OpenPanel Review

OpenPanel is a privacy-focused analytics platform. For websites it covers visitors, referrers, and page views. For products it covers custom events, user profiles, funnels, and retention cohorts. It also includes session replay with privacy controls, revenue tracking that links payment events to MRR and referrers, Google Search Console data next to product metrics, and an MCP integration for querying analytics from AI tools such as Claude or Cursor. Tracking is cookie-less, with IP addresses and user agents hashed daily and no fingerprinting.

Self-hosting is free with unlimited events, and the OpenPanel docs include a self-hosting guide. We did not verify the exact services or hardware needed, so read the guide before sizing a server. If you prefer not to run it, OpenPanel Cloud is EU-hosted, offers a Data Processing Agreement, and includes a 30-day trial with no credit card. The project is three years old and had a commit the day before this review.

The interface is a single dashboard for traffic and product analytics, which avoids the context switch between a web analytics tool and a product analytics tool. Dashboards, websites, users, and profiles are unlimited on every cloud plan. We did not run it ourselves; this section reflects the official pricing page, repository, and OpenAlternative.

• Web analytics and product analytics in one tool
• Funnels, retention cohorts, and user profiles
• Session replay with privacy controls
• Revenue tracking linked to MRR and referrers
• Cookie-less tracking and an MCP integration for AI tools

• Session replay and revenue tracking without separate add-ons
• Simple event-based pricing with unlimited sites, users, and dashboards
• Privacy-focused design and an EU-hosted cloud option

• AGPL-3.0, so a modified version offered over a network must share its source
• A younger and smaller ecosystem than Google Analytics or Mixpanel
• Event-volume pricing can grow quickly for high-traffic products
• Self-hosting needs your own infrastructure and maintenance

Self-hosting is free with unlimited events. Cloud pricing depends only on events per month: 5K events is $2.50/month, 10K is $5, 100K is $20, 250K is $30, 500K is $50, 1M is $90, 2.5M is $180, and 5M is $250, with yearly billing giving two months free. All plans include unlimited websites, users, and dashboards, and there is a 30-day trial without a credit card.

Google Analytics is free and ubiquitous, but it raises consent and data-ownership concerns and is built around web reporting. Mixpanel and Amplitude are strong in product analytics but are separate tools with their own pricing. OpenPanel merges both views and lets you keep the data on your own server, at the cost of a smaller feature set and ecosystem.

• SaaS teams that want web and product analytics in one place
• Privacy-conscious teams that want cookie-less tracking and EU hosting
• Developers who want to query analytics from AI tools through MCP

• Large enterprises that need deep integrations with an ad platform stack
• Teams that want advertising and attribution reporting like Google Analytics with Google Ads
• Organizations that cannot accept AGPL-3.0