Cially - Discord Server Analytics, But Actually Good 🪼

#discord #webdev #opensource #nextjs

Why I made this

I've been running Discord Servers for a long time using great tools that both, Discord and other great developers provide. However, neither, Discord nor other similar tools could give useful insights that were able to help me improve my servers, by understanding fully how each community behaved. Even if there were such tools, they were locked behind strict paywalls that are hard to keep up with due to lack of profit.

So, this is what I did

I spent over 100 days working on Cially: an open-source, self-hosted and completely free tool that anyone can use to track tons of data regarding their Discord Server, while keeping all of it locally. My tool is able to track:

Basic Server Data: Members, Roles, Channels, Bans, Vanity URL uses etc.
Message Analytics: Messages sent per hour/day/week, total messages ever sent/deleted/edited
Growth Metrics: Joins-Leaves per hour/day/week/all time, unique/duplicate joins, retention rate, average user ratings
Activity Insights: Most active channels/users/hours & real-time member status (online, idle, offline)
Per User Insights: Just paste some user's ID and get their join/leave history, average message length, total invites, total messages sent and other basic data

I am a huge fan of pretty UI. I stopped using really useful tools because of their terrible UI & UX. Therefore, I focused a lot on making Cially a pretty and user-friendly tool, giving a premium feeling, even though, anyone can use it for free

But, isn't self-hosting a struggle?

Self-hosting is great -and an addiction for many-. However, simple users find it quite hard to get started. Therefore, thanks to Keksi, our main contributor we've worked on making this as simple as possible. All you need is to download Docker, and follow the steps on repo's README. All the process -besides the time it takes to download Docker- should take less than 10 minutes.

What's the future of Cially

I am not making any profit of Cially at all, and as of right now I am not planning to. I love using and developing this tool for fun, so I want to keep it that way. Therefore, I can't say for sure what its future is. I am trying to fix every bug & issue that people report on Github. However, due to liabilities, new features might take some time to be released. If anyone is willing to work on new stuff, they can send a pull request and I will check it out as soon as possible! That's why open-sourcing is amazing 😝

Summary

Thanks for reading this article! It was very exciting learning all these new technologies and implementing them to create something pretty. Below you can find the Github Link, along with some screenshots of the tool!