I built rails-persona — behavioral analytics for Rails with zero external services

#rails #ruby #webdev #opensource

The problem

Every SaaS app eventually needs to answer the same questions:

Which features do my users actually use?
Who are my most active users?
When did a user last do something meaningful?
Which users are going inactive?

The typical answer is "add Mixpanel" or "set up Segment." But that means:

Sending your user data to a third party
Paying for another service
Adding a JS snippet
Learning another dashboard

For most Rails apps, this is overkill. The data you need is already in your database.

What I built

rails-persona is a Ruby gem that adds model-level behavioral analytics directly to your ActiveRecord models. No external services, no JS, no cookies — just your own database.

class User < ApplicationRecord
  include Persona::Trackable

  persona do
    track :login
    track :export_report
    track :view_dashboard
    track :upgrade_plan
  end
end

Then track actions anywhere in your app:

current_user.track!(:login)
current_user.track!(:upgrade_plan, metadata: { plan: "pro", amount: 49 })

And query behavior instantly:

user.most_frequent_action       # => :login
user.inactive_since?(30)        # => false
user.persona_summary            # => { login: 42, export_report: 5 }
user.daily_activity(7)          # => { "2024-05-28" => 4, "2024-05-29" => 7 }
user.peak_hour                  # => 14  (2pm)
User.persona_leaderboard        # => top 10 most active users

How it's different from ahoy

ahoy is a great gem but it solves a different problem — it tracks HTTP visits and page views. rails-persona tracks what users do inside your app at the model level.

	ahoy	rails-persona
Focus	HTTP visits + page views	Model actions + behavior
Needs JS	Yes	No
Async built-in	No	Yes (Sidekiq)
Bulk tracking	No	Yes (insert_all!)
Class leaderboards	No	Yes
Works on any model	Awkward	First-class

Key features

Async tracking — never slow down a request:

Persona.configure do |config|
  config.async = true  # fires a Sidekiq job
end

Bulk tracking — uses insert_all! under the hood:

user.bulk_track!([:login, :view_dashboard, :export_report])

Open tracking — skip the whitelist entirely:

persona do
  open_tracking!  # any string is valid
end

Data pruning — keep your DB clean:

Persona.configure do |config|
  config.max_events_per_record  = 500
  config.auto_prune_after_days  = 90
end

Works on any model — not just User:

class Post < ApplicationRecord
  include Persona::Trackable

  persona do
    track :viewed
    track :shared
    track :bookmarked
  end
end

Post.persona_class_summary  # => { viewed: 50_420, shared: 890 }

Installation

# Gemfile
gem "rails-persona"

bundle install
rails db:migrate

Why I built this

I was the sole engineer on a production SaaS called CinnaLab PRM — an AI-powered Partner Relationship Management platform. I kept wanting to know things like "which users are using the partner portal vs ignoring it?" and "who's about to churn based on inactivity?"

I didn't want to set up Mixpanel for an internal SaaS. I just wanted to query my own database. rails-persona is what I wish had existed.