Leaving PostHog?
PostHog is powerful — and heavy. Self-hosting means Kafka, ClickHouse, Redis and Postgres (PostHog itself says most teams can't run it reliably). smolanalytics is one binary, tells you what to fix, and lets your own AI answer questions for free.
why people leave PostHog
“I hate Posthog more than any other object in the world… We now have no analytics.”
— r/ProductManagement
“We found many companies lacked the technical resources to run the product reliably.”
— PostHog staff, on Reddit
“A full disk would cause their instance of PostHog to be down for hours or days.”
— PostHog's own blog
PostHog vs smolanalytics
| PostHog | smolanalytics | |
|---|---|---|
| Self-host footprint | Kafka + ClickHouse + Redis + PG | one static binary, one file |
| Time to running | “heavy engineering lift” | 30 seconds, docker run |
| Keeps working | “down for days” on a full disk | one process, no stack to babysit |
| Tells you what to fix | dashboards you interrogate | a verdict, every morning |
| AI to ask questions | their model, metered | your own Claude/Cursor — free |
| Hallucinated numbers | generated SQL can be wrong | deterministic reports, can't lie |
Self-host in 30 seconds
# no Kafka, no ClickHouse, no Helm chart docker run -p 8080:8080 -v $PWD/data:/data \ -e SMOLANALYTICS_DB=/data/smolanalytics.data \ ghcr.io/arjun0606/smolanalytics # dashboard + MCP at http://localhost:8080
One process, one file, your box. Point Claude or Cursor at it and ask anything — no model to pay for, no number it can make up.
Get the verdict, not another dashboard.
Drop one snippet, ask in your editor, own your data. 14-day full trial, no credit card.