Analytics and monitoring decision
Growtics
A capable technical user can reproduce the core analytics, replays, monitoring and simple AI suggestions by combining existing open-source projects (e.g., PostHog/Umami) and a small amount of custom glue work, making self-hosting realistic and cheaper than continuing to pay for the hosted plan for one site.
Visit website↗Built by Kites.Dev, who ships 6 products in this index
$9/mo
$108/yr
Read off the official pricing page.
$100one-off82 h to build
$60/mo6 h/mo upkeep
On cash alone, building overtakes the subscription at 8 seats.
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. All Growtics alternatives, with the arithmetic →
What a replacement has to do
- Collect page events with a lightweight client script, ingest and store events, render real-time dashboards and funnels, capture DOM/snapshot data and replay visitor sessions, run simple AI growth suggestions (rule-based or LLM prompts), and run uptime/diagnostic checks with alerts.
What it still won’t have
- Polished, ranked AI growth actions and integrated SEO writer
- Turnkey, high-quality session replay rendering and UI polish
- Bundled integrations and an official MCP/npm package
- Commercial support, SLA, and money-back guarantee
What remains hard
- Product polish and ongoing maintenance
First-year cost
Keep paying
Paying is—cheaper in year one.
On cash alone, building overtakes the subscription at 8 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 Growtics replacement using Node.js (Express) + ClickHouse (or Postgres) + React for the dashboard. Core features in scope: 1) a lightweight JS tracking snippet that posts page events to an ingestion API; 2) ingestion service that validates events, writes to ClickHouse, and exposes a simple REST query API; 3) dashboard with realtime visitor list, basic charts (pageviews, sources), and funnel/segment UI; 4) session replay capture storing DOM snapshots and a replay player that rehydrates and plays visits; 5) a scheduled job that performs HTTP uptime checks and SSL expiry checks and sends email alerts via an SMTP provider; 6) a simple AI suggestions worker that aggregates site metrics and calls an LLM (OpenAI-compatible) with templated prompts to produce human-readable recommendations. Out of scope: full SEO article writer, advanced AEO diagnostics, polished commercial UX, multi-tenant billing. Include error handling, input validation, logging, tests for ingestion and replay components, and Docker-based deployment scripts.
How we checked
How the score was reached
- Partly verdict base52
- An open-source build was found+5
- 4 cited sources+3
- Price verified on pricing page+3
- Evidence score63
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 · 4
Every page the run actually retrieved.
- official productGrowtics homepage
- official docsGrowtics features
- open sourcePostHog/posthog
- open sourcematomo-org/matomo
Integrity checks
What held up, and what did not.
