head to head

FullStory vs Highlight

Highlight is the open source alternative to FullStory — digital experience analytics. Here is the honest comparison.

Yes — Highlight is a viable free replacement for FullStory. Highlight is open source under its own open-source terms, written in TypeScript, with 9,375 GitHub stars, 675 forks and 553 open issues; it was last pushed 28 days ago. FullStory is priced Custom pricing, while self-hosting Highlight carries no licence fee — the trade is your operational time instead of a subscription. 1 other open source FullStory alternative is tracked here, led by PostHog at 39,835 stars. Highlight ranks #2 of 2 tracked open source FullStory alternatives by stars. The tracked set, by adoption: PostHog (39,835 stars). Replacement criteria on this page: 4 reasons to move to Highlight and 3 reasons to stay on FullStory.

Highlight stars ★ 9.4K license Custom / other self-host yes FullStory pricing Custom pricing

choose Highlight if

  • Your FullStory bill is growing with seats or usage
  • You need your data in a format and server you control
  • Your compliance posture requires auditing the code that touches sensitive data
  • You have (or can rent) a server and basic Docker comfort

full Highlight profile →

stick with FullStory if

  • You need the polished onboarding and support SLAs of a commercial vendor
  • Your team has zero capacity to operate software, even self-hosted-simple
  • You depend on a FullStory integration ecosystem that the OSS alternatives have not replicated

Side by side

Highlight (open source) FullStory
Price Free (self-hosted) Custom pricing
License Custom / other Proprietary
Source code Public, auditable Closed
Self-hosting Yes — highlight/highlight Cloud only
Data ownership Your server, your format Vendor's cloud
Community ★ 9.4K · ⑂ 675
Built with TypeScript

Why people look for a FullStory alternative

FullStory's pricing is opaque and custom. Session data includes sensitive user information on their servers.

About Highlight

Highlight is an open source, full stack monitoring platform for modern web applications. It lives in the Infrastructure & Operations / Monitoring & Observability ecosystem, and its repository lists TypeScript, Golang, APM, metrics, tracing, and self hosted as topics.

read the full Highlight overview →

Other open source alternatives to FullStory

PostHog ★ 40K

last updated nightly · ranking method: github stars, live-tracked

Frequently asked questions

Is Highlight a good replacement for FullStory?

Highlight is an open source alternative to FullStory (Digital experience analytics). It is written in TypeScript and licensed under its own terms, with 9,375 GitHub stars.

Is Highlight free compared to FullStory?

Yes. Highlight is open source — there is no licence fee, and you can self-host it. FullStory is typically a paid subscription, so the trade-off is licence cost against the operational work of running it yourself.

How do I migrate from FullStory to Highlight?

Migration effort depends on the data formats involved. Check Highlight's documentation for import options, and compare the feature table above to confirm the capabilities you depend on are covered before switching.