Free and/or self hosted alternative to Google Analytics?

A customer is asking about analytics, and are sceptical to Google.

All the alternatives I’ve seen, are way too expensive for this non-profit organization. Any hints of alternatives that are free and/or open, self hosted or not?

(Doesn’t have to be the most advanced, but some metrics of which pages are viewed the most, and maybe where people are referred from or something. This is really not my cup of tea, but I guess I could look a bit into it.)

:cowboy_hat_face:

Matomo. Most well-known FOSS alternative, I believe.

3 Likes

Yeah Matomo (previously called “Piwik”) is pretty good. There’s also https://umami.is/ which is lighter but has fewer features.

2 Likes

Just throwing https://www.awstats.org/ in the discussion. However it does not look as beautiful and feature rich as the other solutions listed here.

1 Like

As @ac_fan and @Daniel said, Matomo On-Premise
Running it for three years now. Can only recommend it :slight_smile: - gives me some cool insights without feeding everything to Google.

1 Like

It has it’s own faults as it’s not a perfect product yet.
But check out https://www.usertrack.net/
It’s paid (one time) but it’s self-hosted and it has more expensive features like heatmaps, recordings and A/B tests (I didnt try the A/B tests yet)

1 Like

Great suggestions! Thanks! :clap: I just installed the Matomo WP plugin for their site right now. Will dig more into it later, and probably setup my own server (one of the mentioned ones) for other sites as well. :slight_smile:

another open source choice

1 Like

CloudFlare have just announced their privacy-first analytics platform. You do not need to use CloudFlare’s DNS to utilize this, and it’s totally free:

1 Like

Microsoft Clarity got it, cool features like heatmaps and recording, and its free.

Let’s add a link to this new Plausible Analytics topic
here: https://hostballs.com/t/how-to-self-host-plausible-analytics-guide :slight_smile:

1 Like

Thanks for recommending userTrack!

It has it’s own faults as it’s not a perfect product yet.

I agree, I have a lot of improvements planned but could you let me know what are the biggest problems you encountered so far?

I did try their Microsoft Clairty demo but their heatmaps/recordings were bugged and with a strange/hard UI. Even now, if I try to play a recording on the demo dashboard the playback is empty, it seems to be in an early alpha stage.

I wouldn’t personally recommend anyone to add a free 3rd party session tracking script, especially when it’s sending data to Microsoft. Also keep in mind that they don’t offer full analytics, only qualitative data.