Jitsu vs RudderStack: Pricing and License
Cross 3 million events a month on RudderStack Growth and the list price climbs from $735 to $995 at 5 million. The self-hosted route has its own limit: the license forbids hosting RudderStack's source-available server for your clients.
Jitsu bills per event too, at $99 a month for 2 million and $40 for each million after that, under the MIT license. The RudderStack SDK calls in your apps keep their event names, your JavaScript transformations become Jitsu functions, and the same events reach Amplitude, HubSpot, Meta Ads and your warehouse.
The price ladder, tier by tier
RudderStack's annual column is its own published 15% discount.
| Monthly events | Jitsu Business | RudderStack Growth, monthly | RudderStack Growth, billed annually |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1M | $99 (2M included) | $265 | $225 a month |
| 3M | $139 | $735 | $625 a month |
| 5M | $219 | $995 | $845 a month |
| 10M | $419 | $1,675 | $1,420 a month |
| 25M | $1,019 | $2,750 | $2,335 a month |
| Above 25M | $40 per additional 1M | Enterprise, through sales | Enterprise, through sales |
Sources: Jitsu pricing, RudderStack pricing and its billing docs.
The hosted-service clause
RudderStack's server is published under the Elastic License 2.0. You can read it, change it and run it for your own company. Its first limitation reads:
You may not provide the software to third parties as a hosted or managed service, where the service provides users with access to any substantial set of the features or functionality of the software.
Jitsu's MIT license has no such clause. On self-hosted Jitsu, an agency can run a workspace for each of its clients, and a software company can offer the pipeline to its customers as a service, without a second license.
Tracking plans as code
Keep the check in your repository and deploy it with the Jitsu CLI, and a tracking-plan change ships in the same pull request as the code that sends the event. The check is a function on the warehouse connection: JavaScript that tests each event for the fields and types your plan expects and drops the ones that fail. To keep the failures for inspection, add a second connection to a separate table whose function passes only them.
Porting a RudderStack tracking plan means turning each event's required properties into those checks.
Switching the SDK and transformations
- Swap the SDK. RudderStack's SDK already follows the Segment spec, so on the web your event names and properties stay as they are; only the loader and the object you call change. Apps switch SDKs using the iOS and Android setup pages.
- Add each RudderStack destination to Jitsu from the integrations catalog.
- Port your transformations. A Jitsu function receives each event and returns it changed, or drops it, so a JavaScript transformation's logic moves straight in. Python transformations are rewritten in JavaScript.
Self-hosted RudderStack moves the same way, with Jitsu's code self-hosted on your own Kubernetes cluster.
Questions people ask
Is RudderStack open source? No. Under the Elastic License 2.0 you can run it for your own company but not host it for clients. Jitsu's MIT license allows both.
What does 5 million events a month cost on each? $219 on Jitsu Business. RudderStack Growth lists $995 a month, or $845 a month billed annually.
What happens to my RudderStack transformations? JavaScript transformations become Jitsu functions, which run on each event in flight and can drop, reshape or enrich it.
Do events I filter out count toward the bill? Not on Jitsu. An event counts only once it reaches a destination, so events a function drops without calling fetch are free. RudderStack counts an event when your site or app generates it.
Get started with Jitsu
Point one site or app at a Business free trial and compare its active-event count, at $40 per million above 2 million, with your RudderStack invoice.