by kposehn on 11/4/2021, 4:21:23 PM
Great product. I'm a frequent user of Segment from the early days and have been curious to see when an open-source competitor comes around that will match feature-for-feature.
Thoughts:
1. You've got most major ads sources that I care about, but it seems that there is a higher bar to implementation. Segment lets me just plug in Google & FB ads and dump the entire shebang right into my data warehouse. A lot of marketing teams are going to have less time/resources to deal with implementation so smoothing this out is key.
2. Functions are an underrated and highly powerful feature of Segment. The ability to operate on data in transit, create custom connectors that "just run" (akin to CF Workers) and the like is a big selling point for more technically advanced marketing teams. It doesn't seem present here and that would hold a customer such as myself back on bigger scope projects.
3. I'd love to see a "compare us to your segment usage" where I select my data sources and destinations to see what you cover vs. Segment in a specific use case (and possibly pricing advantages on a self-hosted vs. non). This would make it much easier to sell through procurement and devops for new customers that are switching.
4. There are going to be a lot of people like me that are soon to start fresh in terms of marketing stack, so going after people before they select Segment might also be a play.
Looking forward to seeing where you all take this. Good luck!
by reidalert on 11/4/2021, 2:01:09 PM
Congrats on your launch, and looks really exciting! I'm curious how this compares to tools like Snowplow [1]? I guess Jitsu comes with more sources and destinations out of the box?
by santiagobasulto on 11/4/2021, 12:43:34 PM
I really like this, congratulations on the launch. And this is such a huge space that there's definitively room for other options (aside from Segment).
I'm a little bit out of the loop in this event processing space. Do you think Jitsu could replace lower-level event processing implementations as Kafka/Kinesis? Or this is thought for more "high level" marketing stuff.
by public_void on 11/4/2021, 4:31:22 PM
Hey congrats on the launch, clearly a lot of thought and effort went into this. I'm pretty new to this space, and maybe this is a dumb question but how does this differ from Mixpanel? Would I use this for something different?
by polskibus on 11/4/2021, 9:16:28 PM
How do I scale jitsu if the load from my app servers become too big? Will adding more jitsu nodes trample the database nodes that jitsu writes to? How should I plan capacity for a jitsu deployment in a multi node scenario, and what should I take into consideration when scaling it?
by tailspin2019 on 11/4/2021, 4:48:17 PM
This looks really cool. I'm keen to try it.
It looks like it might play well with my current logging system of choice, Seq [0].
Do you support inbound webhooks? I can see webhooks as a destination but not as a source?
by polskibus on 11/4/2021, 7:26:36 PM
Are there any examples on how the resultant SQL tables look like in postgres or clickhouse for a given event schema? I'd like to know how generic it is per event type (is it sth like (event id, blob), or tries to decompose each event field into a column - what about nested objects then, etc.)). Knowing this would greatly improve my understanding on reusability of jitsu for various event-collection tasks I may have.
by laex on 11/4/2021, 12:48:03 PM
Can we expect react native integration any time soon ?
by 0xferruccio on 11/4/2021, 4:47:17 PM
Congrats on the launch, much needed! Would love to see if it's possible for you to connect to https://june.so for easy to use product analytics.
Are you following the same tracking convention spec as Segment?
by einpoklum on 11/4/2021, 1:39:33 PM
> We help companies collect events from their apps, websites, and APIs and send them to databases.
For those who don't know what "Segment" is (like me) - this Jitsu thing seems to only be relevant to web-based/web-oriented apps.
by yakkomajuri on 11/5/2021, 8:41:53 AM
This is super cool, congrats!
The website is heavy on Segment comparisons (which makes sense). However, you're not the only open source Segment alternative, so how do you view yourselves in comparison to e.g. RudderStack or Snowplow?
by davidkell on 11/4/2021, 2:56:55 PM
Many of your integrations talk about “syncing” rather than event collection, which to me sounds like what Fivetran is doing. Does that distinction make sense and how are you thinking about that?
by tarun_anand on 11/4/2021, 12:54:52 PM
Adding on to the previous comment, how does this compare to rudderstack?
by slig on 11/4/2021, 3:51:34 PM
Congrats on launching and thanks for making it easy to deploy using docker! I'd like to suggest that you make it available as a 1-click app on DigitalOcean as well.
by dominotw on 11/4/2021, 2:48:24 PM
Is https://meltano.com/ a more general version of this ?
i am wondering how this compares to it?
by baur on 11/11/2021, 4:22:47 PM
Congrats on the launch!
Just wondering, do you have any plans to support CrateDB?
It supports SQL and understands PG protocol - perhaps supporting Postgres kinda already makes it close.
by shcheklein on 11/4/2021, 3:58:28 PM
Congrats on the launch! We've started using the open source version for one of the tools we are building (CLI anonymized telemetry) and it looks good so far- thank for the great product. It was very easy and straightforward to get started, deploy and start collecting things (into BigQuery).
Overall, I like this recent trend a lot - more companies are building open-source, lightweight, GDPR compatible analytics, chats (e.g. Papercups). I hope there will be good ways to monetize and sustain this. Wish you all the best, folks!
by ramarnat on 11/7/2021, 3:55:35 PM
CTO at Vertica here. How can we make sure Vertica is one of the DWH destinations in Jitsu?
by adrianthedev on 11/4/2021, 12:28:18 PM
Good job guys. Amazing work!
It was fun watching you grow Jitsu and love the way you provide support!
by pjoter on 11/5/2021, 6:59:59 AM
Do you support something similar as ajs_aid url param id override in Segment?
by MaxiaNN on 11/4/2021, 6:16:03 PM
Great story. How do you feel Jitsu compares to Rudderstack?
by polskibus on 11/4/2021, 8:13:40 PM
what value does the airbyte / elt integration provide? Surely I could just run etls on airflow or similar on tables that jitsu generates?
by ogazitt on 11/5/2021, 1:36:24 AM
Sweet! Great to see an OSS alternative to Segment.
by ajbosco on 11/4/2021, 5:40:31 PM
Why would I use this instead of Airbyte?
by okhuman on 11/4/2021, 10:59:37 PM
I miss the eventnative name :)
by hasurabd on 11/4/2021, 5:13:31 PM
Great product! Lovely team!
by ComputerGuru on 11/4/2021, 3:42:55 PM
The black banners at the top and bottom of your website breaks scrolling on mobile.
by browsec on 11/4/2021, 1:37:18 PM
Great job!
by ThePhysicist on 11/4/2021, 12:44:22 PM
Great work! It's funny that YC funded Segment as well as two direct Segment competitors (RudderStack is the other one, though I think they initially started with a different idea an pivoted to that afterwards), though given the size of YC this is probably expected and Segment is probably large enough to "deserve" some good smaller competition.
As someone who also builds an open-core product (though not directly modeled after an existing closed-source product) I really hope this kind of business model will become more accepted.
by finiteseries on 11/4/2021, 2:52:48 PM
Please consider posting some form of this as a blog post as well, I love to hear about product inceptions.
HN doesn’t allow lesser users with lesser eyesight to read light grey on beige self text, unfortunately.
by leftnode on 11/4/2021, 2:47:56 PM
Congrats on the launch. Unrelated to the actual software, are any of you actual Jiu-Jitsu grapplers? If not, why'd you go with the name Jitsu?
by nkotov on 11/4/2021, 3:39:09 PM
Congrats on the launch!
by xondono on 11/4/2021, 3:17:40 PM
Kudos on the work done and I hope you the best of luck.
A little note of advise: I wouldn’t start my company description as “the Y of X” or “the Y alternative to X”.
It’s okay to mention if you are similar to another well known company, but don’t use it to describe your company, specially not in the first line.
by colesantiago on 11/4/2021, 1:47:02 PM
> Jitsu solves the AdBlocker problem...
This line alone is enough to infuriate me. So I am unable to block spying and data collection now?
I don't understand why we are still praising spyware tools?
by simplyinfinity on 11/4/2021, 1:46:56 PM
The name is 1 letter off of an already existing opensource project: Jitsi
by tomislavpet on 11/4/2021, 1:28:25 PM
Congrats on the launch!
Noticed a typo on jitsu.com - DHW should probably be DWH.
by soumyadeb on 11/4/2021, 1:24:31 PM
Congrats on your launch. Great to see more innovation in this space. Segment deserves some serious competition.
-RudderStack team.
I've been doing data engineering for more than ten years (half of that time, I didn't know that it's called "data engineering”). Before Jitsu, I was a co-founder and CTO of GetIntent, an ad-tech startup. Although it was ad-tech (I'm sorry for that!), we also built a quite fascinating technology platform. We processed up to 1 million events per second at peak, and all those events needed to be stored somewhere.
We churned through a few data warehouse platforms along the way. In 2013, we started with Hadoop's HDFS and a bunch of map-reduce jobs on top of it. Then, when we decided to allow our customers to run ad-hoc reports, we switched to BigQuery. BigQuery was great, but expensive—especially with some customers obsessively clicking the refresh button. Finally, in 2017 we migrated to self-hosted ClickHouse which in my opinion is still the best analytics database in the world.
All that time, we spent a fair amount of effort to get data to the database. When you're dealing with millions of events per minute, running an INSERT statement per event won't work. What if the DB is down for maintenance? How can you be sure that all 50+ edge nodes are aware of recent DB schema changes? Also, did you know streaming data to BigQuery is costly while batching data is free?
We tried different approaches: first, we would write local log files, sync them to HDFS, and load data to BQ (or ClickHouse) with map-reduce jobs. To improve data freshness, we ditched HDFS and started to send data in batches to the DB directly from edge servers. We experimented with Kafka, but it felt too complex for that task at the time.
I always dreamed about a straightforward service, to which I'd throw JSON objects, and it would take care of the rest: queueing, retrying, updating database schema, etc.
Then I discovered Segment. I liked it at first. It seemed very developer-friendly with a nice API and excellent documentation. But the pricing model and data delays (the event gets to DB in 12 hours after it has been sent to Segment) killed the whole idea. And it was not open-sourced. In my opinion, being open-source and self-hostable is a must for such a fundamental part of the architecture as data collection.
I left GetIntent and got accepted to YC with a different idea for the Summer 2020 batch. The idea was to build a churn prevention and BI tool for online retailers. It didn't take off, but in the process we made a component to collect customer's app events and put it to DB. We tried to hack a solution on top of the ELK stack, but I was frustrated with ElasticSearch’s lack of SQL support. Here I was back to square one: there's no good open-source event collection service yet, and we needed to build one, once again.
So we decided to focus solely on that problem. We ditched all the previous code, which was in Java, rewrote the data collection server in Go and hacked together what we called EventNative [1]. It was received very well, and we started to get users.
Over the last 11 months, we've been busy building the UI, adding Connectors (to pull data from external APIs), polishing data warehouse support, adding javascript support to transform incoming data, and implementing dozens of other features.
Now we're launching Jitsu, an open-source Segment alternative. With Jitsu, we make it easy to collect data and send it to databases (we support all major players: ClickHouse, Redshift, Snowflake, BigQuery and Postgres). We’re deployed in production, including into a large gaming publisher, eSignature service, and many other great companies. We're going for an open-core model. So far we don't have paid features, but soon we'll have some, presumably around things like authorization and data masking. Also we run Jitsu.Cloud[2] which you can buy if you don’t want to self-host
Give it a spin: https://github.com/jitsucom/jitsu.
Thank you for reading this story - I hope it was interesting. I would love to read your feedback on Jitsu and answer questions!
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24120325 [2] https://cloud.jitsu.com