Jitsu

Jitsu is an open-source customer data platform and event pipeline for collecting, processing, and delivering event data from websites, applications, and servers to data warehouses and downstream tools. It is designed for data and engineering teams that want a lightweight alternative to traditional CDPs, with the option to run Jitsu in the cloud, in a private cloud, or on their own infrastructure. Jitsu was part of Y Combinator's Summer 2020 batch and the project has over 5,000 stars on GitHub.

Key Capabilities

Jitsu supports real-time event collection and streaming to destinations including Snowflake, BigQuery, ClickHouse, Redshift, Postgres, and analytics and SaaS tools. Its pipeline can filter, transform, and enrich events using JavaScript and TypeScript functions before delivery, while identity stitching builds a view of users across events and sessions. Jitsu also provides APIs, CLI tooling, SDKs, and Segment API compatibility for developer-driven implementations.

Deployment and Control

Jitsu is available as an MIT-licensed open-source project that can be self-hosted on a company's own infrastructure, as well as through managed cloud and private-cloud deployments. The MIT licence places no restriction on operating Jitsu as a hosted or managed service for third parties, so agencies, platform companies, and embedded providers can run it on behalf of their own clients without a separate commercial licence. Self-hosting gives teams control over where event data is processed and stored, which can be useful for organisations with specific infrastructure, security, or data-residency requirements.

Pricing and Differentiation

Jitsu's cloud pricing is based on active events delivered to destinations rather than monthly tracked users. Captured events are unlimited and free, while active events are counted when successfully delivered to at least one destination. The free tier covers 200,000 active events per month, paid usage starts at $99 per month for 2 million active events, and additional volume is $40 per million. This model can produce lower costs for high-volume applications, depending on the relationship between event volume and monthly tracked users. Jitsu's open-source edition is free to self-host with no usage limits.

Jitsu is particularly suited to engineering and data teams that want direct control over their event infrastructure, prefer a warehouse-first architecture, or are evaluating alternatives to proprietary CDPs and per-user pricing models.