Analytics and monitoring decision
Crazy Egg
A competent developer can build a narrow self-hosted replacement for core heatmaps/recordings/A-B testing over several weeks, but you lose enterprise polish, AI analysis, long-term scalable ingestion/storage, and vendor compliance/SLAs — for full feature parity it’s cheaper to keep paying.
Visit website↗Open-source builds that already do this
Every project below is open source and already does this job today. Fork one, self-host it, or take the parts you need — the build prompt further down assumes an empty file, and this is the shortcut past that. Licences differ; check the one on each card before you ship.
What a replacement has to do
- Collect pageview and interaction events from a small script, store and aggregate events to generate heatmaps, capture sampled session recordings and serve playback, run a basic client-side A/B splitter and collect conversion events, provide a dashboard to view heatmaps/recordings and basic experiment results.
What it still won’t have
- Enterprise features (SAML SSO, SLA, dedicated support)
- Large-scale storage, ingestion reliability and multi-tenant scaling
- Built-in AI analysis and export-to-AI features
- Export connectors, add-on marketplace and polished production UX
- Compliance paperwork and formal DPA handling managed by vendor
What remains hard
- Brand trust
Trusted by over 449,000 websites worldwide
- Compliance and regulation
we follow industry-standard security practices and comply with major privacy regulations such as GDPR and CCPA.
First-year cost
Keep paying
Paying is—cheaper in year one.
On cash alone, building overtakes the subscription at 3 seats.
Money you would actually spend
Time you would spend
—
What you would spend
What we assumed
The verdict above measures whether you could build it. This one is only about money.
Runnable build prompt
Build a minimal self-hosted Crazy Egg clone using Node.js (Express) backend, Postgres for events/metadata, S3 for recording blobs, Redis for short-term session state, and a React frontend. In scope: a JS install snippet, event ingestion API, sessionization and sampling, heatmap aggregation (count clicks/positions per page and render overlay tiles), session recording storage and a playback UI, a basic A/B test assignment client and conversion tracking, and a dashboard to view heatmaps/recordings and experiment summaries. Out of scope: multi-tenant billing, enterprise SSO, advanced AI analysis, and production-grade autoscaling. Include error handling, input validation, unit and integration tests, and a README with deployment steps (Docker Compose and a low-cost cloud VM + CDN configuration).
How we checked
How the score was reached
- Partly verdict base52
- An open-source build was found+5
- 5 cited sources+3
- Price verified on pricing page+3
- 3/3 assessment runs agreed+4
- Hard moats found in the evidence-3
- Evidence score64
The base comes from the verdict. Everything under it is a check that either happened or did not, and each one is a fact frozen in this record rather than a judgement made at render time — so the same evidence always produces the same number.
How scoring works →Cited sources · 5
Every page the run actually retrieved.
- official productCrazy Egg Website — Optimization | Heatmaps, Recordings, Surveys & A/B Testing
- official pricingCrazy Egg Pricing
- official docsCrazy Egg Tools | Heatmaps, Snapshots & A/B Testing Overview
- open sourcemicrosoft/clarity
- open sourcehyperdxio/hyperdx
Integrity checks
What held up, and what did not.
