7 ms·

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. I

by 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.
- rPlayer6554 5y ago
  Wow, this is a fantastic site. I definitely plan on visiting Berlin at some point and I'll use it.
- mousetree 5y ago
  Wow, amazing site! Wish I knew about it earlier!
- rraval 5y ago
  I too wanted to preserve privacy and avoid a cookie banner for my blog. I ended up rolling a privacy preserving proxy via Cloudflare workers that forwards `pageview` events to Google Analytics. It's a single HTML tag to drop in and preserves the navigation and user flow reports on the GA side. See https://github.com/rraval/zeroindexed/tree/master/packages/toph-worker#implementation https://github.com/rraval/zeroindexed/tree/master/packages/t... The blog explains expanded motivation: https://zeroindexed.com/privacy https://zeroindexed.com/privacy
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
- philliphaydon 5y ago
  I love how clean clear and concise this site is! More sites should be like this! Great work!
kingcharles 5y ago
I would not recommend Plausible (well, their commercial offering anyway). I had a bad run-in with them recently. Their site would not log data from my web site at all (their Javascript just threw an error in the console and would not execute). I filed a ticket. They brushed it off and said they'd had a brief look and couldn't figure it out, and basically tough shit, and told me to just download their open source version and install it locally. What annoyed me was that if it's not logging on my site, how many other sites is it under-reporting for? YOU DON'T KNOW WHAT YOU DON'T KNOW. And the fact they weren't willing to give it any serious thought at all. This is bad for an analytics company. I tried (begrudgingly) and put Google Analytics behemoth of Javascript on my site and it worked perfectly, so I knew it was a bug in their system, not mine. At that point I decided to try and figure it out so I fired up a proxy and sat there for a couple of hours going back and forth until I did figure it out myself. The bug is in their web server configuration really, not in the actually logging Javascript. Now, it might have been unethical of me, I don't know, but I felt since I'd spent a ton of my time to figure out a serious bug in their product it would be nice if they would throw me a year's free subscription. I felt that was fair compensation. They said no way, don't worry about, basically "I'm sure we'll figure it out ourselves in the future one day, don't call us." So at that point I decided screw it, I can see they don't care about their customers and product, so I'm looking for alternatives that aren't GA. That's my 2 cents. Your mileage may vary. tl;dr: Be aware their product has a bug which causes it to not log data in certain circumstances (the script won't execute) and therefore if you are using their commercial product you might not be seeing all your visitors.
- shafyy 5y ago
  That sucks that you had a bad experience with Plausible. I've never had any problems, and interactions with them on Twitter have always been very friendly and helpful. Now, of course, products have bugs and once you have thousands of users there will be edge cases if it not working. Obviously, they should have handled the interaction with you differently. Out of interest, can you expand more on when the bug occurs? Btw, if you have a fix for it, you can also create a PR.
  - kingcharles 5y ago
kingcharles 5y ago
Does Fugu have a free trial period? I would need to test it actually works at all before I start paying for it. Plausible, fortunately, has a free trial on their commercial product, so I could figure out instantly that their system is broken. I would have hated to pay money only to find it had a terminal bug and they wouldn't fix it. Basically, I'd like a couple of days grace before having to pay for it, so I could install it on my app and see if it even works. The reason I wouldn't install Fugu locally (or Plausible locally) is that I don't want a whole different deployment channel to support. Likely your code needs a different web server or framework than the rest of my stuff, and that is a lot of setup, installation and support. But I do like that the option exists and that I can see the code.
- shafyy 5y ago
  Yes it does have an infinite free trial period :-) You can track events in test mode without having a subscription. Test mode events are auto-deleted after 14 days. Creating an accounting doesn't require a credit card.
  - kingcharles 5y ago
    OK. PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE put that at the very top of your site somewhere. It doesn't say that anywhere that I can see. It just tells me I can self-host for free, or pay $9/month. I clicked off the site because of that, even though the product looked cool. Let people clearly know they can test drive it for free to see if it works. EDIT: OK, I see it says that once I click GET STARTED, but that's too late, because I never clicked that button because I didn't want to pay $9 to find out if it worked. You need to make it really clear on the front page. Also, put a "Sign-up" button next to Sign-In in the top-right corner. That was the first place I looked to try to create an account - I didn't go straight for the GET STARTED button.
    - shafyy 5y ago
      Thanks for the feedback! Makes sense, will update it!
rasulkireev 5y ago
I second Plausible. Have been using it close to a year now. Very happy about it. It is probably not as feature rich as GA, but who needs those features, right. On the other hand they are adding new things everyday, but they focus on what users want.
hijodelsol 5y ago
I second Plausible but to everyone looking to self-host it, be aware: It’s AGPL licensed! From what I have seen it seems that they only want to discourage direct competitors but an APGL license is an APGL license and that’s a deal breaker for many commercial projects. Older version were licensed under the MIT license iirc so might be an option for some. Ofc you can always support them and use their cloud hosting solution without any of these problems. I just wish they their pricing was fairer.. Their plans start at 6€ for 10k monthly page views - for that price you could run your own VPS capable of handling literally millions of requests.
- jimktrains2 5y ago
  Agpl matters if you modify the code, not if you only tun it as a separate service.
  - kevincox 5y ago
    IANAL but isn't using the JS snippet a "combined work"?
apatheticonion 5y ago
Is there a way to self host Plausible and avoid the cost? Is that what your service Fugu aims to achieve? EDIT: You absolutely can! https://plausible.io/self-hosted-web-analytics https://plausible.io/self-hosted-web-analytics
- shafyy 5y ago
  Yes, you can self host both, Plausible and Fugu.
nerdyadventurer 5y ago
Analytics solution that support to Mobile platforms(Android, iOS) too? There is Matomo as I know, what else out there? Aggregating things over platform is hassle when using different services for different platforms.
- shafyy 5y ago
  If you use Fugu, it's simple to unify since you track your events by calling the Fugu API. Of course, it takes a bit (not too much) longer to set it up than just slapping a script in there, but it enables you more granular control of what you're tracking.
mekster 5y ago
Why is plausible even a replacement for an analytics app? It's just a counter. What can you analyze using plausible? User journey, heatmap, filter by users that took several events?

by shafyy 5y ago

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.
rPlayer6554 5y ago
Wow, this is a fantastic site. I definitely plan on visiting Berlin at some point and I'll use it.
mousetree 5y ago
Wow, amazing site! Wish I knew about it earlier!
rraval 5y ago
I too wanted to preserve privacy and avoid a cookie banner for my blog. I ended up rolling a privacy preserving proxy via Cloudflare workers that forwards `pageview` events to Google Analytics. It's a single HTML tag to drop in and preserves the navigation and user flow reports on the GA side. See https://github.com/rraval/zeroindexed/tree/master/packages/toph-worker#implementation https://github.com/rraval/zeroindexed/tree/master/packages/t... The blog explains expanded motivation: https://zeroindexed.com/privacy https://zeroindexed.com/privacy
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
philliphaydon 5y ago
I love how clean clear and concise this site is! More sites should be like this! Great work!

kingcharles 5y ago

I would not recommend Plausible (well, their commercial offering anyway). I had a bad run-in with them recently. Their site would not log data from my web site at all (their Javascript just threw an error in the console and would not execute). I filed a ticket. They brushed it off and said they'd had a brief look and couldn't figure it out, and basically tough shit, and told me to just download their open source version and install it locally. What annoyed me was that if it's not logging on my site, how many other sites is it under-reporting for? YOU DON'T KNOW WHAT YOU DON'T KNOW. And the fact they weren't willing to give it any serious thought at all. This is bad for an analytics company. I tried (begrudgingly) and put Google Analytics behemoth of Javascript on my site and it worked perfectly, so I knew it was a bug in their system, not mine. At that point I decided to try and figure it out so I fired up a proxy and sat there for a couple of hours going back and forth until I did figure it out myself. The bug is in their web server configuration really, not in the actually logging Javascript. Now, it might have been unethical of me, I don't know, but I felt since I'd spent a ton of my time to figure out a serious bug in their product it would be nice if they would throw me a year's free subscription. I felt that was fair compensation. They said no way, don't worry about, basically "I'm sure we'll figure it out ourselves in the future one day, don't call us." So at that point I decided screw it, I can see they don't care about their customers and product, so I'm looking for alternatives that aren't GA. That's my 2 cents. Your mileage may vary. tl;dr: Be aware their product has a bug which causes it to not log data in certain circumstances (the script won't execute) and therefore if you are using their commercial product you might not be seeing all your visitors.

shafyy 5y ago
That sucks that you had a bad experience with Plausible. I've never had any problems, and interactions with them on Twitter have always been very friendly and helpful. Now, of course, products have bugs and once you have thousands of users there will be edge cases if it not working. Obviously, they should have handled the interaction with you differently. Out of interest, can you expand more on when the bug occurs? Btw, if you have a fix for it, you can also create a PR.
- kingcharles 5y ago

kingcharles 5y ago

Does Fugu have a free trial period? I would need to test it actually works at all before I start paying for it. Plausible, fortunately, has a free trial on their commercial product, so I could figure out instantly that their system is broken. I would have hated to pay money only to find it had a terminal bug and they wouldn't fix it. Basically, I'd like a couple of days grace before having to pay for it, so I could install it on my app and see if it even works. The reason I wouldn't install Fugu locally (or Plausible locally) is that I don't want a whole different deployment channel to support. Likely your code needs a different web server or framework than the rest of my stuff, and that is a lot of setup, installation and support. But I do like that the option exists and that I can see the code.

shafyy 5y ago
Yes it does have an infinite free trial period :-) You can track events in test mode without having a subscription. Test mode events are auto-deleted after 14 days. Creating an accounting doesn't require a credit card.
- kingcharles 5y ago
  OK. PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE put that at the very top of your site somewhere. It doesn't say that anywhere that I can see. It just tells me I can self-host for free, or pay $9/month. I clicked off the site because of that, even though the product looked cool. Let people clearly know they can test drive it for free to see if it works. EDIT: OK, I see it says that once I click GET STARTED, but that's too late, because I never clicked that button because I didn't want to pay $9 to find out if it worked. You need to make it really clear on the front page. Also, put a "Sign-up" button next to Sign-In in the top-right corner. That was the first place I looked to try to create an account - I didn't go straight for the GET STARTED button.
  - shafyy 5y ago
    Thanks for the feedback! Makes sense, will update it!

rasulkireev 5y ago

I second Plausible. Have been using it close to a year now. Very happy about it. It is probably not as feature rich as GA, but who needs those features, right. On the other hand they are adding new things everyday, but they focus on what users want.

hijodelsol 5y ago

I second Plausible but to everyone looking to self-host it, be aware: It’s AGPL licensed! From what I have seen it seems that they only want to discourage direct competitors but an APGL license is an APGL license and that’s a deal breaker for many commercial projects. Older version were licensed under the MIT license iirc so might be an option for some. Ofc you can always support them and use their cloud hosting solution without any of these problems. I just wish they their pricing was fairer.. Their plans start at 6€ for 10k monthly page views - for that price you could run your own VPS capable of handling literally millions of requests.

jimktrains2 5y ago
Agpl matters if you modify the code, not if you only tun it as a separate service.
- kevincox 5y ago
  IANAL but isn't using the JS snippet a "combined work"?

apatheticonion 5y ago

Is there a way to self host Plausible and avoid the cost? Is that what your service Fugu aims to achieve? EDIT: You absolutely can! https://plausible.io/self-hosted-web-analytics https://plausible.io/self-hosted-web-analytics

shafyy 5y ago
Yes, you can self host both, Plausible and Fugu.

nerdyadventurer 5y ago

Analytics solution that support to Mobile platforms(Android, iOS) too? There is Matomo as I know, what else out there? Aggregating things over platform is hassle when using different services for different platforms.

shafyy 5y ago
If you use Fugu, it's simple to unify since you track your events by calling the Fugu API. Of course, it takes a bit (not too much) longer to set it up than just slapping a script in there, but it enables you more granular control of what you're tracking.

mekster 5y ago

Why is plausible even a replacement for an analytics app? It's just a counter. What can you analyze using plausible? User journey, heatmap, filter by users that took several events?