Clickhouse definitely takes a lot of resources! There's unfortunately no way around that, though in my experience it runs fine on the cheapest Hetzner instances which are like $3-4 a month for 2GB of RAM. How lightweight is your VPS?
And yea, you don't need clickhouse for a simple static site. I chose clickhouse because it Postgres or MySQL does not scale well since the main site I personally use Rybbit for sends around 20 million events a month.
It pains me to plug my competitors, but check out Umami or Goatcounter if you want a platform that uses postgres.
Only very slightly so. One of the reasons I created Rybbit is because platforms like plausible and fathom have much inferior self-hosted versions (very limited featureset and basically never updated). We have a comparison here
Posthog makes it almost impossible to actually self-host since they try to push you onto the cloud as much as possible. They say that the self-hosted version only works well up until 100k events ... which is insane since their cloud free tier is 1 million events.
It's actually the reason why I built Rybbit. I tried to self-host posthog on my server but it ran it up to 100% CPU on 8 cores and didn't even work.
Ok posthog rant done.
The other main difference is that Posthog has like 10+ different products all in one. Their web analytics is good, but it's just kind of bland (imo) because it's not their main focus.
Yea, we use a client-side script like almost everyone else. The major difference is that we don't use cookies so you can avoid a lot of the cookie banner/GDPR nonsense.
Rybbit definitely isn't the first open source cookieless web analytics platform (Plausible and Umami are the two other big ones), but it's probably the most "all-in-one" of all these alternatives.
as opposed to plausible community edition which is even more limited and is only updated a couple times a year?