OpenPanel is a bootstrapped open source bet that you do not need two analytics tools and a big invoice to understand your users

Most small teams end up running two analytics tools: something simple for marketing traffic and something heavier for what users do inside the product. OpenPanel's whole argument is that this is silly. It tracks visitors, referrers and pages like a privacy-friendly web analytics tool, then adds custom events, funnels, user flows and retention cohorts on top, so the person who wrote the blog post and the person who built the signup flow are looking at the same numbers.

It comes from Carl-Gerhard Lindesvärd in Stockholm, who says he started it in late 2023 because he was paying Mixpanel a lot of money for features he hardly touched. The code is public under AGPL-3.0, the cloud version is hosted in the EU, and it is bootstrapped. That combination is exactly what privacy-minded European startups tend to look for.

What marketers get out of it

OpenPanel says it tracks without cookies, and it lists a Google Search Console integration, conversion tracking broken down by country or device, and revenue tracking that ties payments back to referrers. For a founder trying to work out which channel actually brings paying customers, that last one is the interesting bit. Pricing on the hosted version is based on monthly events, and everything else, websites, seats, dashboards, is unlimited, which is refreshingly easy to reason about.

Two ways in

The easy road is the cloud. Start a 30-day trial with no credit card, drop in the tracking script, and your data lands on EU servers with a DPA ready for the legal team. Websites, seats and dashboards are unlimited, so you can invite the whole company without doing seat maths. The builder's road is self-hosting: the code is on GitHub under AGPL-3.0, it ships with Docker, and on your own Postgres, ClickHouse and Redis setup the events are unlimited and free. Either way, marketing and product are finally reading from the same dashboard.

Most of Mixpanel's useful bits, none of its sticker shock, and the source code to prove it.

The verdict