Countly is a self-hosted, privacy-first analytics platform that helps organizations understand user behavior across mobile and web while retaining full ownership of their data. The company is led by Onur Alp Soner. Pulse 2.0 interviewed Countly’s Onur Alp Soner to learn more.
Background in Telecom Infrastructure
Asked about his background, Soner shared:
I’m a computer engineer by background. Before Countly, I worked on telecom infrastructure, which gave me a strong foundation in building systems that need to be reliable and scalable. At the same time, I was always building side projects. A couple of them got some traction back then. One was a social platform for creating and sharing tutorials, and the other was focused on visual bookmarking. This was 15–20 years ago, of course, but those projects were important for me. They were where my interest in building products and entrepreneurship really took shape, and that is what eventually brought me together with the group I went on to build Countly with.
Origins of the Company
Asked how the idea for the company came together, Soner explained:
Countly was born out of a fundamental disagreement with the analytics status quo. Analytics tools were positioned as neutral infrastructure, but in reality, they were deeply tied to advertising and data resale. The industry normalized a model where gaining visibility meant surrendering ownership. I didn’t believe that should be the default.
So, we built Countly around a different assumption: that organizations should fully own their data and decide how it’s used, stored, and integrated into their own systems. That’s why we started with open source and self-hosting, and why we’ve stayed independent. The technology has evolved a lot since then, but the motivation hasn’t changed. We’re still focused on building infrastructure that gives companies real control over their data, not just compliance, especially as data becomes the foundation for AI and decision-making.
A Favorite Memory
Asked about his favorite memory working for the company so far, Soner reflected:
It’s hard to narrow it down to just one, as the moments that stand out come from very different stages of the company. I still remember when Countly went live, when we made the front page of Hacker News and saw a surge of attention, when we hired our first team member, and when we signed Intel as our first paying customer, all very different moments that stood out for different reasons.
On a more personal level, meeting teammates in person after years of working together remotely has also meant a lot. Another standout has been visiting the headquarters of some of the world’s biggest companies and seeing firsthand how our product helps them. It has been quite a ride over the last 12 years, and I hope we keep adding to that list.
Core Products and Features
Asked about the company’s core products and features, Soner detailed:
Countly started as a self-hosted, privacy-first analytics platform, built to help organizations understand how users interact with their products without giving up ownership of their data. From the beginning, it focused on collecting first-party data across mobile and web in environments fully controlled by the customer.
Over time, the platform expanded beyond basic analytics into product insights, engagement, and experimentation, always with the same goal: turning data into something teams can act on, not just observe. Today, Countly is used by organizations of all sizes, from individual developers to global enterprises such as BMW and Coca-Cola. To support that range, we offer three editions called Lite, Flex, and Enterprise, allowing teams to choose how they host and govern their data, from a single app to large, compliance-heavy environments.
With the 26.01 release, that foundation has evolved further. Product analytics remains part of Countly, but the platform now also serves as a real-time data foundation, designed to structure and govern customer behavior data to support more advanced use cases, including AI, without compromising control.
Challenges in the Sector
Asked whether he has faced any challenges in his sector of work recently and how he overcame them, Soner outlined:
One of the main challenges has been expectations around AI. There’s a lot of pressure to move fast, even when the data foundations aren’t ready. We’ve dealt with that by staying focused on the basics, building a solid data layer before adding intelligence on top.
Another challenge is perception. Self-hosting and data privacy are often seen as “just regulation,” when for us it’s always been about ownership. Helping people see that data ownership is foundational, not restrictive, takes time, but that’s also why we’ve stayed consistent in our approach.
Technology Evolution Since Launch
Asked how the company’s technology has evolved since launching, Soner described:
From the beginning, the real challenge wasn’t insight itself, but the data underneath it, its quality, structure, and ownership.
With the 26.01 release, Countly made that perspective more explicit. The platform is built around analytics as a data foundation, not just a collection of dashboards. A new real-time data engine, an AI-ready data pipeline, and a built-in assistant are designed to turn first-party behavioral data into something enterprises can actually rely on for decision-making and AI.
The goal isn’t to add AI on top of analytics, but to ensure the data feeding the AI is fast, structured, and fully under the organization’s control. In that sense, Countly is moving from an analytics tool to a data layer that enables customer-driven AI, without compromising privacy or trust.
Significant Milestones
Asked about the company’s most significant milestones, Soner noted:
One of the earliest and most important milestones was the release of Countly in 2012 as the first open-source mobile analytics platform. From there, we kept expanding the product beyond analytics. Over the years, we added crash analytics, push notifications, remote configuration, and A/B testing, turning Countly into a broader suite of tools that product teams could actually rely on.
Countly Flex in 2023 was another important step. It was our first dedicated Countly-as-a-service offering, allowing customers to choose their hosting region, features, and data retention settings while still maintaining their own Countly environment in the cloud. That balance between flexibility and control was important to us.
More recently, Countly 26.01 has been a major turning point. It represents a big performance leap for a self-hosted analytics platform. Fast access to insight matters on its own, but the bigger reason we redesigned the architecture was the shift toward AI. AI doesn’t just need raw data in real time; it needs context and insight in real time as well. That is where the new Countly makes a real difference for our customers.
Customer Success Stories
Asked to share specific customer success stories, Soner noted:
Because of how we work with customers and the level of trust involved, I prefer not to share specific names or internal stories. But there are some patterns we see consistently across successful Countly deployments.
The first is control. When a company owns its intelligence infrastructure, analytics stops being a team-specific activity and becomes something the whole organization can approach more strategically. The second is standardization. Teams align on how data is defined, tracked, and used. In large organizations, that matters more than it sounds, because without that alignment, analytics never becomes a company-wide capability.
The third is that when data and action live on the same platform, teams start thinking much more clearly about purpose: why they are tracking something and how they can use it to benefit the customer. And when intelligence sits closer to the product, it’s treated like any other core system, something the company owns. That matters even more for AI use cases, as large companies are often reluctant to expose their product data and intelligence to generic SaaS tools.
I usually describe this as the ownership advantage. There’s a real difference between using a tool and owning part of your infrastructure, and that difference changes how teams think.
Funding and Revenue Metrics
Asked to discuss funding and/or revenue metrics, Soner shared:
Countly has been independently built and bootstrapped since the beginning. We chose not to take outside investment so we could stay focused on our long-term vision and our customers, rather than external timelines or expectations. That independence has shaped how we build, grow, and think about the business overall.
Total Addressable Market
Asked about the total addressable market the company is pursuing, Soner described:
We see our total addressable market as the overlap between product analytics, customer intelligence, and first-party data infrastructure.
If you look only at traditional product and customer analytics platforms, the global market is already in the $10–15 billion range. But that is still too narrow for where Countly is going. As organizations move away from third-party data dependency and begin treating behavioral data as core infrastructure, the market expands into adjacent areas like internal data platforms, customer data foundations for AI, and analytics for regulated enterprise environments. Taking those into account, we see the longer-term opportunity in the $30 billion+ range.
That said, we are not trying to capture all analytics spend. Our focus is much more specific: organizations that care about ownership, control, privacy, and long-term reliability, particularly those in regulated industries or building AI-driven products. That segment is growing faster than the broader category and aligns with how Countly is built.
Competitive Differentiation
Asked what differentiates the company from its competition, Soner emphasized:
Countly is differentiated by the depth of control built into the platform. It was designed so organizations don’t have to choose between owning their data and having advanced capabilities. The system can run entirely within the customer’s environment while still supporting analytics, engagement, and automation at an enterprise scale.
Rather than hiding everything behind closed systems, Countly is designed to be open and adaptable. Teams can understand how their data is handled, connect it to their own systems, and shape the platform around their needs. This makes analytics part of the core infrastructure, not a separate tool on the side.
Future Goals
Asked about the company’s future goals, Soner concluded:
Ironically, our goal is to become invisible. Not in the sense of disappearing, but in becoming part of the underlying system, something products rely on without constantly thinking about it. We want Countly to sit inside applications as infrastructure that helps them understand and respond to users in real time, using data the organization fully owns and controls.
