Jitsu
Open-source event ingestion and data pipeline that streams clicks, events, and identities straight to your warehouse.
Last commit 2026-06-01
Jitsu is an event collection pipeline, not a full customer data platform. That narrower scope is intentional. Where Segment and RudderStack try to be the entire data routing layer, Jitsu focuses on getting events from browsers, mobile apps, and server-side code into an analytics store as quickly and cheaply as possible. Its primary target is ClickHouse, though it supports BigQuery, Snowflake, Redshift, and PostgreSQL equally well. The TypeScript and Go codebase is lightweight enough that a single server handles hundreds of millions of events per month.
The migration story from Segment is straightforward. Jitsu ships a Segment-compatible HTTP API and browser SDK, so existing instrumentation can point at a new host with minimal changes. JavaScript functions run at ingest time for field normalization, PII scrubbing, or enrichment before events are written to the destination. A retroactive replay feature lets you re-process stored raw events against a new schema or a new destination after the fact — a capability that matters when you change your data model or add a new warehouse.
Jitsu is MIT-licensed, which means you can run it freely without usage restrictions on your own hardware or cloud account. The cloud-hosted option uses volume-based pricing similar to Segment, but the self-hosted path eliminates that entirely. The tool does not attempt to replace Segment's 400-destination connector catalog or RudderStack's Profiles identity layer — it does one thing (high-throughput warehouse ingestion) and does it well. Teams that already use dbt or a BI tool on top of ClickHouse often find Jitsu the most cost-effective first layer in that stack.
Key features of Jitsu
- Real-time event streaming to ClickHouse, BigQuery, Snowflake, Redshift, and PostgreSQL
- Segment-compatible HTTP API and browser SDK for zero-friction instrumentation migration
- JavaScript functions for in-flight event transformation and enrichment
- Retroactive replay — re-process historical events after schema or destination changes
- Built-in connection catalog for SaaS sources (Stripe, Salesforce, HubSpot) via connectors
- Jitsu Cloud hosted option with a usage-based pricing model
Pros
- MIT license — freely self-hostable with full source access and no usage-based billing
- ClickHouse-native support delivers sub-second query performance on billions of events
- Lightweight footprint compared to full CDP suites — easy to operate on a single server
Cons
- Primarily an ingestion layer — lacks Segment's breadth of 400+ maintained destination connectors
- User profile unification and identity graph are less mature than Segment Personas or RudderStack Profiles
- Cloud hosted plan pricing scales with event volume, similar to Segment
Jitsu pricing
Free / self-host · open-core · MIT
Engineering teams that need fast, cheap event collection into a warehouse and are willing to handle destination wiring themselves.
Jitsu is an alternative to
Frequently asked questions
Is Jitsu open source?
Yes. Jitsu is open source (MIT), so you can read the code, self-host it, and avoid vendor lock-in.
How much does Jitsu cost?
Jitsu starts at Free / self-host on a open-core model. Self-hosting can reduce that to infrastructure cost only.
Can I self-host Jitsu?
Yes — Jitsu supports self-hosting, giving you full data ownership.