Migrating to Rybbit Analytics
Rybbit is the destination for engineers who want session replay, heatmaps, and Web Vitals tracking without the $400/mo enterprise pricing of FullStory or Hotjar — and who can stomach running a tracker that turned 12 months old in March 2026. AGPL self-host, ClickHouse + TypeScript, autocapture on by default, free cloud tier covers under 3K events/mo, and Hetzner CX22 covers the rest at €4.51/mo. Read the source map first, then click into the matching pair page — only the GA4 path is currently live.
When Rybbit is the right destination
Rybbit is the right call in a narrow band: teams that want product-analytics-grade observability (replays, heatmaps, autocapture, performance metrics) but reject the $400-1200/mo pricing of FullStory, Hotjar, Heap, or PostHog Cloud at scale. The tracker shipped in March 2025; it is genuinely young. The trade-off is feature-richness now versus operational risk for 18 more months until the project crosses the "mature enough" threshold most procurement teams require.
- You want session replay or heatmaps without enterprise SaaS pricing. Rybbit's free cloud tier covers under 3K events/month, and self-host on a Hetzner CX22 (€4.51/mo) handles 1-2M events/month with headroom. FullStory starts at $1,800/year for the lowest plan with replay; Hotjar's replay tier starts at $80/mo. The price gap is two orders of magnitude.
- You are comfortable self-hosting, or comfortable trusting a young SaaS. Rybbit Cloud is operated by the project maintainers; the bus factor is single-digit. Self-host removes the SaaS-shutdown risk but adds Docker + ClickHouse + Postgres operational overhead. Pick the path that matches your team's existing skill stack.
- GA4 bounce-rate frustration is real and you want autocapture. Rybbit captures clicks, form submits, and page transitions automatically — no
gtag('event')instrumentation pass required. Web Vitals (LCP, INP, CLS) ship in the same SDK. For teams burned by GA4's "engaged session" definition, autocapture-by-default is a meaningful workflow upgrade. - You can stomach early-adopter risk. Schema breaks between minor versions are still possible. The dashboard ships features faster than it polishes them. The community Discord is the primary support channel; there is no paid support tier yet. If "we depend on this for our quarterly board report" is the use case, wait six months or pick Matomo instead.
When Rybbit is the wrong destination
Three procurement scenarios and one volume scenario where Rybbit is the wrong answer regardless of how good the product surface looks. Knowing this up front saves the 40-hour evaluation cycle.
- Procurement requires SOC 2 or vendor audit history. Rybbit has neither. The project is 12 months old; SOC 2 Type II requires 12 months of audited operations and a six-figure spend that a young open-source project cannot justify. If your security review checklist has "vendor must provide SOC 2 Type II report" as a hard gate, go to Piwik PRO (SOC 2 Type II since 2019) or Matomo Cloud (SOC 2 Type II + ISO 27001).
- You need HIPAA or a signed BAA. Rybbit does not offer either. Matomo Cloud does not offer HIPAA on standard plans; the only mainstream destination on this site that signs a BAA is Piwik PRO Enterprise, which starts around $500/mo. If you handle PHI, do not pick Rybbit.
- You need Looker Studio or BigQuery integration depth. Rybbit exports raw events via API and CSV but does not have a first-party BigQuery connector or a Looker Studio template. If the analytics consumer is a BI team that lives in Looker, stick with GA4 + BigQuery export — the export is free, the schema is documented, and the BI team's dashboards keep working.
- Under 1K visits/day on a marketing site. Rybbit is overkill at that volume. The replay storage, the autocapture event volume, the dashboard complexity — all designed for sites doing 50K+ pageviews/month. For a small content site or indie SaaS landing page under 1K visits/day, Plausible Cloud at $9/mo or Fathom annual at $84/year are the right answers. Rybbit pays off above 100K events/month, not below.
From which source — pick your starting line
Five common origin points and their dedicated pair pages. Only the GA4 path is currently live; the others are scheduled.
Coming from GA4
The main path and the only live pair page. Effort easy, 3-5 calendar days end-to-end on a 80K-pageview test stand. Auto-capture covers most GA4 enhanced-measurement events out of the box; the JS API handles the long tail.
GA4 → Rybbit →Coming from Universal Analytics
Coming soon. UA was sunset 2024-07-01, so the post-2024 use case is rare — most UA holdouts have already moved. Historical export route via BigQuery archive into Rybbit's CSV importer; live tracker is a fresh install.
UA → Rybbit (soon) →Coming from Mixpanel
Scheduled Q3 2026. Mixpanel's event-property schema maps cleanly to Rybbit's autocapture + custom events, but the cohort and funnel features in Mixpanel do not have a direct Rybbit equivalent. Most teams will keep both for now.
Mixpanel → Rybbit (soon) →Coming from Plausible
Coming soon. A lateral move driven by one feature: session replays. Plausible has none and will not add them. If the team needs to see what users actually clicked on a broken checkout flow, Rybbit answers that. Goals translate one-to-one.
Plausible → Rybbit (soon) →Coming from Segment
Coming soon. CDP-shape mapping. Segment's event-spec format translates to Rybbit's track API with a thin wrapper; the source-of-truth event schema lives in your codebase, not the tool. Migration is a tracking-plan rewrite plus a tag swap.
Segment → Rybbit (soon) →If your source is none of those — Adobe, Heap, Amplitude, FullStory, Hotjar — file an issue on GitHub. The pair page roster is built by request.
What Rybbit replaces — at a glance
Eight rows comparing the GA4 default surface to Rybbit's. One line per row, copy-paste-friendly for a procurement memo.
| Capability | GA4 default | Rybbit default | Verdict |
|---|---|---|---|
| Pageviews + sessions | Yes (cookied) | Yes (cookieless) | Match |
| Autocapture clicks/forms | Enhanced measurement, partial | Yes, full | Rybbit wider |
| Session replay | None — buy FullStory | Yes, included | Rybbit wins |
| Heatmaps | None — buy Hotjar | Yes, included | Rybbit wins |
| Web Vitals (LCP/INP/CLS) | Manual gtag setup | Out-of-box | Rybbit wins |
| Funnels | Yes | Yes, basic | GA4 deeper |
| BigQuery export | Yes, free | API + CSV only | GA4 wins |
| BAA / SOC 2 / HIPAA | Via Google Cloud | None | GA4 wins |
The pattern: Rybbit wins on observability features that GA4 does not bundle, and loses on enterprise compliance and BI integration. If your evaluation criteria are clicks-replays-Web-Vitals, Rybbit replaces three tools at once. If your evaluation criteria are SOC 2 and BigQuery, do not migrate.
Migration cost reality
Rybbit's cost story splits into three honest paths. The numbers below are real 2026 prices for a 200K-events/month workload, the tier where most marketing-site evaluations land.
| Path | Monthly cost | Ops overhead |
|---|---|---|
| Rybbit Cloud free tier (under 3K events/mo) | $0/mo | none |
| Rybbit Cloud paid (above 3K events) | $19-49/mo by volume | none |
| Self-host Hetzner CX22 | €4.51/mo | Docker + ClickHouse + Postgres |
| Self-host Hetzner CX32 (1M+ events) | €7.55/mo | same as above + replay storage |
The free tier is genuinely free below 3K events/month. For a personal site or a pre-launch landing page, that is enough. Above 3K events the paid Cloud tier kicks in at $19/mo and scales to $49/mo around 500K events/month. Pricing is transparent on the Rybbit pricing page and has not changed since cloud launch in mid-2025.
Self-host on Hetzner CX22 is the cost-conscious answer. €4.51/mo (about $4.95) covers a 2-vCPU 4 GB box that runs Docker Compose with ClickHouse + Postgres + the Rybbit app on the same host. It handles 1-2M events/month before you need to upgrade to CX32 (€7.55/mo, 4 GB → 8 GB RAM). The operational tax is one image upgrade per month and one ClickHouse minor-version bump per quarter — manageable for any team with one Linux-comfortable engineer.
The break-even is 100K events/month. Below that volume, Cloud is cheaper than the time cost of running a VPS. Above that volume, the €4.51/mo self-host beats Cloud's $19-49/mo by 4× to 10×, and the operational tax is small if you already run other Docker workloads. If you do not currently run any Docker, pay for Cloud — the time cost is real.
FAQ
Is Rybbit production-ready in 2026?
What does the self-host actually cost?
Can Rybbit import GA4 historical data?
What if Rybbit shuts down?
clickhouse-backup dumps them to S3 in any format you want. The data is yours. (2) AGPL fork: the source is on GitHub, MIT-incompatible but legally forkable. If the upstream project goes dormant, the community can fork it; this happened to Plausible Community Edition's predecessors and the forks ran for years. The risk is not "data lost" — it is "no new features for 12-18 months while a fork stabilizes." For a marketing-site use case that is acceptable. For a regulated workload it is not.Sibling destinations
Other destinations covered on this site. Rybbit fills a feature gap (replays + heatmaps + autocapture); the siblings cover different priorities.