What is Helion?
Helion is an open-source product and web analytics platform. It tracks events, user behavior, funnels, retention, and web traffic — without third-party cookies, without sending your data to a vendor's servers, and without a growing SaaS bill.
It is a developer-first alternative to Mixpanel, PostHog, and Google Analytics, built for teams that want the analytics capability without the lock-in.
Why Helion Exists
The data ownership problem
Most analytics platforms store your data on infrastructure you do not control. When you cancel, your history goes with the vendor. When regulators audit your GDPR compliance, you are dependent on your vendor's data processing agreements. When you need to run a custom query, you are limited to whatever the vendor's UI exposes.
Self-hosted analytics solves this. Your events land in your own ClickHouse instance. You write the queries. You own the exports. You keep the history — permanently, on your terms.
The AI-era shift
Event data is no longer just a dashboard metric. It has become training signal. Product teams are using behavioral data to fine-tune models, build recommendation systems, and drive agentic workflows. That data needs to live in infrastructure you control — not behind a vendor API with rate limits and export restrictions.
Helion was designed with this context in mind. Events are stored in ClickHouse and queryable directly. An MCP integration lets AI agents read your analytics data natively, without going through a middleware layer you did not build.
The pricing problem
Mixpanel bills per event at scale. PostHog's cloud tier grows with your MAU. Google Analytics locks advanced features behind GA4 360, which runs to six figures annually for large organizations. For developers, indie teams, and growing startups, this creates a recurring dilemma: pay for a fraction of what you need, or instrument less than you should.
Helion is self-hosted and licensed under AGPL-3.0. Your infrastructure cost is yours to size and control.
The Product
Helion combines web analytics and product analytics in a single deployment.
Web analytics
- Page views, unique visitors, referrers, and UTM attribution
- Real-time visitor feed
- Cookieless tracking by default — no consent banner required
Product analytics
- Custom event tracking with typed properties
- Funnel analysis and conversion rates
- Retention cohorts
- User profiles and session detail
- A/B testing with statistical breakdowns
- Revenue and subscription tracking
Developer tooling
- SDKs for JavaScript, React, Next.js, Vue, Astro, Swift, Kotlin, React Native, Python, and more
- REST API for custom integrations
- MCP server for direct AI-agent access to your analytics data
Built on Solid Infrastructure
Helion uses ClickHouse for event storage — the same column-store database that powers analytics at some of the largest companies in the world. It handles high-throughput ingestion without the operational complexity of managing your own pipeline from scratch.
Open Source
Helion is fully open-source on GitHub under AGPL-3.0. Self-host it, fork it, audit the code, or contribute. There is no closed-source enterprise tier hiding features behind a paywall. The code you run is the code everyone can read.
Alternatives
If you are comparing Helion to other tools: Mixpanel, Google Analytics, Plausible, PostHog.
Company
Helion Labs is an independent open-source project, not a venture-backed company. There is no physical headquarters. The project is founded and maintained by Lalit Shrotriya.
Questions or feedback: hello@helionlabs.dev or join the Discord.