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Ask HN: Best alternatives to Google Analytics in 2021?

192 points by nyellin 5y ago

I don't like the new GA interface. It's hard to do simple things like display full-urls when you serve multiple subdomains. What alternatives do you like and why?

andreidd 5y ago
posthog * it's open source * you can self host as a docker container * you can log from the client side or from the server side * awesome founders with HN accounts :P
- nyellin 5y ago
  I thought Posthog was more of a Mixpanel competitor. Is it appropriate for aggregate data about anonymous users and referral/flow analysis too?
fourseventy 5y ago
If you run an e-commerce store this is a list of good alternatives that are specifically focused on e-com analytics https://thoughtmetric.io/topics/google-analytics-alternatives-for-ecommerce https://thoughtmetric.io/topics/google-analytics-alternative...
kyrra 5y ago
I'm actually interesting in this as well. I've noticed watching the HTTP logs for my small site, I have traffic on it (it auto-polls my server every 60 seconds to report updated status), but none of those show up as "active" users in Google Analytics. I'm guessing uBlock Origin blocking GA by default is a likely cause.
- marvinblum 5y ago
  > I'm guessing uBlock Origin blocking GA by default is a likely cause. Yep, GA being blocked is a major issue. You can use server-side analytics [0] to prevent any JS from being blocked. [0] https://docs.pirsch.io/get-started/backend-integration/ https://docs.pirsch.io/get-started/backend-integration/ (I'm the co-founder of it)
- jefftk 5y ago
  What do the user agent strings look like? It is possible you are seeing bots.
antidnan 5y ago
https://plausible.io/ https://plausible.io/ No cookies, GDPR compliant, simple interface
- kingcharles 5y ago
  See my post above about Plausible: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29664684 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29664684
jdorfman 5y ago
Documentation Insights by Scarf * Simple dashboard * Displays which: * businesses are visiting your documentation pages. * locales they are coming from (geolocation data in aggregate). * pages are most frequently visited. https://about.scarf.sh/documentation-insights https://about.scarf.sh/documentation-insights Edit: formatting
marvinblum 5y ago
Clearly Pirsch Analytics! https://pirsch.io/ https://pirsch.io/ No cookies, open-source core, GDPR compliant, nice UI, and an extensive API.
- colbyhub 5y ago
  Wow Pirsch looks incredible, will definitely use them for my blog and projects.
JaumeRF 5y ago
At ekademy.eu we use plausible.
Jaume_RF 5y ago
KingOfCoders 5y ago
Depending on your needs Simple Analytics or none.
buro9 5y ago
I'm currently using Cloudflare and their SDK+API to pull logs, which I then push into Loki. I then use Grafana to render the dashboards I want. This isn't for everyone, I'm super comfortable doing this because of familiarity with all the components. But there's no out of the box dashboard for this so you have to replicate the UI parts you value. At least with Grafana once done you're in control of it and you own it. I prefer server logs from the edge for their completeness. There are things missing... I.e. client side knowledge of screen sizes and device types. But server logs are so much more complete than client side JavaScript from third parties that are frequently adblocked.
- nyellin 5y ago
  Unfortunately this won't work as I have an SPA
  - treelovinhippie 5y ago
- Kovah 5y ago
  Is there some blog article on how to do that? Would be interested in trying it out.
- snowwrestler 5y ago
  How do you exclude bot traffic?
  - uaas 5y ago
    You can use this LogQL operator !~ (regex does not match) to exclude strings.
kekebo 5y ago
I just switched from GA to Matomo[0] and have a good impression so far. Seems similar to Pirsch in terms of cookie less tracking, GDPR / DSGVO compliance, being open source, self-hostable, having a decent UI and API. [0] https://matomo.org/matomo-on-premise/ https://matomo.org/matomo-on-premise/
- x3ro 5y ago
  I second Matomo. Easy to set-up and update and has an optional no-cookies (and thus no cookie banners) mode. I’m using it for my private sites, but have also used it professionally in the past.
tetek 5y ago
GA is awful, always was. I got tired of it and started using splitbee.io
beauHD 5y ago
https://www.goatcounter.com/ https://www.goatcounter.com/
- csbartus 5y ago
  Thanks for pointing this out. It's the first free analytics service for personal blogs, websites I've seen recently. The rest is subscription based and useful for revenue-generating businesses. The author seems to have the same itch when went to create this product: https://www.goatcounter.com/why https://www.goatcounter.com/why
  - csbartus 5y ago
    I found this 'pay what you want' alternative in my bookmarks: https://counter.dev/ https://counter.dev/
    - ihucos 5y ago
      Our approach is to be free and sustainable by radically cutting down hosting costs. Most technical solutions are mentioned in the Github page. Apart from this honestly the product is well polished and easy to use. Check it out :-)
- jaggirs 5y ago
  Goatcounter is exactly what I need, nothing more, nothing less.
- ivanech 5y ago
  I've been very happy with goatcounter on my personal site for 2 years now
immnn 5y ago
Try etracker: https://www.etracker.com/ https://www.etracker.com/ It is cookie-less, so no opt in is required in EU. And off course you could have a look at goaccess. It’s parsing your access-logs and generates some nice metrics-dashboard. https://goaccess.io/ https://goaccess.io/
shafyy 5y ago
If you're looking for web analytics, I love and can recommend Plausible (https://plausible.io/ https://plausible.io/). It's both simple and privacy-friendly. Inspired by Plausible, I recently launched Fugu (https://fugu.lol https://fugu.lol). Fugu is a simple and privacy-friendly product analytics tool. It offers only event-based tracking, so it's better suited for web or mobile apps and not web sites (go for Plausible for websites). Fugu doesn't track unique users or any personally identifiable information. It's pretty basic for now, but I'm working on adding conversion funnels next (I work on it in my free time). Fugu is open-source[0] and self-hostable. I make money by providing a managed version for $9/month. 0: https://github.com/shafy/fugu https://github.com/shafy/fugu
- falafelite 5y ago
  This is a really cool thing to work on in your free time! Thanks for sharing. Also, +1 to plausible for simple website analytics.
  - shafyy 5y ago
    Thanks :-)
- nicbou 5y ago
  I use Plausible on https://allaboutberlin.com https://allaboutberlin.com, mainly for privacy and UX reasons (no cookie notice). It's good, but it doesn't replace Google Analytics at all. It tracks visits and events, but not navigation and user flow. It's severely lacking in detail compared to Analytics. It's a compromise, not a drop-in replacement. However, it's excellent as a simple tracker for average website admins. I'm very happy with it. The maintainers have been nothing short of stellar with their support and transparency.
  - shafyy 5y ago
    Cool! Your website looks great. I also live in Berlin! Give Fugu a spin if you want to track conversion funnels (coming soon) and event properties.
  - 5y ago
zimmerx 5y ago
https://umami.is/ https://umami.is/ discovered this, some of my friends use it and it's pretty decent.
- metasyn 5y ago
  i've been using this for a few months now. super easy to get set up and run yourself!
- yla92 5y ago
  +1 for Umami. Pretty straightforward to setup and run.
- jallbrit 5y ago
  Another happy user here. Easy to set up, never have any problems.
- Ocha 5y ago
  +1 for umami here too. I have been using it for https://mailsnag.com https://mailsnag.com. It has event tracking feature that I'm looking forward to use.
gherkinnn 5y ago
Fathom is a simple analytics product. It can track page views and events, the script is fairly small, is GDPR compliant, and gets out of your way. https://usefathom.com https://usefathom.com
- JackWritesCode 5y ago
  Thanks so much for supporting us. We have spent so much money on getting our compliance right :) A lot of companies claim to be GDPR compliant, and they’re not. We’ll be blogging more about this in the future as we don’t like folks being lied to.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
soperj 5y ago
Why do it client side instead of just logging it server side? Preferably async.
- crispyalmond 5y ago
  I think this a really good approach. We've done something similar by exposing an endpoint and just PUT data to it from the client when something interesting happens. This works really well and the server is free to do whatever with it.
paulcole 5y ago
I use the Query Explorer exclusively in place of the GA interface: https://ga-dev-tools.web.app/query-explorer/ https://ga-dev-tools.web.app/query-explorer/ Dead simple to create the queries I want and then copy/paste into a spreadsheet. You can also use the query URLs with the access token to easily get data into Jupyter Notebooks or whatever else you want to use for deeper analysis.
58x14 5y ago
Surprised to not see Simple Analytics here, which I always try and plug (no affiliation, just a happy user): https://simpleanalytics.com/ https://simpleanalytics.com/
Taywee 5y ago
My needs are pretty simple, but I just do server-side logging in a Django Middleware. I wanted to use a tracking cookie to track a user across the site, but I had a hell of a time trying to figure out whether that violated the GDPR, so I just log the user agent instead. What really is the major gain to a big third party analytics platform when you really just need to know how somebody moves through your site, what the hot and cold paths are, and what influences retention and revisits?
jkbl 5y ago
I had a same problem, but GA is only the tip of the iceberg. A lot of apps with analytics capabilities have usability problem. In some, metrics are hidden too deep and it's hard to navigate. Others lack simple features and do not let you change things like timezone or displayed currency. But the biggest pain point for me was integration with data from other apps. To simplify things I am building Raport[1]. Raport integrates metrics from multiple sources (GA, Search Console, Stripe, Adsense) and displays them in clear and simple to use dashboard. It is not an alternative to GA and other tools, but rather works alongside them as an additional interface, where you can view all your data. For me personally Raport saved me a lot of time I spent in GA and Search Console. [1] https://raport.pro https://raport.pro
- tommy_ford 5y ago
  Yeah, I agree with that. A lot of these tools have usability issues. I kinda like Search Console but Google Analytics or Facebook Business gave me some terrible data analysis experiences. I checked out your tool. Looks perfect for my needs but I need do dive a bit deeper to say more. I assume you plan to add more integrations in the future. Have you thought about adding an integration with LinkedIn? That’d be helpful for me.
  - jkbl 5y ago
    I agree, Facebook Business is the worst. And it crashes in Safari. Our plan is to create integrations for social media platforms next (Facebook, Instagram, Twitter). I do not have experience with LinkedIn, but we'll definitely add it too, if there is data to analyze. Feel free to explore the app and leave us a feedback if you want.
ksec 5y ago
Cloudflare Analytics or something on server with GoAccess. SimpleAnalytics, Fathom, Pirsch and Plausible. They are all very similar from pricing, to display layout. The problem is they dont track returning visitors. Some argue that is against privacy, some think it is acceptable for 30 days period. I remember there was one Analytics from EUR that offer returning visitors stats but again.. Bookmarks on browser is practically useless. So I cant find it anymore.
- marvinblum 5y ago
  Pirsch does track returning visitors. As long as no PII is stored, it's fine.
weinzierl 5y ago
I run my own Matomo. Boring and old-school, but serves me well.
gompertz 5y ago
I use clicky.com, it's ultra lite weight and has tons of features.
obmelvin 5y ago
I know that Mixpanel is very event focused, and it seems like the question is more on page tracking, but surprised that no one has mentioned it. Has mixpanel fallen out of favor or is the lack of mention because it's a bit out of scope for the OP?
- jFriedensreich 5y ago
  was wondering the same, in terms of features (retention grid, user centric tracking, funnels, advanced queries) and ui few things come close but its probably pretty costly compared to ga
  - nyellin 5y ago
    OP here. I'm going to give Mixpanel a try. I'm essentially looking for two things: 1. Product analytics on logged in users in a SaaS platform 2. Aggregate analytics on anonymous users with funnel analysis, referral analysis, etc.
apitman 5y ago
I compared[0] a few of the popular options a while back. TLDR; GoatCounter. [0]: https://apitman.com/20/#get-off-google-analytics https://apitman.com/20/#get-off-google-analytics
encoderer 5y ago
I’m a big fan of PanelBear.com and I recently implemented it on Crontab.guru (500k monthly visits). It was painless, the ux is clean and polished, and I can see panelbear tracking 5% greater visits over the same time period as GA due likely to people who had adblocked GA.
barrystaes 5y ago
I used a self hosted Matomo (free and open source) for websites and apps, and it was simpler and (because of that) more flexible than Google Analytics. Less UI clutter is nice also for colleagues.
ncake 5y ago
I use a script I wrote in an hour, which parses nginx access.log and prints last visitors to a "_stats.txt" file. It's 90% requests made by bots, so I didn't bother making a UI.
superasn 5y ago
I prefer goaccess(1) over any other tool that uses client side Javascript. It's basically a real time website log analyser which gives you enough information to know whats happening on your website but doesn't require any pesky Javascript etc to do it. Also since it is works by analysing your log files it can never be blocked. (1) https://rt.goaccess.io/?20210826211303 https://rt.goaccess.io/?20210826211303
- kingcharles 5y ago
  If you want total accuracy, then the only solution is to analyze your HTTP logs like this. You won't get much in the way of knowing your clients, except what comes through in the HTTP requests, e.g. URI, IP address, browser and platform, but you'll also know you're not missing any requests.
  - jefftk 5y ago
    Most people running sites care less about exactly counting the number of requests than knowing details about their visitors and behavior. If I try to process my server logs directly I either need to manually filter out bots, which are the majority of traffic, or I need to use some sort of collaboratively maintained bot identification system. Alternatively, I can use any of the services people are mentioning here and they will do that for me.
    - joshyi 5y ago
      I think it depends a lot in what you are after. Accurate results through the logs, including bots. Or inaccurate results via JS. Bunch of services folks are using out there that blocks them.
- Ciantic 5y ago
  I use Goaccess too for simple things, but I've found that it's not really suitable if you want to compare stats of different months or years, or look into specific week. This is because goaccess aggregates reports to single HTML file. If you give it a year of logs, it compresses whole year in one graph. It didn't seem to have interactive way to explore whole year. Most people don't care and just generate monthly HTML report file, but that has same flaws as yearly file.
sam_goody 5y ago
https://matomo.org https://matomo.org That's the only full featured open source competitor I am aware of, so it should be mentioned. https://snowplowanalytics.com/ https://snowplowanalytics.com/ Somewhat FOSS. There was a story there, but I don't remember the details. If you don't need much, plausible.io is decent but very low on details. Cloudflare seems to offer the same amount of data as Plausible, unblockable, and with no JS to load [especially if you pay $20 for the better analytics], but I don't know what data they lose by browsers that cache dns queries etc.
- sillysaurusx 5y ago
  Matomo is pretty great. Just wanted to chime in to encourage others to self-host it. It was fast, free, and configurable.
  - johnchristopher 5y ago
    Matomo isn't completely free. Funnels and A/B testing is not (see: https://plugins.matomo.org/ https://plugins.matomo.org/).
    - sillysaurusx 5y ago
      Oh, I had no idea! Thank you for the correction.
- mooreds 5y ago
  We use matomo. Takes some getting used to if you are coming from GA (for instance, can take a while to generate segments) but is nice and privacy friendly.
  - nyellin 5y ago
    Can you elaborate on the segments?
    - mooreds 5y ago
gsa 5y ago
Promoting my own side project: https://nocookieanalytics.com/ https://nocookieanalytics.com/. Cookie free, API first and open source with a focus on speed. It's not as featured as some of the other well known projects in this area, but it's a work in progress.
go_blue_13 5y ago
If you're looking for an enterprise-grade solution, check out Rockerbox.com
nerdawson 5y ago
I switched to Fathom at the start of the month and I'm really happy with it. There is a trade off when you opt for a privacy focused product but I think it's more than worth it. Plus, I think the vast majority of companies overestimate the importance of the data they collect. Maybe there's some interesting insights buried in GA but if you aren't actually using them what difference does it make. I respect my site's visitors so I use a monitoring system that I personally have no problem being tracked by. I block GA in Firefox so why should I subject my visitors to it?
- jmondi 5y ago
  I was running selfhosted fathom for several years. A few months ago, I decided I wanted to just defer that maintenance to a SaaS. I felt that fathom was just so expensive for any small use case… I couldn’t justify the cost. Ended up switching to a paid version of Plausible and I couldn’t be happier.
vieclamdmpt 5y ago
https://viclmbcninhbcgiangdmpt.fwscart.com/ https://viclmbcninhbcgiangdmpt.fwscart.com/
jazzychad 5y ago
A couple of friends of mine are building Firstparty - https://firstpartyhq.com https://firstpartyhq.com - the idea is to serve the analytics code/cookie from your own domain (hence, first party). I've been using them for some of my websites and mobile apps. The reporting is nascent at the moment, but it is being built at a fast pace.
- dmor 5y ago
  Thanks Chad! CTO and cofounder of Firstparty here, just wanted to mention our trial comes with 1,000,000 events free so if anyone wants to kick the tires it should be free for a long time for projects that don’t do a ton of web traffic, and we would love your feedback.
urcoilbisurco 5y ago
I created https://metrical.xyz https://metrical.xyz No cookies and banners to setup, custom domains, simple UI, share monitors with others, basic custom events support. Just the things that I needed, nothing more. Hope will come useful to somebody else!
aaronsdevera 5y ago
One thing I am incredibly cognizant of is the balkanization of the web. Different territories and privacy regimes will dictate various compliance steps... navigating this will be difficult. As a site operator I plan on collecting analytics accordingly, with a polymorphic payload that knows whats allowed to be collected where possible...
raimille1 5y ago
I love splitbee.io, been using it for a year now in all my projects.
pabs3 5y ago
Potentially controversial opinion on HN: don't track visits to your website in any way. Or alternately track only statistics about which URLs were requested per day.
ianwehba 5y ago
https://usefathom.com/ https://usefathom.com/
feistypharit 5y ago
Always surprised more people don’t use countly. Runs nice in docker or digital ocean. https://count.ly https://count.ly. Been self hosting it for years with few issues.
JackWritesCode 5y ago
Woah this thread is packed. Most of these companies didn’t exist when we started Fathom back in 2018, so it’s great to see how the privacy-first analytics space is thriving. I’m Jack Ellis, the cofounder of https://usefathom.com https://usefathom.com. We’re a two person, self-funded company from Canada. Our software is used in projects by companies like IBM, GitHub, Tuple, Tailwind and lots of other awesome companies. You shouldn’t use Fathom if you flinch at $14/m for a highly available service. We’re self-funded, priced to be sustainable long term, and we don’t guess on privacy law. Recently, we launched a feature called EU Isolation following the Schrems II ruling (where Max Schrems sued Facebook). Long story short, if you’re using analytics and are passing your EU website visitors personal data (IP & User agent) to US-controlled cloud servers (even if they’re located in the EU), you’re violating the GDPR. Well with Fathom, we use both EU infrastructure and US infrastructure, but we automatically route all your EU visitors through German-owned infrastructure, and hash all personal data there, meaning your EU website visitors personal data will NEVER touch our core US infrastructure. This approach was put together with our Canadian and EU lawyers, and hasn’t been seen before in the analytics space. Lots of companies run on “EU servers”, but they’re controlled by US cloud providers and subject to FISA. This means they’re not GDPR compliant. We don’t guess on legal matters, and we don’t cheap out on infrastructure. The lawyers we invest in work with some of the world’s largest companies, and they’re a big budget item for us. We run our infrastructure across multiple availability zones and invest heavily in serverless infrastructure. If you compare Fathom against most privacy-first analytics providers, you’ll see our uptime is uncontested. It costs us more, yes, but keeping our customers’ analytics reliable is of crucial importance to us. We run only on managed services, as we want experts (like some of the DevOps folk on here) maintaining it for us, and we stick to our strength (building our application). With our custom domain solution (to bypass adblockers), we handle automatic SSL for you and serve your website visitors from a CDN, keeping things really fast. We’ve also recently launched multi-domain, which is super powerful for holding multiple domains under a single dashboard (something the OP was speaking about). Especially since you can also then utilize our API to generate custom reports. We’re going from strength to strength, and we’re the best option for folks who need GDPR compliance. We are also based in Canada, so we have adequacy ruling under the GDPR. Hope this post is helpful for anyone who is already wondering about Fathom :)
- 5y ago
ihucos 5y ago
There is also counter.dev - Free and Privacy friendly since more than a year now.
terrycody 5y ago
If you use Wordpress CMS(and I indeed suggest you do), KoKo analytics is free open source alternatives, quick, small, get the job done.
Ziffity 5y ago
Adobe Analytics is a best alternative for google Analytics. but its available only on paid versions
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
ironman1 5y ago
We're using Simple Analytics mainly for privacy reasons. I did a bit of research beforehand as we're in a quite 'sensitive' industry. So if you care about privacy Simple Analytics is the private one. They are the only ones that never track IP-address. Plausible and fathom do (only for a day or so, but still do). https://simpleanalytics.com/ https://simpleanalytics.com/
kjerzyk 5y ago
I take you are using Google Analytics 4. You should still be able to use the older version (Universal Analytics) where you shouldn't have any problems with displaying full URL (including hostname). It's usually a setting/filter that removes the hostname from the URL.
alexmingoia 5y ago
CloudFlare free page views analytics + saving ?ref= on signup. That gets you traffic + conversion rate broken down by channel.
aluciani 5y ago
I like the simplicity of Fathom analytics https://usefathom.com https://usefathom.com I also switched from Google Analytics this year and happy I did.
mekster 5y ago
I have hard time understanding why people mix up analytics software and counters. What do you actually get out of counters like plausible compared to real analytical services? I consider counters nothing but seeing how many visited and there's pretty much no action to do based on the numbers but stare at it.

192 points by nyellin 5y ago

I don't like the new GA interface. It's hard to do simple things like display full-urls when you serve multiple subdomains. What alternatives do you like and why?

andreidd 5y ago

posthog * it's open source * you can self host as a docker container * you can log from the client side or from the server side * awesome founders with HN accounts :P

nyellin 5y ago
I thought Posthog was more of a Mixpanel competitor. Is it appropriate for aggregate data about anonymous users and referral/flow analysis too?

fourseventy 5y ago

If you run an e-commerce store this is a list of good alternatives that are specifically focused on e-com analytics https://thoughtmetric.io/topics/google-analytics-alternatives-for-ecommerce https://thoughtmetric.io/topics/google-analytics-alternative...

kyrra 5y ago

I'm actually interesting in this as well. I've noticed watching the HTTP logs for my small site, I have traffic on it (it auto-polls my server every 60 seconds to report updated status), but none of those show up as "active" users in Google Analytics. I'm guessing uBlock Origin blocking GA by default is a likely cause.

marvinblum 5y ago
> I'm guessing uBlock Origin blocking GA by default is a likely cause. Yep, GA being blocked is a major issue. You can use server-side analytics [0] to prevent any JS from being blocked. [0] https://docs.pirsch.io/get-started/backend-integration/ https://docs.pirsch.io/get-started/backend-integration/ (I'm the co-founder of it)
jefftk 5y ago
What do the user agent strings look like? It is possible you are seeing bots.

antidnan 5y ago

https://plausible.io/ https://plausible.io/ No cookies, GDPR compliant, simple interface

kingcharles 5y ago
See my post above about Plausible: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29664684 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29664684

jdorfman 5y ago

Documentation Insights by Scarf * Simple dashboard * Displays which: * businesses are visiting your documentation pages. * locales they are coming from (geolocation data in aggregate). * pages are most frequently visited. https://about.scarf.sh/documentation-insights https://about.scarf.sh/documentation-insights Edit: formatting

marvinblum 5y ago

Clearly Pirsch Analytics! https://pirsch.io/ https://pirsch.io/ No cookies, open-source core, GDPR compliant, nice UI, and an extensive API.

colbyhub 5y ago
Wow Pirsch looks incredible, will definitely use them for my blog and projects.

JaumeRF 5y ago

At ekademy.eu we use plausible.

Jaume_RF 5y ago

KingOfCoders 5y ago

Depending on your needs Simple Analytics or none.

buro9 5y ago

I'm currently using Cloudflare and their SDK+API to pull logs, which I then push into Loki. I then use Grafana to render the dashboards I want. This isn't for everyone, I'm super comfortable doing this because of familiarity with all the components. But there's no out of the box dashboard for this so you have to replicate the UI parts you value. At least with Grafana once done you're in control of it and you own it. I prefer server logs from the edge for their completeness. There are things missing... I.e. client side knowledge of screen sizes and device types. But server logs are so much more complete than client side JavaScript from third parties that are frequently adblocked.

nyellin 5y ago
Unfortunately this won't work as I have an SPA
- treelovinhippie 5y ago
Kovah 5y ago
Is there some blog article on how to do that? Would be interested in trying it out.
snowwrestler 5y ago
How do you exclude bot traffic?
- uaas 5y ago
  You can use this LogQL operator !~ (regex does not match) to exclude strings.

kekebo 5y ago

I just switched from GA to Matomo[0] and have a good impression so far. Seems similar to Pirsch in terms of cookie less tracking, GDPR / DSGVO compliance, being open source, self-hostable, having a decent UI and API. [0] https://matomo.org/matomo-on-premise/ https://matomo.org/matomo-on-premise/

x3ro 5y ago
I second Matomo. Easy to set-up and update and has an optional no-cookies (and thus no cookie banners) mode. I’m using it for my private sites, but have also used it professionally in the past.

tetek 5y ago

GA is awful, always was. I got tired of it and started using splitbee.io

beauHD 5y ago

https://www.goatcounter.com/ https://www.goatcounter.com/

csbartus 5y ago
Thanks for pointing this out. It's the first free analytics service for personal blogs, websites I've seen recently. The rest is subscription based and useful for revenue-generating businesses. The author seems to have the same itch when went to create this product: https://www.goatcounter.com/why https://www.goatcounter.com/why
- csbartus 5y ago
  I found this 'pay what you want' alternative in my bookmarks: https://counter.dev/ https://counter.dev/
  - ihucos 5y ago
    Our approach is to be free and sustainable by radically cutting down hosting costs. Most technical solutions are mentioned in the Github page. Apart from this honestly the product is well polished and easy to use. Check it out :-)
jaggirs 5y ago
Goatcounter is exactly what I need, nothing more, nothing less.
ivanech 5y ago
I've been very happy with goatcounter on my personal site for 2 years now

immnn 5y ago

Try etracker: https://www.etracker.com/ https://www.etracker.com/ It is cookie-less, so no opt in is required in EU. And off course you could have a look at goaccess. It’s parsing your access-logs and generates some nice metrics-dashboard. https://goaccess.io/ https://goaccess.io/

shafyy 5y ago

If you're looking for web analytics, I love and can recommend Plausible (https://plausible.io/ https://plausible.io/). It's both simple and privacy-friendly. Inspired by Plausible, I recently launched Fugu (https://fugu.lol https://fugu.lol). Fugu is a simple and privacy-friendly product analytics tool. It offers only event-based tracking, so it's better suited for web or mobile apps and not web sites (go for Plausible for websites). Fugu doesn't track unique users or any personally identifiable information. It's pretty basic for now, but I'm working on adding conversion funnels next (I work on it in my free time). Fugu is open-source[0] and self-hostable. I make money by providing a managed version for $9/month. 0: https://github.com/shafy/fugu https://github.com/shafy/fugu

falafelite 5y ago
This is a really cool thing to work on in your free time! Thanks for sharing. Also, +1 to plausible for simple website analytics.
- shafyy 5y ago
  Thanks :-)
nicbou 5y ago
I use Plausible on https://allaboutberlin.com https://allaboutberlin.com, mainly for privacy and UX reasons (no cookie notice). It's good, but it doesn't replace Google Analytics at all. It tracks visits and events, but not navigation and user flow. It's severely lacking in detail compared to Analytics. It's a compromise, not a drop-in replacement. However, it's excellent as a simple tracker for average website admins. I'm very happy with it. The maintainers have been nothing short of stellar with their support and transparency.
- shafyy 5y ago
  Cool! Your website looks great. I also live in Berlin! Give Fugu a spin if you want to track conversion funnels (coming soon) and event properties.
- 5y ago

zimmerx 5y ago

https://umami.is/ https://umami.is/ discovered this, some of my friends use it and it's pretty decent.

metasyn 5y ago
i've been using this for a few months now. super easy to get set up and run yourself!
yla92 5y ago
+1 for Umami. Pretty straightforward to setup and run.
jallbrit 5y ago
Another happy user here. Easy to set up, never have any problems.
Ocha 5y ago
+1 for umami here too. I have been using it for https://mailsnag.com https://mailsnag.com. It has event tracking feature that I'm looking forward to use.

gherkinnn 5y ago

Fathom is a simple analytics product. It can track page views and events, the script is fairly small, is GDPR compliant, and gets out of your way. https://usefathom.com https://usefathom.com

JackWritesCode 5y ago
Thanks so much for supporting us. We have spent so much money on getting our compliance right :) A lot of companies claim to be GDPR compliant, and they’re not. We’ll be blogging more about this in the future as we don’t like folks being lied to.
deleted 5y ago
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soperj 5y ago

Why do it client side instead of just logging it server side? Preferably async.

crispyalmond 5y ago
I think this a really good approach. We've done something similar by exposing an endpoint and just PUT data to it from the client when something interesting happens. This works really well and the server is free to do whatever with it.

paulcole 5y ago

I use the Query Explorer exclusively in place of the GA interface: https://ga-dev-tools.web.app/query-explorer/ https://ga-dev-tools.web.app/query-explorer/ Dead simple to create the queries I want and then copy/paste into a spreadsheet. You can also use the query URLs with the access token to easily get data into Jupyter Notebooks or whatever else you want to use for deeper analysis.

58x14 5y ago

Surprised to not see Simple Analytics here, which I always try and plug (no affiliation, just a happy user): https://simpleanalytics.com/ https://simpleanalytics.com/

Taywee 5y ago

My needs are pretty simple, but I just do server-side logging in a Django Middleware. I wanted to use a tracking cookie to track a user across the site, but I had a hell of a time trying to figure out whether that violated the GDPR, so I just log the user agent instead. What really is the major gain to a big third party analytics platform when you really just need to know how somebody moves through your site, what the hot and cold paths are, and what influences retention and revisits?

jkbl 5y ago

I had a same problem, but GA is only the tip of the iceberg. A lot of apps with analytics capabilities have usability problem. In some, metrics are hidden too deep and it's hard to navigate. Others lack simple features and do not let you change things like timezone or displayed currency. But the biggest pain point for me was integration with data from other apps. To simplify things I am building Raport[1]. Raport integrates metrics from multiple sources (GA, Search Console, Stripe, Adsense) and displays them in clear and simple to use dashboard. It is not an alternative to GA and other tools, but rather works alongside them as an additional interface, where you can view all your data. For me personally Raport saved me a lot of time I spent in GA and Search Console. [1] https://raport.pro https://raport.pro

tommy_ford 5y ago
Yeah, I agree with that. A lot of these tools have usability issues. I kinda like Search Console but Google Analytics or Facebook Business gave me some terrible data analysis experiences. I checked out your tool. Looks perfect for my needs but I need do dive a bit deeper to say more. I assume you plan to add more integrations in the future. Have you thought about adding an integration with LinkedIn? That’d be helpful for me.
- jkbl 5y ago
  I agree, Facebook Business is the worst. And it crashes in Safari. Our plan is to create integrations for social media platforms next (Facebook, Instagram, Twitter). I do not have experience with LinkedIn, but we'll definitely add it too, if there is data to analyze. Feel free to explore the app and leave us a feedback if you want.

ksec 5y ago

Cloudflare Analytics or something on server with GoAccess. SimpleAnalytics, Fathom, Pirsch and Plausible. They are all very similar from pricing, to display layout. The problem is they dont track returning visitors. Some argue that is against privacy, some think it is acceptable for 30 days period. I remember there was one Analytics from EUR that offer returning visitors stats but again.. Bookmarks on browser is practically useless. So I cant find it anymore.

marvinblum 5y ago
Pirsch does track returning visitors. As long as no PII is stored, it's fine.

weinzierl 5y ago

I run my own Matomo. Boring and old-school, but serves me well.

gompertz 5y ago

I use clicky.com, it's ultra lite weight and has tons of features.

obmelvin 5y ago

I know that Mixpanel is very event focused, and it seems like the question is more on page tracking, but surprised that no one has mentioned it. Has mixpanel fallen out of favor or is the lack of mention because it's a bit out of scope for the OP?

jFriedensreich 5y ago
was wondering the same, in terms of features (retention grid, user centric tracking, funnels, advanced queries) and ui few things come close but its probably pretty costly compared to ga
- nyellin 5y ago
  OP here. I'm going to give Mixpanel a try. I'm essentially looking for two things: 1. Product analytics on logged in users in a SaaS platform 2. Aggregate analytics on anonymous users with funnel analysis, referral analysis, etc.

apitman 5y ago

I compared[0] a few of the popular options a while back. TLDR; GoatCounter. [0]: https://apitman.com/20/#get-off-google-analytics https://apitman.com/20/#get-off-google-analytics

encoderer 5y ago

I’m a big fan of PanelBear.com and I recently implemented it on Crontab.guru (500k monthly visits). It was painless, the ux is clean and polished, and I can see panelbear tracking 5% greater visits over the same time period as GA due likely to people who had adblocked GA.

barrystaes 5y ago

I used a self hosted Matomo (free and open source) for websites and apps, and it was simpler and (because of that) more flexible than Google Analytics. Less UI clutter is nice also for colleagues.

ncake 5y ago

I use a script I wrote in an hour, which parses nginx access.log and prints last visitors to a "_stats.txt" file. It's 90% requests made by bots, so I didn't bother making a UI.

superasn 5y ago

I prefer goaccess(1) over any other tool that uses client side Javascript. It's basically a real time website log analyser which gives you enough information to know whats happening on your website but doesn't require any pesky Javascript etc to do it. Also since it is works by analysing your log files it can never be blocked. (1) https://rt.goaccess.io/?20210826211303 https://rt.goaccess.io/?20210826211303

kingcharles 5y ago
If you want total accuracy, then the only solution is to analyze your HTTP logs like this. You won't get much in the way of knowing your clients, except what comes through in the HTTP requests, e.g. URI, IP address, browser and platform, but you'll also know you're not missing any requests.
- jefftk 5y ago
  Most people running sites care less about exactly counting the number of requests than knowing details about their visitors and behavior. If I try to process my server logs directly I either need to manually filter out bots, which are the majority of traffic, or I need to use some sort of collaboratively maintained bot identification system. Alternatively, I can use any of the services people are mentioning here and they will do that for me.
  - joshyi 5y ago
    I think it depends a lot in what you are after. Accurate results through the logs, including bots. Or inaccurate results via JS. Bunch of services folks are using out there that blocks them.
Ciantic 5y ago
I use Goaccess too for simple things, but I've found that it's not really suitable if you want to compare stats of different months or years, or look into specific week. This is because goaccess aggregates reports to single HTML file. If you give it a year of logs, it compresses whole year in one graph. It didn't seem to have interactive way to explore whole year. Most people don't care and just generate monthly HTML report file, but that has same flaws as yearly file.

sam_goody 5y ago

https://matomo.org https://matomo.org That's the only full featured open source competitor I am aware of, so it should be mentioned. https://snowplowanalytics.com/ https://snowplowanalytics.com/ Somewhat FOSS. There was a story there, but I don't remember the details. If you don't need much, plausible.io is decent but very low on details. Cloudflare seems to offer the same amount of data as Plausible, unblockable, and with no JS to load [especially if you pay $20 for the better analytics], but I don't know what data they lose by browsers that cache dns queries etc.

sillysaurusx 5y ago
Matomo is pretty great. Just wanted to chime in to encourage others to self-host it. It was fast, free, and configurable.
- johnchristopher 5y ago
  Matomo isn't completely free. Funnels and A/B testing is not (see: https://plugins.matomo.org/ https://plugins.matomo.org/).
  - sillysaurusx 5y ago
    Oh, I had no idea! Thank you for the correction.
mooreds 5y ago
We use matomo. Takes some getting used to if you are coming from GA (for instance, can take a while to generate segments) but is nice and privacy friendly.
- nyellin 5y ago
  Can you elaborate on the segments?
  - mooreds 5y ago

gsa 5y ago

Promoting my own side project: https://nocookieanalytics.com/ https://nocookieanalytics.com/. Cookie free, API first and open source with a focus on speed. It's not as featured as some of the other well known projects in this area, but it's a work in progress.

go_blue_13 5y ago

If you're looking for an enterprise-grade solution, check out Rockerbox.com

nerdawson 5y ago

I switched to Fathom at the start of the month and I'm really happy with it. There is a trade off when you opt for a privacy focused product but I think it's more than worth it. Plus, I think the vast majority of companies overestimate the importance of the data they collect. Maybe there's some interesting insights buried in GA but if you aren't actually using them what difference does it make. I respect my site's visitors so I use a monitoring system that I personally have no problem being tracked by. I block GA in Firefox so why should I subject my visitors to it?

jmondi 5y ago
I was running selfhosted fathom for several years. A few months ago, I decided I wanted to just defer that maintenance to a SaaS. I felt that fathom was just so expensive for any small use case… I couldn’t justify the cost. Ended up switching to a paid version of Plausible and I couldn’t be happier.

vieclamdmpt 5y ago

https://viclmbcninhbcgiangdmpt.fwscart.com/ https://viclmbcninhbcgiangdmpt.fwscart.com/

jazzychad 5y ago

A couple of friends of mine are building Firstparty - https://firstpartyhq.com https://firstpartyhq.com - the idea is to serve the analytics code/cookie from your own domain (hence, first party). I've been using them for some of my websites and mobile apps. The reporting is nascent at the moment, but it is being built at a fast pace.

dmor 5y ago
Thanks Chad! CTO and cofounder of Firstparty here, just wanted to mention our trial comes with 1,000,000 events free so if anyone wants to kick the tires it should be free for a long time for projects that don’t do a ton of web traffic, and we would love your feedback.

urcoilbisurco 5y ago

I created https://metrical.xyz https://metrical.xyz No cookies and banners to setup, custom domains, simple UI, share monitors with others, basic custom events support. Just the things that I needed, nothing more. Hope will come useful to somebody else!

aaronsdevera 5y ago

One thing I am incredibly cognizant of is the balkanization of the web. Different territories and privacy regimes will dictate various compliance steps... navigating this will be difficult. As a site operator I plan on collecting analytics accordingly, with a polymorphic payload that knows whats allowed to be collected where possible...

raimille1 5y ago

I love splitbee.io, been using it for a year now in all my projects.

pabs3 5y ago

Potentially controversial opinion on HN: don't track visits to your website in any way. Or alternately track only statistics about which URLs were requested per day.

ianwehba 5y ago

https://usefathom.com/ https://usefathom.com/

feistypharit 5y ago

Always surprised more people don’t use countly. Runs nice in docker or digital ocean. https://count.ly https://count.ly. Been self hosting it for years with few issues.

JackWritesCode 5y ago

Woah this thread is packed. Most of these companies didn’t exist when we started Fathom back in 2018, so it’s great to see how the privacy-first analytics space is thriving. I’m Jack Ellis, the cofounder of https://usefathom.com https://usefathom.com. We’re a two person, self-funded company from Canada. Our software is used in projects by companies like IBM, GitHub, Tuple, Tailwind and lots of other awesome companies. You shouldn’t use Fathom if you flinch at $14/m for a highly available service. We’re self-funded, priced to be sustainable long term, and we don’t guess on privacy law. Recently, we launched a feature called EU Isolation following the Schrems II ruling (where Max Schrems sued Facebook). Long story short, if you’re using analytics and are passing your EU website visitors personal data (IP & User agent) to US-controlled cloud servers (even if they’re located in the EU), you’re violating the GDPR. Well with Fathom, we use both EU infrastructure and US infrastructure, but we automatically route all your EU visitors through German-owned infrastructure, and hash all personal data there, meaning your EU website visitors personal data will NEVER touch our core US infrastructure. This approach was put together with our Canadian and EU lawyers, and hasn’t been seen before in the analytics space. Lots of companies run on “EU servers”, but they’re controlled by US cloud providers and subject to FISA. This means they’re not GDPR compliant. We don’t guess on legal matters, and we don’t cheap out on infrastructure. The lawyers we invest in work with some of the world’s largest companies, and they’re a big budget item for us. We run our infrastructure across multiple availability zones and invest heavily in serverless infrastructure. If you compare Fathom against most privacy-first analytics providers, you’ll see our uptime is uncontested. It costs us more, yes, but keeping our customers’ analytics reliable is of crucial importance to us. We run only on managed services, as we want experts (like some of the DevOps folk on here) maintaining it for us, and we stick to our strength (building our application). With our custom domain solution (to bypass adblockers), we handle automatic SSL for you and serve your website visitors from a CDN, keeping things really fast. We’ve also recently launched multi-domain, which is super powerful for holding multiple domains under a single dashboard (something the OP was speaking about). Especially since you can also then utilize our API to generate custom reports. We’re going from strength to strength, and we’re the best option for folks who need GDPR compliance. We are also based in Canada, so we have adequacy ruling under the GDPR. Hope this post is helpful for anyone who is already wondering about Fathom :)

5y ago

ihucos 5y ago

There is also counter.dev - Free and Privacy friendly since more than a year now.

terrycody 5y ago

If you use Wordpress CMS(and I indeed suggest you do), KoKo analytics is free open source alternatives, quick, small, get the job done.

Ziffity 5y ago

Adobe Analytics is a best alternative for google Analytics. but its available only on paid versions

deleted 5y ago

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ironman1 5y ago

We're using Simple Analytics mainly for privacy reasons. I did a bit of research beforehand as we're in a quite 'sensitive' industry. So if you care about privacy Simple Analytics is the private one. They are the only ones that never track IP-address. Plausible and fathom do (only for a day or so, but still do). https://simpleanalytics.com/ https://simpleanalytics.com/

kjerzyk 5y ago

I take you are using Google Analytics 4. You should still be able to use the older version (Universal Analytics) where you shouldn't have any problems with displaying full URL (including hostname). It's usually a setting/filter that removes the hostname from the URL.

alexmingoia 5y ago

CloudFlare free page views analytics + saving ?ref= on signup. That gets you traffic + conversion rate broken down by channel.

aluciani 5y ago

I like the simplicity of Fathom analytics https://usefathom.com https://usefathom.com I also switched from Google Analytics this year and happy I did.

mekster 5y ago

I have hard time understanding why people mix up analytics software and counters. What do you actually get out of counters like plausible compared to real analytical services? I consider counters nothing but seeing how many visited and there's pretty much no action to do based on the numbers but stare at it.