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Umami – An alternative to Google Analytics
- ksec 5y agoPrevious Discussions https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24198329 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24198329 Edit: LOL, why is top Referrer from pornhub.com ?
- cdubzzz 5y agoDamnit I clicked that thinking it would drill down or something, not load the page. Sorry, IT.
- viraptor 5y agoI guess now we know why it's there - collecting traffic.
- Retr0spectrum 5y agoAt time of writing, pornhub.com has 69 referrals - I suppose someone was just having a laugh.
- Seirdy 5y agoIt's not uncommon for people to spoof their referrer headers to a site they want to promote or to shock content. Back when I used to track referrers in my access logs, I ended up watching the Simpson's Couch Gag "You're Next" episode because it showed up at least 50 times, for instance.
- benjaminjosephw 5y agoI 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 5y agoDwell 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 5y agoIt 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.
- bombcar 5y agoGoogle analytics provides large amounts of useful information to Google to help them sell ads. The information available to the sites is not as easy to interpret.
- cbsmith 5y agoIn a similar vein: https://divolte.io/ https://divolte.io/
- doo_daa 5y agoYour 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 5y agoBy combining the request's IP, user agent and OS to create a unique session ID: https://github.com/mikecao/umami/blob/f8ac987bfc0df581721bd2c9b0b9d9555698c346/lib/session.js#L35 https://github.com/mikecao/umami/blob/f8ac987bfc0df581721bd2... This will undercount some visitors and overcount others, but it should be good enough for most purposes.
- esrh 5y agoThis is unfortunate in a way because it's easy to deny cookiee but hard to spoof all of those
- kevinbowman 5y agoInterestingly, the OS is detected from the user agent, so really it’s only hashing the IP and the user agent.
- lucasmullens 5y agoSo 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.
- johbjo 5y agoThe 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.
- ahstilde 5y agoJust use Parse.ly and make your life easier.
- mrwnmonm 5y agoWhy is pornhub in the Referrers list?
- preya2k 5y agoI 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 5y agoWhy 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!
- IceWreck 5y agoIf you want something more lightweight and easier to selfhost, I recently discovered https://www.goatcounter.com/ https://www.goatcounter.com/
- nvr219 5y agoYes I've been using goatcounter and it's very simple and to the point. Recommende.
- francislavoie 5y agoAlso: https://usefathom.com/ https://usefathom.com/
- listenallyall 5y agoUnder-featured and over-priced
- catinblack 5y agohttps://piwik.pro/ https://piwik.pro/ You should also check this one
- Shorel 5y agoAnother pollution of the search space. Now when I am looking for flavour profiles I will get SEO nonsense. Also true the other way around.
- HuwFulcher 5y agoWhat is the edge of this over competitors like Plausible or Fathom? They look the same and seem to offer exactly the same features
- mrwnmonm 5y agoUses Chartjs?
- stanislavb 5y agoUmami 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 https://www.libhunt.com/r/umami
- codyogden 5y agoI’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 https://analytics.bale.media/share/s1Q7twme
- woodpanel 5y agoI like https://www.offen.dev/ https://www.offen.dev/ for offering users to see and delete their footprint in your data themselves!
- danmur 5y agoThank you, that looks really neat
- shermozle 5y agoAnother day, another analytics platform that writes data directly to a database. Cos your database is 100% available, never needs to go down for upgrades.
- alephu5 5y agoYou made this same comment 9 months ago in the previous discussion (linked above). I personally am not bothered if I lose a few seconds of analytics, it's not going to affect my conclusions or the user experience.
- wg0 5y agoI doubt it will scale to millions of views per day something like 50 million views because database is directly exposed to the write intensive operations.
- mekster 5y agoThese analytics pretty much provide no value except to see that you have traffic or not. Once you take look at stuff like Countly (free version doesn't offer much but enterprise version offers quite a bit) or PostHog (and other SaaS only ones), you'll realize that putting events on each actions, drilling down user activity and filtering user by type is what actually matters to see which part of your site looks attractive from users.
- marvinblum 5y agoAnother alternative is Pirsch Analytics (pirsch.io).
- pelmenept 5y agoIn live demo, when you change range to custom range, and click "refresh" button, there is JS error. type error, e.match is null