8 ms·

Show HN: Ackee – Self-hosted website analytics

214 points by electerious 7y ago

electerious 7y ago
A side project I've been working on for a while now. Ackee is a self-hosted, Node.js based analytics tool for those who care about privacy. It runs on your own server, analyses the traffic of your websites and provides useful statistics in a minimal interface. If you have any questions or feedback, just write it here :) Thanks!
- breck 7y ago
  Looks good! We removed analytics from our sites for privacy and simplicity reasons so I’ll consider this. Does it use JavaScript clientside or hook up to express or nginx or both? Before google analytics I remember there were a few self hosted tools in this space. Would you mind adding a list of the most current ones that people are using? I need to get caught up.
  - rkwz 7y ago
    Couple of ones I can think of: Fathom: https://github.com/usefathom/fathom https://github.com/usefathom/fathom Goatcounter: https://github.com/zgoat/goatcounter https://github.com/zgoat/goatcounter Freshlytics: https://github.com/sheshbabu/freshlytics https://github.com/sheshbabu/freshlytics There's also a non-oss but privacy focussed analytics - http://simpleanalytics.com http://simpleanalytics.com Disclaimer: I'm the creator of Freshlytics
    - gorkemcetin 7y ago
      You may want to add Countly (for both web and mobile) to that list (https://github.com/countly/countly-server https://github.com/countly/countly-server) - which can be deployed on DO easily as well for free (https://marketplace.digitalocean.com/apps/countly-analytics https://marketplace.digitalocean.com/apps/countly-analytics)
    - cosmie 7y ago
      Snowplow is another: https://snowplowanalytics.com/products/snowplow-open-source/ https://snowplowanalytics.com/products/snowplow-open-source/
  - electerious 7y ago
    Ackee uses a JS snippet to get the data. Nginx logs won't work, but the API is fully documented and it should be possible to build an import / custom script. Could also work with express.
- bildung 7y ago
  Piwik/Matomo is a popular tool in the same space. How would you compare Ackee to Matomo (tech aside)?
  - electerious 7y ago
    Piwik/Matomo is more like Google Analytics in the way it works and what you can do with it. Ackee will never be a replacement if you need full-featured marketing analytics with tons of options and insights. Ackee tries to be less. Lightweight, easy to install and with a good balance between analytics and privacy.
    - acidburnNSA 7y ago
      What about vs. the old perl script, awstats? I'm still using that, amazingly, after like 15 years. It does the basics fairly well, if a little ugly. I'm always looking for new cool stuff though.
      - g4k 7y ago
        Log file analytics does not work with Javascript apps.
        cmroanirgo 7y ago
        True, but log file analytics work despite JavaScript being disabled in the browser.
- dpcan 7y ago
  What happens when you start to accumulate over 5 million+ records (as an arbitrary large number)? Or a couple gigs of stats data? We used to provide our own stats software to our customers before it became an utter nightmare of indexing databases, cron jobs, report generation, and customers stepping over their hosting quotas because of all the stats data.
  - cosmie 7y ago
    I can't speak to the OP's performance, but Snowplow[1] may be good for your use. It's a bit more general purpose than just pure web analytics, and doesn't come with the reporting interface. But as far as the data collection and storage at scale aspect, it's fantastic. [1] https://snowplowanalytics.com/products/snowplow-open-source/ https://snowplowanalytics.com/products/snowplow-open-source/
  - rkwz 7y ago
    If your reports are predefined - summarised and no adhoc reporting needed, you can look into the continuous view feature of PipelineDB - http://docs.pipelinedb.com/continuous-views.html http://docs.pipelinedb.com/continuous-views.html > As soon as a stream row has been read by the continuous views that must read it, it is discarded. Raw, granular data is not stored anywhere. The only data that is persisted for a continuous view is whatever is returned by running a SELECT * FROM that_view. Thus you can think of a continuous view as a very high-throughput, realtime materialized view. I use PipelineDB continuous views in Freshlytics - https://github.com/sheshbabu/freshlytics/blob/master/src/server/migrations/1561030715992_init.sql#L32 https://github.com/sheshbabu/freshlytics/blob/master/src/ser... TimescaleDB also has something called "Continuous Aggregates" - https://docs.timescale.com/latest/using-timescaledb/continuous-aggregates https://docs.timescale.com/latest/using-timescaledb/continuo... but I haven't looked into it much.
  - electerious 7y ago
    > What happens when you start to accumulate over 5 million+ records I don't think Ackee is the right tool if your site as so many visitors. And to be honest: I don't know what will happen at this scale. There shouldn't be a problem as long as MongoDB can handle it.
- bovermyer 7y ago
  How does this compare to Fathom?
  - electerious 7y ago
    Ackee and Fathom are very similar. Both in the way they display data and how they process it. The biggest advantages of Ackee (compared to Fathom) are probably: - A documented REST API that lets you build upon Ackee. Could be used for custom import scripts or apps that display your current visitor stats in the menu bar. - Ackee allows you to track more than just page/site views (browser, system, etc.). This is optional and off by default, but great for people/companies that need more insights. Fathom definitely has a head start, while Ackee is very young. Can't wait to see how Fathom v2 will look like and how both will compare in the future.
vxNsr 7y ago
There is a huge need for massive innovation in this field. As with many other products Google came in and sucked all the air out of the room. I'll be installing this on my website.
jeena 7y ago
Do I need to add the javascript to get any data or can I also just use the nginx logs?
- electerious 7y ago
  Ackee uses a JS snippet to get the data. Nginx logs won't work, but the API is fully documented and it should be possible to build an import / custom script. Could be a great addition :)
dangoor 7y ago
Looks very nice! Simple, clean, and attractive. This seems to me like a perfect job for a serverless solution, given how popular static sites have become. Serverless would provide minimal cost when you don't have a lot of traffic (and could scale if you get HackerNews'ed).
orangepanda 7y ago
> for those who care about privacy. As a user, I dont see tracking by specifically google being the problem; what I'm against is being tracked _at all_ - by anyone, self hosted or not. There's "caring about privacy" in the subheadings, yet there's a whole section in docs about collecting private data [1]. Empty words. I've used goaccess [2] in the past to provide traffic analytics. It reads from nginx/apache logs. You only get access to what browsers send anyway, and users who alter their user agents are in the minority, so they wont affect analytics much. [1] https://github.com/electerious/Ackee/blob/1cf7779/docs/Anonymization.md#personal-data https://github.com/electerious/Ackee/blob/1cf7779/docs/Anony... [2] https://goaccess.io/ https://goaccess.io/
- unwind 7y ago
  Sounds like a difference in perspectives; you as a user think of data about you as personal and private, while an operator of a site using Ackee thinks of their sites' tracking data as private. Quite amusing, really. :)
- rkwz 7y ago
  I released an analytics tool earlier this week that doesn't collect PII or set cookies. All the tracking events are aggregated and you can't even see the tracking logs of a particular visitor or visitor's browser as with log based analytics. https://github.com/sheshbabu/freshlytics https://github.com/sheshbabu/freshlytics
- kodablah 7y ago
  Why do you consider some data your browser provides as private and some others not? Not saying I disagree, but hardliners could say they don't want what the browser provides in any way as tracked. Saying this app is hypocritical because they support a different notion of privacy is akin to saying your comment is hypocritical because you say you're against being tracked at all, then talk about tracking browsers via web server logs. I think we need to recognize privacy as a spectrum and applaud self-hosted alternatives to traditional saas services even if they don't conform to your notion of tracking.
  - 7y ago
donohoe 7y ago
Looks very promising. Might I also suggest a few other useful metrics: Bounce Rate: The percentage of visitors to a particular website who navigate away from the site after viewing only one page. Aside form that one it would be useful to track Page Views per Session, PVs per Page Type (homepage versus article page), and even Page Depth (per Page Type) Just a thought. Still really nice.
- electerious 7y ago
  Thanks for the suggestions! There's still a lot missing, but the base is ready and I can't wait to add new features.
- huhtenberg 7y ago
  > Bounce Rate This requires tracking sessions. > Page Views per Session This requires cookies or some other mechanism for stringing individual page hits into a single stream. While you can, sort of, kind of, do that based on the source IP combined with the user-agent (like this project does), it's not terribly accurate and it can't track longer sessions. I would argue that very few people object to being tracked by the site they are actually visiting. Most object to being tracked by 3rd parties, and across multiple unrelated sites. So a simple 1st party cookie is quite acceptable, but you can certainly go an extra mile and ask even if it can be set.
technotarek 7y ago
I'm always interested in these. Would love to get off Google Analytics. Alas, they always seem to forget to offer event based interaction tracking (e.g., button clicks). Most of our core metrics are tied to events of this sort, and rolling our own separate event log doesn't satisfy our needs either.
- electerious 7y ago
  Event tracking is probably the best way learn more about your uses. It's something I will definitely look into as soon as all the basics are done. I've created an issue for it if you want to keep an eye on the progress: https://github.com/electerious/Ackee/issues/40 https://github.com/electerious/Ackee/issues/40
AndrewStephens 7y ago
This looks nice and clean. Is it all domain based, or can I drill down to view hits of individual URLs. +1 for self-hosting analytics, something I encourage everyone to do if you have the time to devote to it. I dislike sites handing my browsing habits off to random third-parties. Obviously, really large sites need more sophisticated analytics but for most sites something like GoogleAnalytics is complete overkill. It grabs information that nobody except Google's machine learning bots are ever going to look at.
- electerious 7y ago
  Glad you like it! There's still a lot missing in Ackee, but even with all the features I'm planning to add it will never be a full replacement for Google Analytics. And I think that's the best about Ackee. Because not everyone needs full-featured marketing analytics with tons of options and insights. Ackee can also show page views, but it's not implemented in the UI, yet. This is the same for browser, system, visit duration and other insights (all of them are optional to track and turned off by default). Keep an eye on https://github.com/electerious/Ackee/issues/35 https://github.com/electerious/Ackee/issues/35 to know when it's ready.
zebnyc 7y ago
I presume I have to include a `cookie` tracking acceptance modal for GDPR compliance. Correct?
- electerious 7y ago
  Ackee only tracks page views, site visits and referrers by default. It stores no IPs and it's not possible to view the browsing history of a user. The data can't be used to identify a user and should therefore be GDPR compliant. But: I'm not a lawyer. I can't give you a legally certain statement. It's hard to say what's "identifiable data" according to the GDPR.
wzy 7y ago
How did you come up with that name?
- electerious 7y ago
  All started with my self-hosted photo-management tool Lychee (https://lychee.electerious.com https://lychee.electerious.com). We named it Lychee because we had some lychees on the desk while working on the first version. It was the only cool name we could come up with. All my tools/webapps after Lychee are somehow following the same species or clade: Rosid, Malvid and now Ackee.
bdefore 7y ago
Anyone have any tales to tell around migrating Google Analytics data into a self-hosted system and how well it worked? I don't see such a feature for this one.
lxe 7y ago
This is great. I think there's a market for self-hosted/on-prem analytics software due to the mounting privacy fears and browser-default third-party request blocking. Outside of piwik/matomo, what else is out there?
blacksmith_tb 7y ago
Is there a Jamaican connection, like in ackee and saltfish[1]? (Also famous from Harry Belafonte, "ackee rice / saltfish is nice") 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ackee https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ackee
aledalgrande 7y ago
I was thinking "well if you still store user identifiable data it's still going to infringe privacy" but then I was satisfied when I read: > No unique user tracking on the site.
alanh 7y ago
I'd been hoping for an actively maintained spiritual successor to Inman’s Mint. https://haveamint.com https://haveamint.com
- electerious 7y ago
  I've used Mint and started to work on Ackee since it has been abandoned. It took me several rewrites and years, but it all started with Mint as an inspiration :D
jamesponddotco 7y ago
Is there any sort of user management, so each user have access to stats about its own website? We are building a WordPress hosting company and would love to offer this as an alternative to Google Analytics to all customers. Right now, each customer gets its own Fathom install, but I would prefer to have it centralised to make management easier and decrease the amount of non-standard packages on the WordPress containers.
- peter_tonoli 7y ago
  Have you considered Matomo? https://matomo.org/ https://matomo.org/
  - jamesponddotco 7y ago
    We have, but as mentioned by the author of this post, Matomo is more like Google Analytics. We want something simpler, with bigger focus on privacy.
    - sakisv 7y ago
      Depending on where you draw the line on "privacy", Matomo can also be hosted by you, if you don't mind the extra burden, and one installation can track multiple sites. Edit: Not advocating in favour of Matomo, it's just that it is a solution which seems quite full featured. Personally I found it painful enough to work with it (from a devops perspective) that I wouldn't touch it with a ten foot stick.
      - jamesponddotco 7y ago
        We do have an instance of Matomo installed for testing, but it still feels like just a self-hosted version of Google Analytics. Way too many features that a person with a blog won’t need. Something simpler like Fathom or this one, which was built with privacy in mind from the get-go — instead of just “I want to get away from Google” —, seems like a better solution. To be clear, I am not saying Matomo is a bad piece of software. Just that it does not feet our needs.

214 points by electerious 7y ago

A side project I've been working on for a while now. Ackee is a self-hosted, Node.js based analytics tool for those who care about privacy. It runs on your own server, analyses the traffic of your websites and provides useful statistics in a minimal interface. If you have any questions or feedback, just write it here :) Thanks!

breck 7y ago
Looks good! We removed analytics from our sites for privacy and simplicity reasons so I’ll consider this. Does it use JavaScript clientside or hook up to express or nginx or both? Before google analytics I remember there were a few self hosted tools in this space. Would you mind adding a list of the most current ones that people are using? I need to get caught up.
- rkwz 7y ago
  Couple of ones I can think of: Fathom: https://github.com/usefathom/fathom https://github.com/usefathom/fathom Goatcounter: https://github.com/zgoat/goatcounter https://github.com/zgoat/goatcounter Freshlytics: https://github.com/sheshbabu/freshlytics https://github.com/sheshbabu/freshlytics There's also a non-oss but privacy focussed analytics - http://simpleanalytics.com http://simpleanalytics.com Disclaimer: I'm the creator of Freshlytics
  - gorkemcetin 7y ago
    You may want to add Countly (for both web and mobile) to that list (https://github.com/countly/countly-server https://github.com/countly/countly-server) - which can be deployed on DO easily as well for free (https://marketplace.digitalocean.com/apps/countly-analytics https://marketplace.digitalocean.com/apps/countly-analytics)
  - cosmie 7y ago
    Snowplow is another: https://snowplowanalytics.com/products/snowplow-open-source/ https://snowplowanalytics.com/products/snowplow-open-source/
- electerious 7y ago
  Ackee uses a JS snippet to get the data. Nginx logs won't work, but the API is fully documented and it should be possible to build an import / custom script. Could also work with express.
bildung 7y ago
Piwik/Matomo is a popular tool in the same space. How would you compare Ackee to Matomo (tech aside)?
- electerious 7y ago
  Piwik/Matomo is more like Google Analytics in the way it works and what you can do with it. Ackee will never be a replacement if you need full-featured marketing analytics with tons of options and insights. Ackee tries to be less. Lightweight, easy to install and with a good balance between analytics and privacy.
  - acidburnNSA 7y ago
    What about vs. the old perl script, awstats? I'm still using that, amazingly, after like 15 years. It does the basics fairly well, if a little ugly. I'm always looking for new cool stuff though.
    - g4k 7y ago
      Log file analytics does not work with Javascript apps.
      - cmroanirgo 7y ago
        True, but log file analytics work despite JavaScript being disabled in the browser.
dpcan 7y ago
What happens when you start to accumulate over 5 million+ records (as an arbitrary large number)? Or a couple gigs of stats data? We used to provide our own stats software to our customers before it became an utter nightmare of indexing databases, cron jobs, report generation, and customers stepping over their hosting quotas because of all the stats data.
- cosmie 7y ago
  I can't speak to the OP's performance, but Snowplow[1] may be good for your use. It's a bit more general purpose than just pure web analytics, and doesn't come with the reporting interface. But as far as the data collection and storage at scale aspect, it's fantastic. [1] https://snowplowanalytics.com/products/snowplow-open-source/ https://snowplowanalytics.com/products/snowplow-open-source/
- rkwz 7y ago
  If your reports are predefined - summarised and no adhoc reporting needed, you can look into the continuous view feature of PipelineDB - http://docs.pipelinedb.com/continuous-views.html http://docs.pipelinedb.com/continuous-views.html > As soon as a stream row has been read by the continuous views that must read it, it is discarded. Raw, granular data is not stored anywhere. The only data that is persisted for a continuous view is whatever is returned by running a SELECT * FROM that_view. Thus you can think of a continuous view as a very high-throughput, realtime materialized view. I use PipelineDB continuous views in Freshlytics - https://github.com/sheshbabu/freshlytics/blob/master/src/server/migrations/1561030715992_init.sql#L32 https://github.com/sheshbabu/freshlytics/blob/master/src/ser... TimescaleDB also has something called "Continuous Aggregates" - https://docs.timescale.com/latest/using-timescaledb/continuous-aggregates https://docs.timescale.com/latest/using-timescaledb/continuo... but I haven't looked into it much.
- electerious 7y ago
  > What happens when you start to accumulate over 5 million+ records I don't think Ackee is the right tool if your site as so many visitors. And to be honest: I don't know what will happen at this scale. There shouldn't be a problem as long as MongoDB can handle it.
bovermyer 7y ago
How does this compare to Fathom?
- electerious 7y ago
  Ackee and Fathom are very similar. Both in the way they display data and how they process it. The biggest advantages of Ackee (compared to Fathom) are probably: - A documented REST API that lets you build upon Ackee. Could be used for custom import scripts or apps that display your current visitor stats in the menu bar. - Ackee allows you to track more than just page/site views (browser, system, etc.). This is optional and off by default, but great for people/companies that need more insights. Fathom definitely has a head start, while Ackee is very young. Can't wait to see how Fathom v2 will look like and how both will compare in the future.

vxNsr 7y ago

There is a huge need for massive innovation in this field. As with many other products Google came in and sucked all the air out of the room. I'll be installing this on my website.

jeena 7y ago

Do I need to add the javascript to get any data or can I also just use the nginx logs?

electerious 7y ago
Ackee uses a JS snippet to get the data. Nginx logs won't work, but the API is fully documented and it should be possible to build an import / custom script. Could be a great addition :)

dangoor 7y ago

Looks very nice! Simple, clean, and attractive. This seems to me like a perfect job for a serverless solution, given how popular static sites have become. Serverless would provide minimal cost when you don't have a lot of traffic (and could scale if you get HackerNews'ed).

orangepanda 7y ago

> for those who care about privacy. As a user, I dont see tracking by specifically google being the problem; what I'm against is being tracked _at all_ - by anyone, self hosted or not. There's "caring about privacy" in the subheadings, yet there's a whole section in docs about collecting private data [1]. Empty words. I've used goaccess [2] in the past to provide traffic analytics. It reads from nginx/apache logs. You only get access to what browsers send anyway, and users who alter their user agents are in the minority, so they wont affect analytics much. [1] https://github.com/electerious/Ackee/blob/1cf7779/docs/Anonymization.md#personal-data https://github.com/electerious/Ackee/blob/1cf7779/docs/Anony... [2] https://goaccess.io/ https://goaccess.io/

unwind 7y ago
Sounds like a difference in perspectives; you as a user think of data about you as personal and private, while an operator of a site using Ackee thinks of their sites' tracking data as private. Quite amusing, really. :)
rkwz 7y ago
I released an analytics tool earlier this week that doesn't collect PII or set cookies. All the tracking events are aggregated and you can't even see the tracking logs of a particular visitor or visitor's browser as with log based analytics. https://github.com/sheshbabu/freshlytics https://github.com/sheshbabu/freshlytics
kodablah 7y ago
Why do you consider some data your browser provides as private and some others not? Not saying I disagree, but hardliners could say they don't want what the browser provides in any way as tracked. Saying this app is hypocritical because they support a different notion of privacy is akin to saying your comment is hypocritical because you say you're against being tracked at all, then talk about tracking browsers via web server logs. I think we need to recognize privacy as a spectrum and applaud self-hosted alternatives to traditional saas services even if they don't conform to your notion of tracking.
- 7y ago

donohoe 7y ago

Looks very promising. Might I also suggest a few other useful metrics: Bounce Rate: The percentage of visitors to a particular website who navigate away from the site after viewing only one page. Aside form that one it would be useful to track Page Views per Session, PVs per Page Type (homepage versus article page), and even Page Depth (per Page Type) Just a thought. Still really nice.

electerious 7y ago
Thanks for the suggestions! There's still a lot missing, but the base is ready and I can't wait to add new features.
huhtenberg 7y ago
> Bounce Rate This requires tracking sessions. > Page Views per Session This requires cookies or some other mechanism for stringing individual page hits into a single stream. While you can, sort of, kind of, do that based on the source IP combined with the user-agent (like this project does), it's not terribly accurate and it can't track longer sessions. I would argue that very few people object to being tracked by the site they are actually visiting. Most object to being tracked by 3rd parties, and across multiple unrelated sites. So a simple 1st party cookie is quite acceptable, but you can certainly go an extra mile and ask even if it can be set.

technotarek 7y ago

I'm always interested in these. Would love to get off Google Analytics. Alas, they always seem to forget to offer event based interaction tracking (e.g., button clicks). Most of our core metrics are tied to events of this sort, and rolling our own separate event log doesn't satisfy our needs either.

electerious 7y ago
Event tracking is probably the best way learn more about your uses. It's something I will definitely look into as soon as all the basics are done. I've created an issue for it if you want to keep an eye on the progress: https://github.com/electerious/Ackee/issues/40 https://github.com/electerious/Ackee/issues/40

AndrewStephens 7y ago

This looks nice and clean. Is it all domain based, or can I drill down to view hits of individual URLs. +1 for self-hosting analytics, something I encourage everyone to do if you have the time to devote to it. I dislike sites handing my browsing habits off to random third-parties. Obviously, really large sites need more sophisticated analytics but for most sites something like GoogleAnalytics is complete overkill. It grabs information that nobody except Google's machine learning bots are ever going to look at.

electerious 7y ago
Glad you like it! There's still a lot missing in Ackee, but even with all the features I'm planning to add it will never be a full replacement for Google Analytics. And I think that's the best about Ackee. Because not everyone needs full-featured marketing analytics with tons of options and insights. Ackee can also show page views, but it's not implemented in the UI, yet. This is the same for browser, system, visit duration and other insights (all of them are optional to track and turned off by default). Keep an eye on https://github.com/electerious/Ackee/issues/35 https://github.com/electerious/Ackee/issues/35 to know when it's ready.

zebnyc 7y ago

I presume I have to include a `cookie` tracking acceptance modal for GDPR compliance. Correct?

electerious 7y ago
Ackee only tracks page views, site visits and referrers by default. It stores no IPs and it's not possible to view the browsing history of a user. The data can't be used to identify a user and should therefore be GDPR compliant. But: I'm not a lawyer. I can't give you a legally certain statement. It's hard to say what's "identifiable data" according to the GDPR.

wzy 7y ago

How did you come up with that name?

electerious 7y ago
All started with my self-hosted photo-management tool Lychee (https://lychee.electerious.com https://lychee.electerious.com). We named it Lychee because we had some lychees on the desk while working on the first version. It was the only cool name we could come up with. All my tools/webapps after Lychee are somehow following the same species or clade: Rosid, Malvid and now Ackee.

bdefore 7y ago

Anyone have any tales to tell around migrating Google Analytics data into a self-hosted system and how well it worked? I don't see such a feature for this one.

lxe 7y ago

This is great. I think there's a market for self-hosted/on-prem analytics software due to the mounting privacy fears and browser-default third-party request blocking. Outside of piwik/matomo, what else is out there?

blacksmith_tb 7y ago

Is there a Jamaican connection, like in ackee and saltfish[1]? (Also famous from Harry Belafonte, "ackee rice / saltfish is nice") 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ackee https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ackee

aledalgrande 7y ago

I was thinking "well if you still store user identifiable data it's still going to infringe privacy" but then I was satisfied when I read: > No unique user tracking on the site.

alanh 7y ago

I'd been hoping for an actively maintained spiritual successor to Inman’s Mint. https://haveamint.com https://haveamint.com

electerious 7y ago
I've used Mint and started to work on Ackee since it has been abandoned. It took me several rewrites and years, but it all started with Mint as an inspiration :D

jamesponddotco 7y ago

Is there any sort of user management, so each user have access to stats about its own website? We are building a WordPress hosting company and would love to offer this as an alternative to Google Analytics to all customers. Right now, each customer gets its own Fathom install, but I would prefer to have it centralised to make management easier and decrease the amount of non-standard packages on the WordPress containers.

peter_tonoli 7y ago
Have you considered Matomo? https://matomo.org/ https://matomo.org/
- jamesponddotco 7y ago
  We have, but as mentioned by the author of this post, Matomo is more like Google Analytics. We want something simpler, with bigger focus on privacy.
  - sakisv 7y ago
    Depending on where you draw the line on "privacy", Matomo can also be hosted by you, if you don't mind the extra burden, and one installation can track multiple sites. Edit: Not advocating in favour of Matomo, it's just that it is a solution which seems quite full featured. Personally I found it painful enough to work with it (from a devops perspective) that I wouldn't touch it with a ten foot stick.
    - jamesponddotco 7y ago
      We do have an instance of Matomo installed for testing, but it still feels like just a self-hosted version of Google Analytics. Way too many features that a person with a blog won’t need. Something simpler like Fathom or this one, which was built with privacy in mind from the get-go — instead of just “I want to get away from Google” —, seems like a better solution. To be clear, I am not saying Matomo is a bad piece of software. Just that it does not feet our needs.