OpenPanel vs Wicked Reports in 2026: Open-source product analytics vs first-party ecommerce ad attribution
One is a $2.50-a-month, self-hostable event tracker built for product teams. The other is a $499-a-month attribution engine built to prove which ads actually bring new ecommerce customers.
OpenPanel
Wicked Reports- OpenPanel starts at $2.50/month for 5,000 events. Wicked Reports starts at $499/month on the Measure plan and scales with annual revenue, reaching $4,999-plus/month at Enterprise.
- OpenPanel tracks custom product and web events: funnels, A/B tests, revenue tracking. Wicked Reports tracks ad attribution specifically, separating new-customer conversions from repeat-buyer credit on ecommerce ad spend.
- OpenPanel is open-source and can be fully self-hosted at any tier. Wicked Reports is a hosted SaaS platform with no self-hosting option mentioned anywhere in its plans.
- Wicked Reports' Attribution Time Machine matches a sale back to the original ad click weeks or months later. OpenPanel has no ad-click attribution model; it reports on events and funnels as they happen inside your own tracked product.
- OpenPanel exposes 38 MCP tools so AI agents can query product analytics directly. Wicked Reports has no MCP or AI-agent integration mentioned in its feature set, though it does run a weekly 5 Forces AI budget classification on Maximize and Enterprise plans.
- OpenPanel has no white-label delivery for agencies. Wicked Reports does not document white-label either, though its API integrations from the Scale plan upward support building custom agency reporting workflows.
OpenPanel and Wicked Reports both live in the Analytics & Reporting category, but they were built to answer completely different questions. OpenPanel tracks what users do inside your product or on your site: custom events, funnels, A/B tests, and revenue tracking, starting at $2.50/month for 5,000 events, with a self-hosting option and 38 MCP tools for AI-agent access to the data. Wicked Reports tracks what your ad spend actually produces: it separates first-time customers from repeat buyers at the attribution layer, matches sales back to the original ad click even months later, and runs a weekly AI-driven Scale, Chill, or Kill recommendation on every campaign, starting at $499/month and scaling with your annual revenue. A developer instrumenting a SaaS product and a DTC brand auditing Meta ad spend are looking for entirely different tools, even though a directory might list them side by side.
The tools at a glance
OpenPanel
Open-source product and web analytics with self-hosting, MCP integration, and Mixpanel-level event depth
OpenPanel is an open-source analytics platform for tracking custom events, funnels, A/B tests, and revenue inside a product or website, priced by monthly event volume starting at $2.50/month for 5,000 events. The self-hosting option means a team with data residency requirements can run the entire stack on its own infrastructure rather than sending behavioral data to a third party.
Every core feature, funnels, A/B testing, revenue tracking, is available from the cheapest tier rather than gated to a higher plan, and the 38 MCP tools let AI agents query event data directly, which is unusual in this market. It answers the question of how users move through a product, not how an ad dollar turned into a customer.
There is no advertising or attribution layer at all: no ad platform connections, no click-to-sale matching, no campaign-level ROI recommendations. OpenPanel is a first-party event tracker for the product itself, not a tool for auditing marketing spend.
| Feature | 5K events $2.50/mo | 100K events $20/mo | 1.0M events $90/mo | Custom Contact |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Custom event tracking | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Funnel analysis | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| A/B testing and revenue tracking | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| MCP tools (38) | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Self-hosting option | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
Wicked Reports
First-party attribution that shows which ads bring new customers, not just clicks.
Wicked Reports answers a question that most ad platforms answer badly: which campaigns bring in genuinely new customers, rather than claiming credit for a repeat buyer's next order. It has analyzed data from over 2,000 ecommerce brands and separates new-customer attribution from retargeting at the data layer instead of leaving it to manual analysis.
The Attribution Time Machine matches a sale back to the original ad click even months after it happened, which matters for anything with a longer consideration cycle than a same-day impulse buy. Advanced Signal feeds clean new-customer conversion data back to Meta via CAPI, and the weekly 5 Forces AI classifies every campaign as Scale, Chill, or Kill against verified new-customer ROI.
Pricing starts at $499/month on the Measure plan and scales with annual revenue, reaching $4,999-plus/month at Enterprise. It is built for ecommerce brands on Shopify or WooCommerce-style platforms with real ad budgets, not for tracking product usage or general site behavior.
| Feature | Measure $499/month | Scale $699/month | Maximize $999/month | Enterprise From $4,999/month |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| API Integrations | No | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| 5 Forces AI (Weekly Budget AI) | Add-on +$199/mo | Add-on +$199/mo | Yes | Yes |
| Advanced Signal Meta CAPI | Add-on +$199/mo | Add-on +$199/mo | Yes | Yes |
| Priority Support | No | No | No | Yes |
Head-to-head feature comparison
| Feature | OpenPanel | Wicked Reports |
|---|---|---|
| Starting price | $2.50/mo | $499/mo |
| Core function | Product and web event analytics | First-party ad attribution for ecommerce |
| Custom event tracking | Yes | No |
| Self-hosting option | Yes | No |
| Ad platform attribution | No | Yes |
| New-customer vs repeat-buyer filtering | No | Yes |
| Long-window sale-to-click matching | No | Yes (Attribution Time Machine) |
| AI/agent integration | Yes, 38 MCP tools | No MCP mentioned |
| Weekly budget recommendations | No | Yes (5 Forces AI, Maximize+) |
| Revenue tracking | Yes | Yes (revenue-linked, not attribution) |
Which should you choose?
OpenPanelWicked ReportsOpenPanelWicked ReportsOpenPanelWicked ReportsThese two rarely compete for the same line item in a budget. OpenPanel is what a product or engineering team installs to understand how people use the thing they built. Wicked Reports is what a marketing or growth team installs to understand whether the ad dollars spent to acquire those people were actually well spent on new customers rather than repeat buyers. The price gap, $2.50/month against a $499/month floor, reflects that they are solving problems of very different scope, not that one is simply a cheaper version of the other.
Bottom line
Choose OpenPanel if you need to track custom events, funnels, and revenue inside your own product at minimal cost, with self-hosting as a real option for data control. Choose Wicked Reports if you run ecommerce ad spend and need to prove which campaigns bring genuinely new customers rather than recycling credit for repeat buyers. A DTC brand with its own app could reasonably run both: OpenPanel for product usage, Wicked Reports for ad attribution, since neither one covers the other's job.
Frequently asked questions
Are OpenPanel and Wicked Reports direct competitors?
No. OpenPanel is an open-source product and web analytics tool for tracking custom events, funnels, and revenue inside your own product, while Wicked Reports is a first-party ad attribution platform built specifically to separate new-customer acquisition from retargeting credit on ecommerce ad spend. They solve different problems for different teams.
Why is Wicked Reports so much more expensive than OpenPanel?
Wicked Reports starts at $499 per month because it is solving a revenue-attribution problem for ecommerce brands with real ad budgets, including features like the Attribution Time Machine and a weekly AI-driven budget recommendation engine. OpenPanel, at $2.50 per month, is a lightweight event-tracking tool with no ad attribution layer at all, so the price difference reflects two different product categories rather than one tool being a discount version of the other.
Can OpenPanel tell me which ad brought in a new customer?
No. OpenPanel tracks custom events, funnels, and revenue inside your product or site, but it has no concept of matching a sale back to an ad click or filtering new customers from repeat buyers. That specific capability is what Wicked Reports is built around.
Does OpenPanel have anything comparable to Wicked Reports' MCP or AI features?
OpenPanel ships 38 MCP tools that let AI agents query product event data directly, which Wicked Reports does not offer. Wicked Reports' AI feature is different in kind: the weekly 5 Forces AI classifies ad campaigns as Scale, Chill, or Kill based on new-customer ROI, available on the Maximize plan and above or as an add-on on lower tiers.
Is Wicked Reports useful for a SaaS product without ecommerce checkout?
Not really. Wicked Reports' new-customer attribution model is built around transaction data from Shopify, WooCommerce, and similar cart platforms. A SaaS product without a direct ecommerce checkout would get far more value from OpenPanel's event tracking and funnel analysis than from an ecommerce-specific attribution tool.