Introduction to Helion

Helion is an open-source analytics platform that tracks user behavior across your web properties and product — without third-party cookies, without sending data to a vendor, and without per-event pricing that punishes growth.

It is a self-hosted alternative to Mixpanel and Google Analytics, designed for developers who want the analytics capability without the lock-in.

What Helion tracks

Helion combines two categories of analytics in a single deployment:

Web analytics — the same visibility you get from Plausible or Fathom, without cookies:

• Page views, unique visitors, and visit duration
• Referrer attribution and UTM parameters
• Entry and exit pages, bounce rate
• Country, device, browser, and OS breakdown
• Real-time visitor feed

Product analytics — the behavioral depth of Mixpanel:

• Custom event tracking with typed properties
• Funnel analysis and drop-off rates
• User retention cohorts
• Per-user profiles and full session history
• Revenue and subscription event tracking

How data flows

Events are ingested through the Helion API (api.helionlabs.dev on cloud, or your own instance when self-hosted). The API enqueues each event in Redis, where the worker process picks it up, batches writes, and commits them to ClickHouse. Dashboard queries read aggregations directly from ClickHouse; project configuration and user profile state are stored in PostgreSQL.

The client SDK (@helionlabs/web) tracks events in the browser. It does not use cookies — identifiers are derived from a salted hash of IP, User-Agent, and project ID that resets daily, satisfying most GDPR use cases without a consent banner.

Server-side events can be tracked via the HTTP API or the Node SDK (@helionlabs/sdk). Server events are not attributed to browser sessions but are attached to user profiles.

Privacy model

Helion is cookieless by default. The daily-rotating device identifier means no persistent cross-site tracking. No data is sent to third parties. On self-hosted deployments, every byte stays within your infrastructure.

GDPR and CCPA compliance requirements are met by design: no cookies, no cross-site tracking, you control the data, and you can export or delete any record via the API.

Getting started

Script tag — the fastest path for any HTML page:

<script>
  window.hl = window.hl || function() { /* init queue */ }();
  window.hl('init', { clientId: 'YOUR_CLIENT_ID', trackScreenViews: true });
</script>
<script src="https://helionlabs.dev/hl1.js" defer async></script>

npm — for framework-integrated installs:

npm install @helionlabs/web      # Browser / vanilla JS
npm install @helionlabs/nextjs   # Next.js
npm install @helionlabs/sdk      # Node.js / server-side

import { Helion } from '@helionlabs/web';

const helion = new Helion({
  clientId: 'YOUR_CLIENT_ID',
  clientSecret: 'YOUR_CLIENT_SECRET', // optional for browser-only usage
  apiUrl: 'https://api.helionlabs.dev', // or your self-hosted endpoint
});

helion.track('button_clicked', { label: 'signup', plan: 'pro' });

See the SDK documentation for framework-specific setup (Next.js, Astro, Nuxt, Express, React Native, and more).

Self-hosting

Helion is fully self-hostable via Docker Compose. The setup script handles PostgreSQL, Redis, ClickHouse, the API, and the dashboard in a single command:

git clone -b self-hosting https://github.com/Shrotriya-lalit/helionlabs
cd helionlabs/self-hosting && ./setup && ./start

See the self-hosting guide for full configuration options.

Source code

Helion is licensed under AGPL-3.0. The full source is at github.com/Shrotriya-lalit/helionlabs.