[HN Gopher] Umami - An alternative to Google Analytics ___________________________________________________________________ Umami - An alternative to Google Analytics Author : sandebert Score : 167 points Date : 2021-05-17 09:44 UTC (13 hours ago) (HTM) web link (github.com) (TXT) w3m dump (github.com) | HuwFulcher wrote: | What is the edge of this over competitors like Plausible or | Fathom? They look the same and seem to offer exactly the same | features | mrwnmonm wrote: | Uses Chartjs? | preya2k wrote: | I recently switched from Matomo to Umami and I don't regret it at | all. Of course Matomo can do a lot more, but Umami is perfect for | my use case and a lot less work to maintain and host than Matomo. | kstrauser wrote: | Why do you say that? I'm using Matomo right now and it I don't | recall having to maintain it, other than applying the | occasional upgrade it asks for. | | I admit that Umami is pretty, though! | ksec wrote: | Previous Discussions | | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24198329 | | Edit: LOL, why is top Referrer from pornhub.com ? | Retr0spectrum wrote: | At time of writing, pornhub.com has 69 referrals - I suppose | someone was just having a laugh. | Seirdy wrote: | It's not uncommon for people to spoof their referrer headers | to a site they want to promote or to shock content. I ended | up watching the Simpson's Couch Gag "You're Next" episode | because it showed up in my access logs at least 50 times, for | instance. | cdubzzz wrote: | Damnit I clicked that thinking it would drill down or | something, not load the page. Sorry, IT. | francislavoie wrote: | Also: https://usefathom.com/ | listenallyall wrote: | Under-featured and over-priced | cbsmith wrote: | In a similar vein: https://divolte.io/ | benjaminjosephw wrote: | I know visitor stats has been a long-established expectation of | the web publishers but, silly question, why? Is it primarily | curiosity or are there genuine operational concerns which aren't | possible with stats from the server itself? | hansvm wrote: | Dwell time is challenging to pull out from server logs without | constant interaction. E.g., if a landing page has a low | conversion rate, your solutions are going to be pretty | different if you're trying to solve users immediately bouncing, | reading the whole thing and bouncing, or scrolling to some | particular piece of content and bouncing. | | There's also an implicit assumption in your question that every | notable user event has an associated server-side request. If | page changes and whatnot are being handled completely client- | side after the first request you might need a little extra | monitoring just to get the same level of detail you would | otherwise have from traditional server logs. | | I could be wrong here, but I think the big feature in client- | side analytics isn't that they offer some sort of special data | or insight; the selling point is that anyone can add them to | basically any web hosting solution (including CDNs you don't | control or random WordPress sites) with a single copy/paste. It | optimizes ease of adoption _at the cost of_ probably better | analytics. | | Elaborating on that "better analytics" point -- the web is | varied enough that even if you want to track your users' | activities it's really hard to interpret client-side data | correctly. E.g., in the landing page example above, if your | heartbeats stop hitting the server did the user navigate away | or did they go to another tab for a bit? In that same example, | are your heartbeats going through because the user is reading | and pondering your content or because they've gone to make a | sandwich (you can disambiguate this a bit if you also keep | track of something like the last time the user did something, | but it's not perfect)? On top of that, you don't get metrics | from people with JS disabled, with certain DNS blocklists, | people with slow connections, etc. | asciident wrote: | It looks like Umami does some of that. But I found that | Google Analytics does none of it, and in fact year-over-year | seems to cut back on the amount of useful information. The | main advantage now is they show referring search terms, which | servers logs would show, but they broke that on purpose with | their search result self-referring links. | benjaminjosephw wrote: | Is dwell time a meaningful/valuable metric to track? I | consistently open links in tabs I keep open for a long time | and I suspect other people might do the same. Like you said, | it's really hard to interpret this data, so why bother | trying? | | I think you're right about the ease of adoption aspect. My | take is that we do it because we've always done it - | primarily because the cost/benefit ratio has justified it. | We've normalized the idea that it's not only acceptable but | also prudent to study and analyze the detailed behavior of | end-users. The consensus seems to be that not adding end-user | tracking is similar to "leaving money on the table". | | On reflection, I'm starting to feel that it's perhaps not an | acceptable set of norms to accept without a justified need. | Some metrics seem almost voyeuristic and most imply an | approach to content marketing that only snake-oil salesmen | should consider. The use of analytics itself implies a | certain potential for inauthentic or intentionally | manipulative content. Optimizing content to have as much | mass-appeal as possible is perhaps more problematic than we | initially thought. | | Maybe it's time we rethink the norm in the first place. | Perhaps it's better to not know everything. | hansvm wrote: | > Is dwell time a meaningful/valuable metric to track? | | Like most other questions of this nature, the answer is | "maybe." Throwing out one possible scenario: We know some | people keep tabs open for a long time. Does our dwell time | data reflect that? If not then that's a red flag that we | have work to do (maybe a memory leak from some framework | lifecycle issue makes our page prone to crashes or being | manually closed, maybe the content is such hot garbage that | nobody thinks it's worth even keeping a background tab open | with our site, ...). | | > Like you said, it's really hard to interpret this data, | so why bother trying? | | Something can have a lot of value without that value being | easy to extract. Like...I'm sure Amazon has detailed | metrics about every mouse and keyboard event associated | with any pixel with the gall to glance sideways at the | shopping cart. It's probably hard to use correctly, but | when a 1% increase can pay for hundreds or thousands of | dedicated engineers and scientists the ease of | interpretation starts to not matter as much. | | > I'm starting to feel that it's perhaps not an acceptable | set of norms to accept without a justified need | | I'll need to think on it further, but on the surface that | seems like a reasonable baseline. If you don't at a bare | minimum know enough about your business and the data in | question to be able to anticipate some actionable way you | might actually need the data you want to collect then | you'll probably do more harm than good for yourself and | your users by collecting it. | ahstilde wrote: | Just use Parse.ly and make your life easier. | Saris wrote: | Not considering it since they don't publish pricing. | wussboy wrote: | Their pricing page doesn't have any pricing. It shows three | tiers, each one without a price, and when you click to "learn | more" it asks you to fill out your personal information. I'm | not impressed. | catinblack wrote: | https://piwik.pro/ You should also check this one | stanislavb wrote: | Umami seems great! However, if you are interested in an | alternative in a different programming language (non JS), you can | check out LibHunt https://www.libhunt.com/r/umami | doo_daa wrote: | Your faq says that "Umami does not use any cookies" so how do you | get the count of Visitors on your geo breakdown part of the | report? | yorwba wrote: | By combining the request's IP, user agent and OS to create a | unique session ID: | https://github.com/mikecao/umami/blob/f8ac987bfc0df581721bd2... | | This will undercount some visitors and overcount others, but it | should be good enough for most purposes. | kevinbowman wrote: | Interestingly, the OS is detected from the user agent, so | really it's only hashing the IP and the user agent. | lucasmullens wrote: | So an entire school district would be the same user? | | Seems reasonable for most cases, but if you're a website | that's used a lot by schools or businesses, they might have | every computer using the same user agent and IP. | esrh wrote: | This is unfortunate in a way because it's easy to deny | cookiee but hard to spoof all of those | Shorel wrote: | Another pollution of the search space. | | Now when I am looking for flavour profiles I will get SEO | nonsense. | | Also true the other way around. | mrwnmonm wrote: | Why is pornhub in the Referrers list? | johbjo wrote: | The value google provides here is not the technology, but a | "neutral" external partner. It means that bosses do not need to | elevate anyone's responsibilities to some niche (but probably | better) alternative tool. | | It's the same with most standard tools or outsourcing partners. | The point is not so much "no one got fired for choosing IBM", | it's that IBM is customer to the boss, not the subordinate. | | A big value in SaaS is that it allows the boss to have the | highest privileges in all systems. | IceWreck wrote: | If you want something more lightweight and easier to selfhost, I | recently discovered https://www.goatcounter.com/ | nvr219 wrote: | Yes I've been using goatcounter and it's very simple and to the | point. Recommende. | codyogden wrote: | I've been using Umami for Killed by Google for the last eight | months. I'm very happy with it. Provides me with just enough data | for insightful decisions. | | Here's the public analytics page (all time ~675k page views, | ~575k visitors). | | https://analytics.bale.media/share/s1Q7twme ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2021-05-17 23:00 UTC)