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Simple and privacy-friendly alternative to Google Analytic
- rajeshrajappan 6y agoI came across Plausible from this article on Test Double https://blog.testdouble.com/posts/2021-03-02-why-privacy-minded-analytics-can-fix-marketing/ https://blog.testdouble.com/posts/2021-03-02-why-privacy-min...
- markosaric 6y agoThanks for submitting Plausible! We have a feature that sends alerts for traffic spikes so I just got an alert that we have large number of visors thanks to this post! (I'm the co-founder of Plausible)
- rajeshrajappan 6y agoNo problem, I will be trying this out in my projects. I have been looking for alternatives to Google Analytics because of the privacy concerns and also does not require all the features they off.
- Kovah 6y agoI tested Plausible a few months ago and couldn't get it up and running on my own server. The docs stated that self-hosting was possible but not supported at all. It was a real bummer, hope they worked on this in the last months.
- that_guy_iain 6y agoHow did you try to get it running? They have a docker-compose setup[1] that was super easy to use. It looks to be 5 months old so if you tried before then, good news, it's easy now! [1] https://github.com/plausible/hosting https://github.com/plausible/hosting
- Kovah 6y agoI cannot use the docker-compose setup they provide on my server, because it interferes with my existing Docker containers. Settting up the Clickhouse container never worked because Plausible wasn't able to connect properly to it. After researching for hours, I gave up. Not sure what the issues was.
- that_guy_iain 6y agoHave you tried putting it into a different user namespace than your current docker containers? https://docs.docker.com/engine/security/userns-remap/ https://docs.docker.com/engine/security/userns-remap/
- Kovah 6y agoNope, I just gave up after some hours.
- amanzi 6y agoI've been self-hosting Plausible for a few months now, but you're right - there's a bit of fiddling to get everything working. I ended up creating dedicated hosts for the Clickhouse and Postgres databases, and then playing with the connection strings in the Plausible container to connect to them.
- ochronus 6y agoI just set it up using the recommended docker machine way and it was like a breeze. You might want to give it another try - that said, it's really cheap, comparable to self hosting
- maxwelldone 6y agoI use https://www.goatcounter.com/ https://www.goatcounter.com/ and I'm very happy with it. It's open source and can be self hosted. Since there's no user tracking, it's GDPR compliant out of the box.
- statstutor 6y agoGoatCounter claims to be GDPR compliant, but also says it collects: URL of the visited page. Referer header. User-Agent header. Screen size. Country name based on IP address. A hash of the IP address, User-Agent, and random number As such, it seems to be processing user data that could be linked to an individual person. I'd be cautious about the claim that GoatCounter is totally GDPR compliant (without a consent notice). You're safe, for now, on the basis that this doesn't seem likely to be tested in law.
- Proven 6y agoThey don't claim that. In their docs they explain why it's unlikely that Goatcounter sites need consent. RTFM if you want to be "cautious".
- arp242 6y ago> GoatCounter claims to be GDPR compliant It claims it's probably GDPR compliant, but it's pretty transparent about various possible caveats and such on the GDPR page[1]. [1]: https://www.goatcounter.com/gdpr https://www.goatcounter.com/gdpr
- statstutor 6y agoAh, I read another page it frames this slightly differently, e.g. https://www.goatcounter.com/why https://www.goatcounter.com/why "There should always be an option to add GoatCounter to your site without requiring a GDPR consent notice."
- arp242 6y agoIt's tricky writing these kind of things haha. You can actually disable data collection for a number of parameters: disable "User-Agents" for example and they will never be stored to disk. I should probably update a few of these pages.
- notum 6y agoI'm happy with https://goaccess.io/ https://goaccess.io/ via raw nginx logs. No additional requests for the end user.
- notamy 6y agoI use Plausible, it's very nice and completely painless to get started with. Transfers 701 bytes(!) to load the js on a page, which is super impressive.
- notum 6y agoWhile that *is* impressive, the bigger performance cost is usually in the DNS resolve time.
- eric4smith 6y agoI would posit that almost any remotely hosted analytics system (privacy oriented or not) is eventually a target for privacy centric browsers. If not now, then in the future. I mean, let's be honest - the days are fast coming when anything that looks like remotely hosted javascript is going to be blocked, no matter how benign it is. So could it be that the future is home grown analytics subsystems that reside in your own stack? That way people who need deeper types of tracking can do it, while those that need shallow analytics can do it too. It certainly seems to be heading in that direction.
- paulgb 6y agoOne neat thing about Plausible is that you can point a CNAME of your domain to their servers and serve the analytics request that way. To the browser, it looks the same as if you hosted it yourself.
- mhitza 6y agoI just set up Plausible analytics on my blog a couple of days ago and can confirm the at least uBlock Origin blocks it by default.
- Semaphor 6y agoWe don’t need any of the advanced features Google Analytics offers. But when I look at the replacements, they also lack basic ones. A simple one would be showing me the visitors to /blog/ and its subdirectories. And from there allow drilling down to them. And from a UX perspective, none of them seem to support searching for a specific page to display the stats for. Yes, you can edit the URL, but that’s a horrible way to do it. edit: To add, they are also very expensive. Above 1 million views/month (which I would say is still a pretty small commercial site) goatcounter already is in "ask us" territory and plausible wants $69/month. As the value add seems very small, we rather use our own homegrown, bare-bones analytics system for anyone who doesn’t consent to analytics.
- markosaric 6y agoPlausible can actually do that and we have the same exact use case showing in our live demo (filtering by /blog/ only and allowing filtering per blog post). See https://plausible.io/plausible.io https://plausible.io/plausible.io and click on "Visit /blog*" in the Goal Conversion section. (I'm the co-founder of Plausible)
- Semaphor 6y agoIt does not. I used /blog/ as an example because it’s what Plausible has. But no sub-sites of /blog/ are listed, for example /blog/growing-saas-mrr.
- markosaric 6y agoLook into the Top Pages report on the linked page for the full list of all blog posts ranked by popularity. Click on the individual post to filter the dashboard by traffic to that post only.
- capableweb 6y agoI guess what Semaphor is saying is that there is no nesting. Taking a look at "docs" as an example, you have these entries in "Top Pages" from https://plausible.io/plausible.io https://plausible.io/plausible.io: - /docs/self-hosting 4.1k 5.7k 67% - /docs/ 2.1k 2.7k 30% - /docs 1.6k 2.1k 15% - /docs/self-hosting-configuration 1.2k 1.8k 57% You have to select "/docs/self-hosting" directly, and once you done that, you don't see the subpages of that page anymore. If you select "/docs" you only see docs, not "/docs" + subpages so you can see the most popular blogpost and only pages under "/docs"
- chiefalchemist 6y agoRe: unlimited websites Is there a way to invite clients and give them access to only their site's? Effectively, I'd pay for it for myself and would add (mostly) pro-bono NPO client sites.
- markosaric 6y agoYes. Take a look at our shared links feature (private, secure and can be password protected). Those with the shared link only get access to the individual dashboard that you shared and nothing else. https://plausible.io/docs/shared-links https://plausible.io/docs/shared-links (I'm the co-founder of Plausible)
- chiefalchemist 6y agoGreat. Thank you. One more question while I have your attention: Can I still use utm_* codes? Or something similar appended to a link (in the query string) in order to add attributes to a visit? And then analyze / filter by those attributes?
- markosaric 6y agoYes. UTM tags (utm_source, utm_medium and utm_campaign) are fully supported. And you can filter the dashboard by any of them. And you can also see which of them refer traffic that ends up converting on any of your custom events/goals. You can try it out on our live demo: https://plausible.io/plausible.io https://plausible.io/plausible.io
- tjpnz 6y agoNot knocking this but I've seen what feels like dozens of script based solutions coming up on HN recently. If the goal is privacy what would this give you over something which runs on the server?
- markosaric 6y agoAs in server logs? Accuracy would be the main thing. I did a study and found huge number of bots in server logs (AWStats shows 18 times higher number of page views than Plausible on my own website for instance). See https://plausible.io/blog/server-log-analysis https://plausible.io/blog/server-log-analysis (I'm the co-founder of Plausible)
- 7sidedmarble 6y agoThat is data though. You might want to know more about those bot hits. You might want to ip ban certain ranges that aggressive traffic comes from.
- that_guy_iain 6y agoYea but the target audience for the data is different. For example, I recommended plausible to the head of marketing at my job because she cares about conversion rates, how long people use the site, etc and she gets that from google analytics. While the sys admins use kibana/grifana to view data the sort of data analytics provides such as where and how people are going, if people are converting, bounce rate aren't important. The raw stats are what are important. I would not recommend plausible to the sysadmins.
- markosaric 6y agoTrue. There's a lot of value in data server logs provide for many use cases. But for sites that use Google Analytics right now, in majority of cases they don't want that data and that data makes their dashboard so noisy that is no longer usable for the purposes they use GA for.
- indysigners 6y agoWhat’s about the claim that if you drop GA, your site will degraded by Google and you’ll lose traffic?
- markosaric 6y agoWe have no evidence of that happening. Also Google themselves are on record saying that they don't use GA data for their search algorithm. I wrote a post on this topic: https://plausible.io/blog/google-analytics-seo https://plausible.io/blog/google-analytics-seo (I'm the Plausible co-founder)
- chiefalchemist 6y agoIn theory, that shouldn't happen. The gist being, Google wants to make you (the person searching) happy. So much so, it wants to personalize its suggestions. That is, if you knew what Google knows, what would you recommend to you? :) The algorithm wants to be human. It wants to be you. In fact, in that context, if you're a pro-privacy person then Google should - again in theory - be more prone to recommend privacy-respecting sites to you. True, that's counterintuitive given Google's biz model. However, that biz model breaks down even faster when people stop returning because they are unhappy w/ search results. Put another way, it's only a matter of time before DDG and the like use the pro-privacy signal to move sites up the SERP. DDG already knows you probably prefer that, as that's why you use DDG. It certainly would be a helpful icon DDG could add to their SERPs.
- shafyy 6y agoI love Plausible and use and on mulitple sites. I like the simplicity, great UX and the fact that it's open source and self-hostable (even though I don't host it myself, knowing that it's possible is great).
- ericweyant 6y agoI am now looking at https://nullitics.com https://nullitics.com (https://github.com/nullitics/nullitics https://github.com/nullitics/nullitics) to jump away from Google Analytics, and quite like it. For self-hosted option I would probably use GoAccess. In general, I like the trend that more and more alternatives appear, competition is never a bad thing.
- abhinav22 6y agoQuestion for you lot: Self hosting sounds like a better pro privacy solution (if cross origin JavaScript gets blocked), but what’s stopping somebody having a server side script to funnel all that information to somebody else? I don’t think it helps. Perhaps tracking should be done be regulated bodies who must abide by the rules
- qertoip 6y agoRegulate the shit out of everything, because why not?
- qertoip 6y agoI left Plausible for GoatCounter. It is better designed privacy-wise and much easier to self host (a single statically build binary, no dependencies): https://goatcounter.com/ https://goatcounter.com/
- brendanmc6 6y agoLoving the Plausible paid/hosted version, just upgraded yesterday. Exactly what I need and nothing more. Totally painless. As a dev I really cant think of anything I dislike! I don't do any A/B testing or social engineering nonsense, I just want to know where people are clicking from and when. Being able to create password protected links for my colleagues is really nice though!
- idownvoted 6y agoHas anyone here tried out http://offen.dev http://offen.dev yet? I've stumbled upon it while implementing a self-hosted matomo solution. I like the approach, which allows for a much nicer UX of their consent process (of course I would prefer to not having to have one in the first place).