PostHog - Django based open source product analytics

Hey, I’m James and I’m new here but a long time Django user! I am quite proud of what we built so I hoped to share it :slight_smile:

TLDR: open source, product analytics written in Django - https://github.com/posthog/posthog

In a former life, I saw how important product analytics can be as a developer trying to work out how to make a product better. It just gives you some data behind the product decisions you end up making. However, I didn’t like sending user data to 3rd parties and just wanted something trivial to install that I could host myself.

We made PostHog to capture every front end click automatically, to integrate with back end events via the libraries and API, and to provide funnels, event trends and segmentation based on user/team properties, user paths and cohorts. And it gives you full API/SQL access to the underlying data. It’s in Django with a React front end.

We also built a 1 click Heroku deploy, docker or deploy from source too so it’s quite easy to play with. (Heroku is the easiest way to get it into production for a low traffic site).

The dream is for this to become something any developer just installs as they start building a project. Tim and I want to make it a little more developer-focussed than more product-team focussed analytics in the longer run too, but before that, we have plenty of polishing to do on the basic functionality, and we’ve still plenty of basics to do like to build like a/b testing.

If you like the sound of this, I’d be very grateful if you’d try it out, raise any issues you might come across, and tell us what features you’d like to see. Ultimately, we hope to find more people who are passionate about this area and want to contribute, so we hope people find it useful enough to want to do so!

The repo is https://github.com/posthog/posthog

9 Likes

Very cool. Definitely the kind of tool I’d consider if building a new product. I dropped google analytics from my own site last year and rely on just parsing the server logs with GoAccess for now, which is functional.

Great to see Django powering this.

Really like the idea of the applications of this project. Will have find use of this when I get get better at Django! :smiley: