[HN Gopher] Ask HN: Good open source alternatives to Google Anal...
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Ask HN: Good open source alternatives to Google Analytics?
Are there good alternatives for Google Analytics which you can
easily host yourself?
Author : TekMol
Score : 90 points
Date : 2022-01-11 07:25 UTC (1 days ago)
| benhoyt wrote:
| I wrote two articles about this for LWN last year. Several of
| them are self-hostable. Summary:
|
| https://lwn.net/Articles/822568/: lightweight options:
| GoatCounter and Plausible (open source), Simple Analytics and
| Fathom (closed)
|
| https://lwn.net/Articles/824294/: more alternatives: Matomo and
| Open Web Analytics (fairly heavyweight but both open source),
| Countly (open core), Snowplow Analytics (open source but
| enterprise roll-your-own product), GoAccess (open source;
| analyzes web server logs)
| kingo55 wrote:
| I've been a Snowplow user for nearly a decade. It's a bit of
| work to set up, but it's the best engineered of all those
| options.
|
| Snowplow's JSON schema events and contexts give you complete
| flexibility to define a data model that suits your business.
| Combined with DBT and a BI tool, like Apache Superset, it's
| vastly more capable than Google Analytics. We have clients
| running Google Analytics 360 that can't do the stuff we're able
| to with Snowplow.
| benhoyt wrote:
| I've also used Snowplow fairly heavily (several years ago).
| It's good for big stuff where you need lots of control and
| data customization, but it's significantly overkill if you
| just want basic analytics for your blog or small business
| website.
| kingo55 wrote:
| For sure... Bit overkill for that unless you're using
| Snowplow mini. A good rule of thumb to decide on Snowplow
| is whether you're considering GA 360.
| joshuaissac wrote:
| > Matomo
|
| Google may sometimes disable AdWords campaigns on sites that
| use Matomo. They "fix" it every once in a while when Matomo
| devs reach out to them, but the problem returns after a few
| months each time.
|
| https://forum.matomo.org/t/adwords-campaign-rejected-for-goo...
| propogandist wrote:
| > google assistance told me that "you need to remove the
| Matomo javascript as it is a malware"
|
| so Google wants Google Analytics to never be threatened for
| marketshare.
|
| A great sign that the free analytics service offered by the
| advertising company should not be trusted.
| paxcoder wrote:
| Makes me think Matomo's doing something right
| tedivm wrote:
| Fathom started as an open source project and then closed- when
| called on it one of the cofounders got extremely hostile and
| lied about saying it would stay open (then blocked people who
| shared the screenshots).
|
| Plausible on the other hand has been really engaged with the
| community on their Github Discussion board.
| culi wrote:
| The most popular on alternativeto.net are: Matomo, Plausible,
| GoAccess, Open Web Analytics, GoatCounter, etc
|
| https://alternativeto.net/software/google-analytics/
| topherPedersen wrote:
| Posthog! You can host the analytics yourself or let them host it
| for you.
| drchaim wrote:
| As I predicted around 2018, most or all analytics/events products
| will eventually move to ClickHouse or related technology (forks).
|
| Plausible: ClickHouse
|
| PostHog: ClickHouse
|
| Panbelbear: Clickhouse
|
| https://pirsch.io/: ClickHouse.
|
| PD: I should have a blog or something where I put this predicts
| :)
| mtmail wrote:
| https://plausible.io/self-hosted-web-analytics
| (https://github.com/plausible/analytics)
| anthelios wrote:
| https://panelbear.com/ isn't open source but privacy friendly. I
| found it on HN (the founder is on here), can't speak more highly
| of it. If you are tracking more than one site and want to get a
| good overview I recommend it.
| encoderer wrote:
| Panelbear is truly great. I moved crontab.guru to panelbear in
| October and I've been extremely happy. The site does millions
| of page views a month but the analytics are still fast and
| responsive.
| pixelbath wrote:
| I finally made the switch from GA to Open Web Analytics. I'm
| already fairly experienced with PHP, which I considered a point
| in its favor, but I honestly haven't had to do anything with it
| other than copying it to a server and configuring a few basic
| settings.
|
| The tracking code seems very lightweight, and I haven't found it
| lacking any of the features I was using in GA. I've tried a few,
| and OWA was the first that met all my criteria (100% free
| software, open source, actually works).
| magamig wrote:
| https://counter.dev/
| pieterhg wrote:
| https://simpleanalytics.com is what I use on all my sites and I
| love it
| nle wrote:
| Check out Umami (https://umami.is/). Should be GDPR compliant.
| Not as advanced as Google Analytics, but it has pretty good
| features.
| robin_reala wrote:
| The standard recommendation is https://matomo.org/. I've used it
| in production once (when it was called Piwik) and it seemed
| reasonable, but I'm not sure how it stacks up right now.
| jamesfinlayson wrote:
| A company I used to work for used Piwik and that's what I was
| going to suggest - I didn't realise it was now called Matomo.
| mywittyname wrote:
| Matomo is also dead-simple to develop plugins for. So if you're
| looking at a product that can be customized beyond simple
| analytics, Matomo is a great choice.
|
| I also used it a lot back when it was Piwik and the biggest
| issue was that it is backed by a MySQL database, and the way
| the reporting engine was designed meant that it would get
| pretty slow to work with custom date ranges with large volumes
| of data. But it did support caching and would pre-build reports
| over certain date ranges (by day, by month, by week, MtD, YtD).
| TekMol wrote:
| Thanks, I will take a look at it.
| mooreds wrote:
| We use matomo right now. Querying is a bit tougher (no
| instantaneous segments), but I find that it works fine for most
| of our use cases.
|
| We use their hosted version.
| bcl wrote:
| https://goaccess.io/ is nice, analyzes the logfiles instead of
| requiring it be added to the pages.
| Piribedil wrote:
| https://kindmetrics.io/ and
| https://github.com/kindmetrics/kindmetrics
| lbrito wrote:
| Shameless plug: I wrote a log-based analytics software that you
| can self-host on an Android phone.
|
| https://github.com/lbrito1/android-analytics
|
| Blog post:
| https://lbrito1.github.io/blog/2020/07/replacing_google_anal...
| john-doe wrote:
| https://github.com/nullitics/nullitics
| denysvitali wrote:
| Plausible, Matomo
| moritzruth wrote:
| I'm using https://umami.is for 5 sites. I also tried
| https://ackee.electerious.com/ but didn't like it.
|
| Now I would probably try https://plausible.io/
| XCSme wrote:
| I have been building a self-hosted analytics platform[0] (note
| that it's not free or open-source, just partially source-
| available) that is focused on the ease of self-hosting. It is
| most similar to Matomo but with a better performance, simpler UI
| and with features that they only provide in their paid plans.
|
| I used simple technologies (MySQL/PHP) for performance and
| portability reasons and, compared to other self-hosted
| alternatives, it provides features that you can only find on
| expensive SaaS product-analytics platforms (heatmaps,session
| recordings,ab tests, etc.).
|
| Let me know if you have any questions about UXWizz or self-
| hosting in general.
|
| [0]: https://www.uxwizz.com/
| [deleted]
| spreeker wrote:
| https://www.goatcounter.com/
| pea wrote:
| PostHog is the gold standard here. The feature-set goes far
| beyond GA and essentially replaces a lot of the other tools you
| may end up needing (FullStory, Amplitude, etc.)
| ggoo wrote:
| I use plausible for my very low traffic side project, mostly
| because it's easy to host yourself and free if you do so.
|
| https://github.com/plausible/analytics
| ejb999 wrote:
| I also like plausible - low cost for a low traffic site, but
| without all the more intrusive tracking/features that google
| has. I use it on about a dozen sites I develop/maintain.
|
| Also has a self-hosted option which is 'free', but you need to
| pay to host it someplace. I just pay them instead.
| ukutaht wrote:
| Thank you!
|
| I'm the maintainer of the project and it's so heartwarming to
| see it being recommended on this forum.
|
| All the projects mentioned here are great. What I think sets
| Plausible apart is that we've managed to create a profitable
| business around a 100% AGPL-licensed codebase (i.e. no dual-
| license for enterprise version). This means we can keep
| investing into the product and adding new features without
| being in the 'thankless OSS maintainer' role that so often ends
| in burnout.
|
| We're currently working on importing historical data from
| Google Analytics into Plausible[1] which should make switching
| even easier for many folks. Stay tuned.
|
| 1. https://github.com/plausible/analytics/pull/1466
| simonw wrote:
| I'm really into Plausible. I use their hosted version, and I
| really like their approach to privacy - it doesn't even use
| cookies, which means it doesn't trigger the need for an ugly
| GDPR cookie banner in the EU.
| spreeker wrote:
| https://www.goatcounter.com/ simple effective visitor counting
| with a fast golang / postgress solution. easy javascript solution
| to count actions on a page. GDPR compliant! Just looks a bit
| spartan.
| kyrra wrote:
| While not focused on OSS, this was asked 20 days ago at
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29662859 as "Ask HN: Best
| alternatives to Google Analytics in 2021?". It listed some OSS
| versions there.
| pictur wrote:
| https://count.ly/
| Jugurtha wrote:
| PostHog: https://github.com/PostHog/posthog if you want to deploy
| it yourself and https://posthog.com if you want the SaaS.
|
| I was using Avodocs (https://www.avodocs.com) to produce a
| privacy policy for our MLOps platform, https://iko.ai, but they
| didn't have PostHog in the list for the "Analytics" section, and
| they assumed that doing analytics implied sending user data to a
| third party site or something.
|
| I tweeted at them and they were lightning fast in reaching out
| and adding PostHog to the options of the the privacy policy
| template. It's really cool:
| https://twitter.com/jugurthahadjar/status/144733750656389120...
| krat0sprakhar wrote:
| +1 for PostHog!
| the_arun wrote:
| Regarding PostHog: If am a Startup & still running my beta
| product, $1500 per month is very expensive for managed service.
| They should charge it by number of API requests. Then I can
| start using this and naturally grow into the product. I really
| do not have bandwidth to self host when I am busy solving core
| customer problem.
| Jugurtha wrote:
| I'm not affiliated with PostHog nor am I privy to their
| internal tradeoffs; I therefore can't comment on how they
| should charge. However, their self hosting modality is rather
| straightforward: it's a docker-compose. It takes a few
| minutes to set up and mostly just works.
| SomeCallMeTim wrote:
| Click the "Cloud" option. Free to 1M events.
| santamex wrote:
| For questions like this I always consult:
|
| https://alternativeto.net/
| juriansluiman wrote:
| As stated by others already, there's Plausible (plausible.io) and
| Matomo (matomo.org).
|
| I have used both and stuck at Plausible. A few reasons
| (subjective):
|
| 1. Plausible is GDPR compliant by default, it has an effective
| way to measure analytics throughout the day without cookies
|
| 2. It is simple and that's key. I don't need to know much,
| Plausible just gives me that
|
| 3. It's fairly lightweight. Matomo is quite heavy and as my
| VPS'es are pretty much scaled down, less is just more
|
| 4. The Plausible self-hosting doc is centered around Docker,
| which is the architecture I use myself and is set up in literally
| a few minutes
| ukutaht wrote:
| Disclaimer: Plausible Analytics founder here
|
| I think Matomo is quite similar to Google Analytics which many
| people feel is bloated and confusing from the user's
| perspective. The idea with Plausible is to simplify web
| analytics and make it more understandable compared to what
| GA/Matomo offer.
|
| Granted, Matomo does have more depth and features in some
| areas. It can be the better choice if you want to go very deep
| into analytics and need some power features that Plausible
| might not support.
|
| We wrote a little (clearly biased) comparison with Matomo[1]. I
| hope we're not too harsh on it because Matomo is a great
| project and still a good fit for many people. But obviously we
| feel like a modern and simplified take on web analytics fits
| better for the majority of website owners.
|
| 1. https://plausible.io/vs-matomo
| tyingq wrote:
| Using a middle-man proxy for GA is an interesting idea I've seen.
| GA can take input from the backend, rather than the frontend, if
| you wish. So you could do some tokenizing/removal/etc of
| sensitive data, like IP addresses, but still use GA for it's
| reporting strengths.
|
| Edit: The GA api does allow for things like overriding the
| geolocation such that if you aren't sending the IP address,
| there's still relevant geo data to report on.
| dewey wrote:
| Another vote for Plausible, I pay for the hosted version as I
| like to support their way of doing things but I know people who
| self-host it and it's not hard to do.
| eu wrote:
| https://www.goatcounter.com
| tornquist wrote:
| I've been very happy with goatcounter as well.
|
| If you're looking for self-hosted the repo is here:
| https://github.com/arp242/goatcounter
| marvinblum wrote:
| Pirsch Analytics: https://pirsch.io
|
| Only the core (golang) is open-source though, so you won't get
| the dashboard.
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