reports can answer what an account is doing rather than only what one person did.
- **Report builder and flows**: Line, bar, and sankey-style flow charts combining metrics from any event, saved into customizable dashboards with Grafana-style widget layouts introduced in v2.

### Web analytics and revenue

The Plausible-style traffic layer and the money attached to it, from the same script.

- **Traffic overview**: Visitors, sessions, bounce rate, session duration, top pages, entry and exit pages, referrers, all five UTM parameters, country, region, city, device, browser, and operating system on one page.
- **Real-time view**: A live count of active visitors and a live event stream, useful during a launch or campaign send.
- **Revenue tracking**: Any event can carry an amount, so purchases, upgrades, renewals, and refunds flow into funnels, retention, and profiles, and revenue can be broken down by referrer or signup source.
- **Google Search Console integration**: Search queries, clicks, impressions, average position, page details, and keyword cannibalization sit beside on-site behavior, so a query can be followed through to conversion without switching tools.
- **Adblocker-resistant proxying**: The Next.js SDK and the WordPress plugin can proxy tracking through your own domain, and the docs explain how to do the same in any backend framework, recovering visitors whose blockers catch generic analytics domains.

### Session replay and privacy

Opt-in replay with aggressive default masking, and tracking designed to avoid cookies altogether.

- **Session replay**: Built on the open source rrweb library, recording DOM changes, mouse movement, scrolls, and interactions as structured data rather than video. It is off by default, loads as a separate script only for recorded sessions, has no cap on the number of replays, and keeps each replay for 30 days.
- **Default text and input masking**: All page text and all inputs are replaced with asterisks in the browser before anything is sent, with selectors to unmask safe elements or block regions entirely, which is a stricter default than most replay tools ship.
- **Cookieless identification**: A daily-rotating salted hash of IP, user agent, and project replaces cookies and persistent IDs; the vendor's DPA states that raw IP addresses are never stored and that standard website tracking does not constitute personal data under GDPR.
- **Consent queue**: Initializing with disabled set to true holds every track, identify, and replay chunk in memory until ready() is called, and a waitForProfile mode holds events until a user logs in.

### Alerts, sharing, and data access

Getting numbers to people and machines without per-seat pricing.

- **Event and funnel notifications**: Rules fire instantly on a matching event, or after a session ends when every funnel step was completed in order, and post to Slack, Discord, or a webhook with template variables or a JavaScript transform of the payload. S3 and Google Cloud Storage exports are listed as coming soon.
- **Unlimited members and project-level access**: No seat charges on any tier; members get organization-wide access or access to specific projects only.
- **Public and password-protected sharing**: Whole dashboards or single reports can be shared by link, open to anyone or behind a password, which suits client reporting and public stats pages.
- **REST API**: Track, import, raw event export, chart export, around fifty insights endpoints, and a manage API for projects, clients, and references. Insights and export allow 100 requests per 10 seconds per client; tracking and import are not rate limited.
- **MCP server and AI assistant**: A hosted MCP server with 38 tools lets Claude, Cursor, Windsurf, or a custom agent query funnels, retention, profiles, and Search Console data. The optional in-app AI chat uses OpenAI on the cloud, and self-hosters can plug in their own OpenAI or Anthropic key.

## Use cases

- **Indie developer with a consumer app outgrowing a free tier**: The app now fires around 5 million events a month, the Mixpanel quote above the free tier is several hundred dollars a month or more, and the app earns little. Outcome: OpenPanel's 5 million event step costs $250 a month, or $2,500 a year, with funnels, retention, profiles, and replay included. If even that is too much, the same software self-hosted on a single VPS costs the price of the server.
- **European SaaS founder avoiding a cookie banner**: The team wants one tool for the marketing site and the signup funnel, hosted in the EU, without adding a consent banner that hides half the traffic. Outcome: The cookieless script tracks the site and the app from one project, data sits on Hetzner servers in Germany under a published DPA, and the consent queue is available for the logged-in product if counsel wants explicit consent there anyway.
- **B2B SaaS team tracking accounts, not just users**: Twenty people at one customer share a subscription, and the renewal question is whether the account is active, not whether one user logged in. Outcome: Group calls attach users to their company with plan and seat properties, retention and funnels can be read at that level, and a funnel notification posts to Slack whenever a trial account completes the activation sequence.
- **Agency reporting to several small clients**: Each client wants traffic, conversions, and search performance, and per-seat analytics pricing makes giving every client a login expensive. Outcome: Unlimited projects and members on one event-priced plan, project-level access per client, Search Console data beside site behavior, and password-protected dashboard links for clients who never log in.

## Pricing

One cloud plan metered only on events tracked per month, chosen from 13 published volume steps between 5,000 and 50 million events, with custom pricing above that. Every step includes the same features and unlimited websites or apps, users, dashboards, charts, and tracked profiles. Yearly billing costs ten times the monthly price. The AGPL-3.0 source can be self-hosted for free with unlimited events.

- **Self-hosted**: $0 your own server, AGPL-3.0. Unlimited events, projects, and users; Docker Compose setup script plus guides for Coolify, Dokploy, and Kubernetes; You run ClickHouse, Postgres, and Redis, and supply email and optional AI keys. Stable tagged images are public. Images built on every commit require the supporter program from $20 a month.
- **Cloud, 5K to 500K events**: $2.50 to $50 per month, or $25 to $500 per year. 5K events $2.50, 10K $5, 100K $20, 250K $30, 500K $50 per month; All features, including funnels, retention, profiles, groups, and session replay; Unlimited websites or apps, users, dashboards, charts, and tracked profiles.
- **Cloud, 1M to 5M events**: $90 to $250 per month, or $900 to $2,500 per year. 1M events $90, 2.5M $180, 5M $250 per month; Same feature set as every other step; EU hosting in Germany. This is the band where OpenPanel is compared most directly with Mixpanel, which is free up to 1 million events and bills per event above it.
- **Cloud, 10M to 50M events**: $350 to $900 per month, or $3,500 to $9,000 per year. 10M events $350, 20M $530, 30M $680, 40M $800, 50M $900 per month; Same feature set as every other step; Email support on paid plans.
- **Custom**: Quoted above 50 million events per month. Selected from the pricing slider; no published rate.

Add-ons:

- Supporter program (From $20 per month): Aimed at self-hosters: access to private Docker images built on every commit, priority Discord support, and prioritized feature requests.

Billing notes:

- Prices as published September 2026, in US dollars plus VAT where applicable. Monthly and annual prices are both published; annual is ten times the monthly price, which the vendor describes as two months free.
- The meter is events per month and nothing else. Seats, projects, dashboards, and tracked profiles are unlimited on every step, and there are no feature gates between steps.
- No overage rate is published. The terms of service allow the vendor to suspend or terminate an account whose project exceeds its plan's usage limits, in one period or repeatedly, and say it will try to warn you as usage approaches the limit but is not obliged to. Budget headroom rather than assuming an automatic upgrade.
- Subscriptions renew automatically and, except where the law requires otherwise, fees are non-refundable; cancelling keeps access to the end of the paid period.
- Session replay does not appear as a separate meter on the pricing page, and the docs describe unlimited replays with 30 day retention. Confirm how replay payloads relate to your event count before enabling it on a busy site.
- Self-hosting is free in license terms but not in effort: ClickHouse, Postgres, Redis, backups, upgrades, and the email provider are yours, and the AGPL imposes source-sharing obligations if you modify the server and offer it over a network.

Value assessment: OpenPanel's value depends on where your volume sits relative to Mixpanel's free tier. Under 1 million events a month, Mixpanel costs nothing and OpenPanel costs up to $90, so the argument for OpenPanel there is cookieless tracking, EU hosting, and web analytics in the same tool rather than price. Above 1 million events the arithmetic flips hard: 10 million events is $350 a month on OpenPanel, while Mixpanel's published $0.00028 per event entry rate would put the 9 million billable events above its free allowance at roughly $2,500 before volume discounts. Unlimited seats, replay included, and a flat feature set make the bill easy to forecast. What you are not paying for is maturity: no flags or experiments, no published security certifications, and a very small vendor. For a startup or indie product that is usually an acceptable trade; for a company with a procurement process it often is not.

### Entry price history

Dates are when SaaSTracker checked the vendor's published pricing, not when the vendor changed it.

Entry price first recorded on 26 September 2026. It will be re-checked when this category next comes round the rotation.

| Checked | Entry price | Normalised | Event | Note |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| 2026-09-26 | $2.50 per month billed monthly for 5,000 events, or $25 per year billed annually; self-hosting is free | $2.50 monthly, flat | recorded |  |

## Strengths

- Published, flat event pricing with no feature gates: $20 buys 100,000 events and $350 buys 10 million, with unlimited seats, projects, and profiles on every step.
- Genuinely open source under AGPL-3.0 with a documented self-hosting path and unlimited events, so the exit from the cloud is the same software rather than a migration.
- Web analytics and product analytics from one script, which removes the usual Plausible-plus-Mixpanel pairing for small teams.
- Cookieless tracking by design with a published DPA, Hetzner hosting in Germany, and a sub-processor list that keeps analytics data in the EEA in normal operation.
- Session replay included with no replay cap and all text masked by default, which is a stronger privacy default than most replay tools ship.
- Useful extras rarely found at this price: event and funnel alerts to Slack, Discord, or webhooks, Search Console data, groups for B2B accounts, and a 38 tool MCP server for AI assistants.
- Visibly active: commits within the past week, a v2 release for self-hosters in early 2026, and around 7,000 GitHub stars.

## Limitations

- No free cloud tier, so a product that would fit inside Mixpanel's 1 million free events pays up to $90 a month here for the same volume.
- No feature flags, no experiment engine, no surveys, and no in-app guides; A/B analysis depends on assigning variants in another tool and breaking charts down by that property.
- No SOC 2 report, ISO certification, SAML SSO, or uptime SLA is published, and the company registry lists one to four employees, which will stop some procurement reviews at the first question.
- The published overage behavior is suspension rather than billing, per the terms of service, which is a harsher failure mode than an automatic step-up.
- Mobile coverage is thinner than the incumbents: Swift and React Native are documented, but the docs say the Kotlin SDK is not yet published to Maven, and several framework integrations fall back to the generic web SDK.
- Session replay keeps recordings for 30 days and documents no console, network, or error capture, so it explains behavior rather than debugging it.
- Self-hosters get stable releases publicly but must pay the $20 a month supporter fee for images built on every commit, and running ClickHouse well at volume is real operations work.
- Integrations out are limited to Slack, Discord, webhooks, and the API today; warehouse exports to S3 and Google Cloud Storage are announced as coming soon rather than shipped.

## Comparisons

- **OpenPanel vs Mixpanel**: The comparison OpenPanel invites and the one that turns on volume. Mixpanel is free up to 1 million events and 10,000 replays a month, has the more mature analysis interface, deeper mobile SDKs, warehouse connectors, and SOC 2, and costs nothing for a small app. OpenPanel costs $90 a month at 1 million events but only $350 at 10 million, where Mixpanel's published $0.00028 per event entry rate implies roughly $2,500 before discounts, and it adds cookieless web analytics, EU hosting by default, and self-hosting. Stay on Mixpanel while you fit its free tier or need enterprise assurances; move to OpenPanel when the event bill is the problem.
- **OpenPanel vs Countly**: Both are AGPL open source with a free self-hosted edition, but the free editions are very different. Countly Lite leaves out funnels, cohorts, drill, and user profiles, and managed Countly Flex starts at $175 a month; OpenPanel's self-hosted code includes funnels, retention, profiles, and replay, and its cloud starts at $2.50. Countly is the stronger mobile and regulated-industry platform, with push, crash reporting, surveys, and remote config on the same server. Choose OpenPanel for web and SaaS analytics on a budget; choose Countly for native mobile under a compliance constraint.
- **OpenPanel vs June**: June is discontinued, having wound down into Amplitude in August 2025, so this is a question of where its former users go. OpenPanel recovers some of June's appeal for small B2B teams: group tracking for company-level analysis, Slack alerts when an account completes a funnel, and transparent pricing from $2.50 a month where June's last self-serve plan was $149. It does not auto-generate June's starter report set or sync usage to a CRM, so expect to build the account views yourself.
- **OpenPanel vs Matomo**: Two privacy-first, self-hostable tools from opposite ends. Matomo is a mature Google Analytics replacement with nineteen years of development, CNIL consent-exempt configuration, heatmaps, form analytics, and ecommerce reporting, but its visit-and-pageview model makes product questions awkward and its behavioral features are paid plugins; cloud starts at 29 euros for 50,000 hits. OpenPanel is event-based, includes funnels, retention, and replay at every price, and costs $20 a month for 100,000 events. Pick Matomo for a marketing or ecommerce site that needs the CNIL posture; pick OpenPanel when the site and the product need one tool.

## Pairs well with

OpenPanel is a product analytics tool, and a team running it still has 7 neighbouring categories to staff. The pick in each is Dataddo for customer data platforms, Chameleon for product onboarding & PLG, Churn Solution for retention & churn prevention, Intercom for customer support platforms, Microsoft Clarity for CRO & experimentation, Metronome for subscription billing and Formbricks for forms & surveys, each the leading tool in that category on published criteria.

| Category | Ideal pairing | Because | Benefit |
| --- | --- | --- | --- |
| Customer Data Platforms | [Dataddo](https://saastracker.org/products/dataddo) (Ease of Use) | OpenPanel lists mobile coverage is thinner than the incumbents among its limits. Dataddo adds data blending before delivery. | Events get collected once and sent everywhere, instead of a tag per destination. |
| Product Onboarding & PLG | [Chameleon](https://saastracker.org/products/chameleon) (Innovation) | OpenPanel is built for product analytics, not onboarding. Chameleon adds credible security posture for a 40-person company. | New users reach the thing the product is for without a call, and the drop-off shows up in the data. |
| Retention & Churn Prevention | [Churn Solution](https://saastracker.org/products/churn-solution) (Innovation) | OpenPanel is built for product analytics, not retention. Churn Solution adds $50 monthly minimum. | Accounts at risk surface while there is still time to call, rather than at renewal. |
| Customer Support Platforms | [Intercom](https://saastracker.org/products/intercom) (Innovation) | OpenPanel is built for product analytics, not support. Intercom adds messenger carries real product context into the conversation. | Questions arrive in one queue with a history attached, instead of scattered across personal inboxes. |
| CRO & Experimentation | [Microsoft Clarity](https://saastracker.org/products/microsoft-clarity) (Ease of Use) | OpenPanel sends buyers elsewhere for feature flags, randomized experiments with statistical significance, surveys, or in-app guides. Microsoft Clarity adds unlimited projects and unlimited team members. | Page changes get tested rather than argued about, and the winner is measured. |
| Subscription Billing | [Metronome](https://saastracker.org/products/metronome) (Innovation) | OpenPanel is built for product analytics, not billing. Metronome adds one pricing spine for self-serve and negotiated enterprise revenue. | Recurring revenue bills, retries and reconciles itself, including the tax nobody wants to calculate. |
| Forms & Surveys | [Formbricks](https://saastracker.org/products/formbricks) (Innovation) | OpenPanel is built for product analytics, not forms. Formbricks adds only product in this category. | Answers arrive structured and routed, rather than as free text somebody has to read and retype. |

Pairings follow the SaaSTracker methodology (https://saastracker.org/methodology): the leading tool in each complementary category, chosen on published criteria. Placement cannot be purchased.

## Implementation

- Setup time: Minutes on the cloud: create a project, paste the script tag, and the traffic overview fills immediately. Instrumenting the product events, identify calls, and group calls that make funnels and retention meaningful is a day or two of engineering. Self-hosting with the setup script is quoted by the vendor at 30 seconds to 2 minutes on a VPS once Docker and Node are present, but TLS, email, backups, and upgrade discipline are extra and ongoing.
- Learning curve: Low for the web overview, which anyone who has used Plausible or Google Analytics will read without help. Moderate for the product side, where the skill is choosing a small set of well-named events with useful properties. The report builder is simpler than Mixpanel's, which helps non-analysts and limits power users.
- Onboarding: Fully self-serve with a 30 day trial and a live demo at demo.openpanel.dev. Help comes from the documentation, GitHub issues, and the Discord community, with email support on paid plans. There is no onboarding team or customer success function advertised.
- Migration: Historical events can be sent through the import endpoint, which is not rate limited, and sessions are not created for events older than 15 minutes, so a backfill will not invent fake sessions. Coming from Mixpanel the event, property, and identify model maps closely; coming from a pageview tool like Plausible or Umami the web overview carries over but product events need instrumenting. Moving from the cloud to self-hosting is supported by asking the vendor for a database dump, and raw events can be exported through the API at any time.

## Platform, API & security

- Platforms: Web via script tag or the JavaScript web SDK, Next.js, Astro, and Nuxt integrations; React, Vue, Remix, and others through the web SDK, Node.js (including Express), Python, Ruby, Rust, and Java server SDKs, React Native, Swift (iOS, macOS, tvOS, watchOS), and Kotlin for Android (not yet on Maven), WordPress plugin, Self-hosted on Docker Compose, Coolify, Dokploy, or Kubernetes, Web dashboard
- API: A REST API with track, profile, import, export (raw events and chart series), insights (overview, active users, retention, funnels, pages, referrers, UTMs, geography, devices, profiles, sessions, groups, Search Console), and manage (projects, clients, references, dashboards) endpoints, authenticated by client ID and secret with read, write, and root client types. Insights and export are limited to 100 requests per 10 seconds and manage to 20; track and import are unlimited. A hosted MCP server exposes 38 read tools to AI clients.
- Compliance: GDPR with a published Art. 28 DPA, Cookieless tracking with no stored IP addresses
- Data residency: Cloud data is stored on Hetzner servers in Germany with backups on Cloudflare R2 in the EU, and the DPA states analytics data does not leave the EEA in normal operation. Transactional email (Resend) and opt-in AI features (OpenAI) are US sub-processors under Standard Contractual Clauses. Self-hosted deployments keep data wherever you run them.
- SSO: Not published. The public site documents organization-wide and project-level member access but no SAML or SSO option.
- Security notes: The vendor publishes no SOC 2, ISO 27001, or penetration test report. What it does document: TLS in transit, role-based dashboard access, IP addresses discarded after geolocation and hashing, daily salt rotation that makes visitor IDs irreversible after 24 hours, breach notification within 48 hours in the DPA, replays deleted after 30 days, and event data retained for as long as the account is active with no maximum currently enforced. The code is public, so the data handling can be audited directly.

## Support

- Channels: Documentation, GitHub issues, Discord community, Email support on paid cloud plans, Priority Discord support for supporters from $20 a month
- Documentation: Developer-oriented documentation covering every SDK, the tracking model (device IDs, sessions, profiles, client versus server events), consent handling, session replay options, adblocker proxying, the REST API, the MCP server, and self-hosting from Docker Compose to Kubernetes with a self-hosting changelog.
- Community: An open source community of around 40 contributors on GitHub and a Discord that doubles as the main support channel. It is small next to PostHog's or Matomo's, and much of the product still depends on the founder.

## Company

- Founded: 2023
- Founders: Carl-Gerhard Lindesvärd
- Headquarters: Stockholm, Sweden
- Ownership: Independent, founder-owned (OpenPanel AB)
- Employees: 1 to 4 per the Swedish company registry listing (allabolag.se, 2026)
- Funding: No outside funding disclosed; the vendor describes itself as a small independent team funded by subscriptions and supporters. Founding year basis: the founder writes that he started OpenPanel as a side project in late 2023; the operating company, OpenPanel AB, was registered in Stockholm on 2 September 2024.

Timeline:

- 2023: Carl-Gerhard Lindesvärd starts OpenPanel as a side project in late 2023 after his Mixpanel startup program ends.
- 2024: Public GitHub repository opens in February; the cloud launches as a free beta in March; Clerk authentication is replaced to simplify self-hosting and native Swift and Kotlin SDKs are added.
- 2024: OpenPanel AB is registered in Stockholm in September. By year end the founder reports more than 1,000 projects, over 1 billion events collected, and 3,300 GitHub stars.
- 2026: OpenPanel v2 is released to self-hosters in early 2026 with a redesigned dashboard, revenue tracking, session views, a real-time view, and customizable dashboards.
- 2026: The DPA and terms are updated in May, and by September the repository has around 7,000 stars with commits landing weekly.

## Integrations

Slack, Discord, Webhooks (usable with Zapier, Make, or your own backend), Google Search Console, WordPress plugin, Next.js, Astro, and Nuxt, Coolify and Dokploy one-click deployment, MCP clients such as Claude, Cursor, and Windsurf, OpenAI (cloud AI features) and Anthropic or OpenAI keys on self-hosted installs, REST API for export and import

## FAQ

### What is OpenPanel?

OpenPanel is an open source analytics platform that combines web analytics (visitors, referrers, campaigns, geography, devices) with product analytics (custom events, funnels, retention, conversion trends, user profiles, and groups) and opt-in session replay. It tracks without cookies, hosts its cloud in Germany, and can be self-hosted for free under the AGPL-3.0 license.

### How much does OpenPanel cost?

The cloud is priced only by monthly events: $2.50 for 5,000, $5 for 10,000, $20 for 100,000, $50 for 500,000, $90 for 1 million, $250 for 5 million, $350 for 10 million, and $900 for 50 million, with custom pricing above that. Yearly billing is ten times the monthly price. Every step includes unlimited users, projects, dashboards, and tracked profiles. Self-hosting is free with unlimited events.

### Does OpenPanel have a free plan?

Not on the cloud. There is a 30 day free trial that the vendor says needs no credit card, and the vendor says it skips a free tier because it wants committed users and needs the revenue to maintain the service. The free routes are self-hosting the open source code, or applying to the open source program, which gives qualifying non-commercial projects up to 2.5 million events a month.

### Is OpenPanel cheaper than Mixpanel?

Below 1 million events a month, no: Mixpanel's free plan covers that volume and OpenPanel charges up to $90. Above it, usually by a wide margin. OpenPanel is $350 a month at 10 million events, while Mixpanel's published entry overage rate of $0.00028 per event would put the 9 million events beyond its free allowance at roughly $2,500 before any volume discount. Mixpanel is the more mature product, so the saving buys you less polish and fewer enterprise assurances.

### Does OpenPanel use cookies, and is it GDPR compliant?

It does not use cookies. Visitors are identified by a hash of IP, user agent, and project with a salt that rotates daily, and the raw IP is discarded after geolocation. The vendor's DPA says standard website tracking therefore does not constitute personal data under GDPR, publishes the sub-processor list, and keeps cloud data on Hetzner servers in Germany. Session replay and identified user profiles do involve personal data, and the SDK can queue all tracking until consent is given. Whether you need a banner is still a question for your own counsel.

### Does OpenPanel have session replay?

Yes, as an opt-in feature built on rrweb. It records DOM changes and interactions rather than video, masks all text and inputs by default, has no cap on the number of replays, and keeps each replay for 30 days. It does not document console, network, or error capture, so it is for understanding behavior rather than debugging code.

### Does OpenPanel do A/B testing or feature flags?

Not in the sense of assigning variants. There are no feature flags and no experiment engine with significance testing. What OpenPanel calls A/B testing is breaking down a conversion or funnel chart by a variant property you set yourself, for example from a flag tool like Flagsmith or your own code.

### Can I self-host OpenPanel?

Yes. The code is AGPL-3.0 on GitHub, and a setup script installs it on a VPS with Docker; guides also cover Coolify, Dokploy, Kubernetes, reverse proxies, and high-volume setups. You run ClickHouse, Postgres, and Redis and configure an email provider. Stable images are public, while images built from every commit are available to supporters from $20 a month.

### What happens if I go over my event limit?

No overage price is published. The terms of service let the vendor suspend or terminate an account whose project exceeds its plan's usage limits, and say it will try to warn you as usage approaches the limit without promising to. In practice, choose a step with headroom and move up before a launch or campaign.

### Who makes OpenPanel?

OpenPanel AB, a Stockholm company founded by Carl-Gerhard Lindesvärd, who started the project in late 2023 and registered the company in 2024. No outside funding is disclosed, and the Swedish company registry lists one to four employees. The product is developed in the open with around 40 GitHub contributors.

### What should I pair OpenPanel with?

OpenPanel is a product analytics tool, and a team running it still has 7 neighbouring categories to staff. The pick in each is Dataddo for customer data platforms, Chameleon for product onboarding & PLG, Churn Solution for retention & churn prevention, Intercom for customer support platforms, Microsoft Clarity for CRO & experimentation, Metronome for subscription billing and Formbricks for forms & surveys, each the leading tool in that category on published criteria.

### What do I pair with OpenPanel for Customer Data Platforms?

Dataddo. OpenPanel lists mobile coverage is thinner than the incumbents among its limits. Dataddo adds data blending before delivery.

### Is OpenPanel enough on its own?

For product analytics, yes. OpenPanel does not cover product onboarding & PLG, retention & churn prevention and customer support platforms, and its own profile says so; Chameleon, Churn Solution and Intercom are the tools that fill those gaps.

## Editorial verdict

OpenPanel is the most interesting low-cost entrant in product analytics right now: one cookieless, EU-hosted, open source tool that covers the marketing site and the product funnel, with funnels, retention, groups, revenue events, replay, and Slack alerts included at every price and a flat event meter that starts at $2.50 a month. The math is its whole argument. Past Mixpanel's 1 million event free tier, OpenPanel is several times cheaper at the same volume, and the AGPL self-hosting route caps the downside at the cost of a server. The caveats are the ones you would expect from a three-year-old product built largely by one founder: no flags or experiments, no published security certifications or SSO, thin mobile SDK coverage on Android, suspension rather than overage billing at the limit, and a vendor small enough that its future rests on a handful of people. Buy it if you are a startup or indie team whose event bill elsewhere is the problem, or a European team that wants web and product analytics from one privacy-first tool. If you fit inside Mixpanel's free tier or your buyer needs a SOC 2 report, stay where you are.

---

Source: SaaSTracker (https://saastracker.org), an independent editorial project. This profile is compiled from public information, carries no peer reviews or paid placement, and was last reviewed 2026-09-26. Awards are judged on published criteria: https://saastracker.org/methodology