Why consider OpenPanel over Crazy Egg?
Crazy Egg, founded by Neil Patel and Hiten Shah in 2005, pioneered website heatmaps and has since expanded into A/B testing, session recordings, and surveys. It's a well-known tool for visual website optimization — understanding where visitors click, how far they scroll, and which page elements drive engagement. But Crazy Egg is web-only, proprietary, and focused on visual optimization rather than product analytics.
OpenPanel serves a different but complementary need. Where Crazy Egg helps you optimize individual pages through visual feedback, OpenPanel helps you understand the entire user journey through event-based product analytics. Funnels show you where users drop off in multi-step flows, retention analysis reveals whether they come back, and user profiles let you track individual behavior across sessions.
The technical differences are significant for growing teams. Crazy Egg is cloud-only with no self-hosting option and charges based on pageviews. OpenPanel is open source under the MIT license, offers full self-hosting via Docker, and supports mobile apps through native SDKs for iOS, Android, and React Native — capabilities Crazy Egg doesn't provide.
If you need to go beyond heatmaps and understand how users actually flow through your product, especially across both web and mobile platforms, OpenPanel provides the event-based analytics foundation that visual optimization tools like Crazy Egg can't match.
