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GoatCounter: Open-source hosted/self-hosted web analytics
- salzig 4y agonice to see a alternative to https://plausible.io/ https://plausible.io/. UI looks a little rough in comparison, but that's maybe more a matter of taste.
- windthrown 4y agoThe developer actually addresses this point: https://www.goatcounter.com/design https://www.goatcounter.com/design
- marvinblum 4y agoThere are plenty of alternatives: https://european-alternatives.eu/category/web-analytics-services https://european-alternatives.eu/category/web-analytics-serv... I'm building one of them, Pirsch.
- salzig 4y agoThanks for European-alternatives. Didn’t know that site.
- dang 4y agoRelated: GoatCounter – Simple web statistics, with no tracking of personal data - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22044854 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22044854 - Jan 2020 (136 comments)
- yewenjie 4y agoHow does this compare with Plausible Analytics?
- dustedcodes 4y ago[flagged]
- palata 4y agoThat's not really fair. I haven't used Plausible Analytics, but from a quick look it can be self-hosted, too: https://plausible.io/open-source-website-analytics#can-plausible-analytics-be-self-hosted https://plausible.io/open-source-website-analytics#can-plaus...
- dustedcodes 4y agoMy mistake. As I said I only guessed based on a brief look at both homepages and the self hosting was not visibly advertised as an option when I had a look but I stand corrected.
- JLCarveth 4y agoYou can self-host Plausible.
- satvikpendem 4y agoPerhaps you shouldn't speak so quickly and so snarkily about products you "briefly look at" because Plausible is also self-hosted.
- dustedcodes 4y ago[flagged]
- batterylow 4y agoI was after something like this a while ago. Settled on Umami https://umami.is/ https://umami.is/. Great projects!
- dieselgate 4y agoGood to know, how is Umami treating you? Any pros/cons that may be quick to share?
- technotarek 4y agoThe biggest shortcoming here, from what I can tell, is custom event tracking (eg, click tracking). That was a high priority for us when we moved some projects from GA/universal.
- spiffytech 4y agoGoatCounter added custom event tracking sometime last year. Not sure if it's what you needed. https://www.goatcounter.com/help/events https://www.goatcounter.com/help/events
- technotarek 4y agoYep, my bad. Thanks!
- xavdid 4y agoI've used goatcounter on my site for more than a year and have been very happy with it. I don't need anything complex- I want to know if any pages are getting big traffic and it's nice to know which external links are getting clicked the most. Because I'm very low volume and non-commercial, I can use their free hosted service without guilt.
- tigroferoce 4y agoI second this. I also am an extremely happy user of goat counter. Bravo, well done.
- jddj 4y agoSame here, I use it on a small informational site to get an idea of referrers to occasionally go looking for feedback. It does what it says on the tin. Good software.
- nop_slide 4y agoHappy customer of goatcounter for my personal sites. It’s the first project sponsored on GitHub.
- dieselgate 4y agoVery cool thanks for whoever posted. One of the best parts of HN is if you kind of just wait long enough you'll see a post for something you low key need/were looking for. It's just not the same as web searching for "open source/self hosted web analytics" (even though goat counter is top 10 results for that search on ggle hehe)
- brianzelip 4y agoI hear you! I found the link from noodling around in a code base posted to the GPTDuck post earlier today, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34263525 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34263525.
- hiAndrewQuinn 4y agoIt's what keeps me coming back. Before GC it was ntfy.sh - phone notifications a POST from your command line away.
- Koshkin 4y agoGiven the extreme complexity of the modern CPU chips and the parallelism of their internal processes, as well as the fact that the “architecture” (the instruction set, registers, etc.) is now far removed from how things are done at the hardware level, - does the notion of a “CPU cycle” still make sense?
- cornstalks 4y agoIs this comment on the correct thread?
- Koshkin 4y agoNo. Thanks :) Anyway, looking forward to an answer!
- notwhereyouare 4y agoAnybody else having a problem loading the site? I'm getting Server Not Found
- r1ch 4y agoIt's in one of the popular AdBlock lists.
- wannabebarista 4y agoAnother happy GoatCounter user here. I've been using it for my personal website for three years with very few hiccups. Strongly recommend.
- ddri 4y agoThanks for the tip, going to try this on my personal site. More open source analytics with no tracking is always a good thing.
- pentagrama 4y agoFor WordPress sites I recommend Koko Analytics. Koko Analytics is really good when: * You don't have much technical knowledge (eg: self-host GoatCounter). * Want a really basic and simple way to see traffic data in a privacy respecting way. * Want to use a open source, maintained tool with no "Go Pro" up-sell annoyances and no big changes across the years. * Want to own the data on your server and don't phone any third party server. I'm using it for some years now with no complains :) Demo: https://www.kokoanalytics.com/?go-to-demo https://www.kokoanalytics.com/?go-to-demo Main page: https://www.kokoanalytics.com/ https://www.kokoanalytics.com/ It is maintained: https://wordpress.org/plugins/koko-analytics/#developers https://wordpress.org/plugins/koko-analytics/#developers
- karmaMeansCool 4y agoI tried self hosting it, but could never log in. I would even follow the password reset emails that tell me the password was changed, but then login never worked. I wish I could have gotten it to work, but ended up giving up on it.
- satvikpendem 4y agoLots of people making open source web analytics recently, Plausible, Fathom, Umami, and now GoatCounter. I have one of these for my sites but I honestly don't really look at it, it's not critical really. Now I was thinking of making an analytics solution for tracking site performance instead, like an uptime monitor mixed with tracking how long sites are taking to resolve, and from which areas of the world. As well, something like tracking user events too, like Mixpanel, but a lot easier to use rather than their enterprise solution. Is that something people would find useful?
- pwillia7 4y agoI was so sick of using GA for my personal projects and found GC to use as a simpler approach. I LOVE this tool. It is so simple and easy to use and has everything I need for simple stuff.
- bumblewax 4y agoIt took less than five minutes to create an account and get my blog updated with GC tracking. Love the early early web look of the site too. Thanks for the share!
- 0xbadcafebee 4y agoI'm a little bit confused by their use of EUPL (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Union_Public_Licence https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Union_Public_Licence), can anyone summarize the direct impact, e.g. what shouldn't you use it for? Ah - their use of EUPL was actually modified so it is only compatible with "AGPL v3 and OSL v2.1, v3.0" (https://github.com/arp242/goatcounter/blob/master/LICENSE https://github.com/arp242/goatcounter/blob/master/LICENSE). So really it seems this should be considered as licensed as those two.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- cmitsakis 4y agoThe EUPL is copyleft for any derivative work (as defined by EU law) so the scope of copyleft is not clearly defined. But EU law allows linking without producing a derivative work [1] "linking two programs does not produce a single derivative of both (each program stay covered by its primary licence)". So this is weak copyleft. It's something like LGPL with network protection. They have modified the EUPL license though, which means they have created another license which is incompatible with EUPL. I believe they should use a different name for the modified license. This is confusing. > So really it seems this should be considered as licensed as those two. If you create a different work based on the original (EUPL licensed) work and some AGPL code, you still have to abide by the EUPL but you license the resulting work as AGPL, so others have to abide by the AGPL only. I'm not a lawyer [1] https://joinup.ec.europa.eu/collection/eupl/matrix-eupl-compatible-open-source-licences#section-3 https://joinup.ec.europa.eu/collection/eupl/matrix-eupl-comp...
- jamietanna 4y agoI've been self-hosting Matomo (née Piwik) for about a decade and really enjoying it, but I do wonder about looking at the alternatives
- XCSme 4y agoHi Jamie, check out https://uxwizz.com https://uxwizz.com , I made it, it's most similar to Matomo, but it includes some of their cloud-only/premium features in the (paid) self-hosted version.
- t0mas88 4y agoOne warning: the site claims you don't need a "cookie popup" since it doesn't use cookies. That's false. The ePrivacy directive states that reading or writing any data from the user device other than for the purpose of serving the site needs permission. This thing uses the user agent string and IP to identify users, so you need a permission popup. It's great that they put much effort into not storing those things, using hashes etc, but that does not remove the requirement for permission under the ePrivacy directive.
- dvko 4y agoSpot on. The author acknowledges that cookies are actually more privacy friendly, but then concludes with “it is what it is”. Kind of disappointing. This is my major gripe with all the privacy friendly analytics (disclaimer: I authored two, namely Fathom when it was still open-source and Koko Analytics) tools that submerged over the past few years. Elaborate work went into bypassing cookies, only to make things worse from a privacy perspective in the end.
- hnbad 4y agoI don't know how bypassing cookies does literally anything, at least not since the GDPR came into effect (let alone ePrivacy). It doesn't matter if the data is collected via cookie, header, HTTP request or carrier pigeon. If you're processing, storing or transferring PII for non-functional (read: immediately necessary to provide the service the user specifically requested) purposes, you need revokable consent via opt-in and you need to be able to provide information to the user about what data you collected and what you did with it. Now that the GDPR and ePrivacy are in effect, PII is radioactive. You need containment, handling and disposal procedures, you need to allow users to inspect it at any time and if you accidentally expose anyone to it that's a major emergency incident.
- bschwindHN 4y agoAt this point, why doesn't the browser implement the cookie popup so every site doesn't have to re-invent it? Just don't allow access to cookies programmatically until the user has allowed it via the browser's built-in popup. This already happens for things like notifications and location access, is this something being worked on for the future?
- vgel 4y agoOut of curiosity, I just checked: ~/goatcounter-files on my VPS was created 2021-03-12, and that was also the last time I thought about it beyond checking the stats. Great, very stable piece of software.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- darekkay 4y agoFor some basic analytics a la "I want to know which of my blog posts are read the most", I highly recommend GoAccess[1]. It doesn't require JavaScript and uses access logs instead. There are of course some pros and cons of that approach. When I've migrated from Google Analytics a few years ago, I've ran both at the same time for a while, and the relative numbers were pretty close. [1] https://goaccess.io/ https://goaccess.io/