Jitsu vs Snowplow: Schemas, Pricing and License
Every new custom event your product team adds on Snowplow waits for a published schema before it reaches a table. After the 14-day trial the platform is priced by quote, and the events land in a warehouse you run and pay for separately.
Jitsu creates the warehouse columns from whatever your site, app or backend sends, in ClickHouse, which Jitsu Cloud provisions for you, or in your own BigQuery, Snowflake or Redshift.
What has to exist before your data flows
Snowplow validates each self-describing event against its schema and passes only valid ones, so a new event type needs a new schema first.
Jitsu's automatic schema management works the other way around. Send track("plan_upgraded", { plan: "team", seats: 12 }) and the events table gains a column for each new property.
A Jitsu function can still reject an event that lacks a field your reports depend on, and your existing Snowplow schemas tell you which fields those are.
Snowplow's quote and Jitsu's price
Snowplow's pricing page quotes rates based on monthly event volume, hosting preferences, consumption or destinations. Jitsu's prices are published: the Free plan covers 200,000 active events a month, Business is $99 for 2 million, and 10 million events a month is $419.
Snowplow's self-hosted code is under SLULA 1.1, which carries a non-commercial use restriction. Jitsu's is MIT, with no usage limits.
Porting trackers and enrichments
- Map your tracker calls. Snowplow self-describing events become Jitsu
trackcalls with the same properties, and page views becomepage. - Rebuild your enrichments as functions. A function can call an external API with
fetchand reshape each event before it is stored.
Questions people ask
Do I need a schema or a warehouse before my first event? Neither. Jitsu creates the columns from the events it receives and stores them in ClickHouse. BigQuery, Snowflake or Redshift can be added as destinations later.
What happens to my Snowplow schemas? They become the specification for your Jitsu tracking calls, and a function can enforce the fields you rely on.
Is Snowplow open source? No. The Snowplow Limited Use License 1.1 allows only non-production or non-commercial use, so running it in production takes a separate self-hosted agreement with Snowplow. Jitsu's MIT code runs in production at no license cost.
How long is Jitsu's free plan? It has no end date.
Get started with Jitsu
Add the snippet to a free account and query your first events in ClickHouse.