Ask HN: What are the best alternatives to Google Analytics? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What are the best alternatives to Google Analytics?

56 pointskevmo24 comments

Matomo, formerly Piwik

Concur, pretty much can track everything GA does, with a much more straightforward interface

This won me over with their extensive API though not so modern but does the job. You can most definitely get the same data like GA.

Yes, Matomo! Easy to use, and I love the fact that it's a self hosted solution.

They also offer a solution that analyzes access logs, which is useful to capture traffic from ad-blocking users from your web server. As far as I understand it's not part of the open-source version though.

We run Matomo on a self-hosted server for all our websites and it works very well, there's a large discrepancy between the traffic / visitor count shown by Cloudflare and Matomo though: Matomo will show 50-80 % less unique visitors than Cloudflare, which seems a lot even when accounting for ad-blocking users. It might be due to our very user-friendly cookie script though, which only loads Matomo after the user explicitly clicks on OK (and he/she can click on "Decline" as well). Guess we should investigate how many people actually click on "Decline".

https://simpleanalytics.io just launched and is exactly that!

Hi, founder here. I just created a tool that does exactly that: Simple Analytics. I’m very happy this gets more attention in the analytics space. I’m not saying I’m the best but I’m trying to start a movement toward a change in the analytics world. If there is anything I should do better, please let me know.

Nice work! How's it going so far?

Pretty good. It’s my first official launch, so very new for me. But I do get a few customers every day. I will write about it soon and announce that on my Twitter @harianus.

I run https://www.improvely.com and https://www.w3counter.com. Been doing this since before Google Analytics existed.

MixPanel is the biggie for user tracking during entire app lifecycle. But it can be $$$$. And you can miss out on collecting your own valuable data.

If you are writing your own web servers and request handlers at the outset. Then you can structure your log file data as required. And use the ELK stack to process very powerful queries, business analytics, predictive machine learning, sentiment analysis, etc.

https://www.elastic.co/products

I’ve used gaug.es for years. Their API is great and they’re affordable. https://get.gaug.es

We switched to https://usefathom.com/ last week, happy so far.

I've heard Snowplow is good. I think it's self-hosted so it's likely more complicated to setup than a complete solution like Google Analytics. But then Google doesn't get the data.

https://github.com/snowplow/snowplow

https://github.com/snowplow/snowplow-javascript-tracker

Snowplow is really hard to set up and manage but I'd say its the best tool in this space if you want to self manage.

+1. Not easy to setup if you have little cloud experience, but once you have it running, it works really well. I have a fast setup for the ones who like containers and Kubernetes: https://github.com/pacuna/snowplow-pipeline

There aren't many out there that do similar stuff, but if you're looking to try something new https://simpleanalytics.io is working pretty well thus far.

Anything I can run server side to reduce the amount of JS that has to be injected?

Good question though. I think I want to implement server side, as long as it does not track user though.

Note: I’m the creator of Simple Analytics.

There's goaccess[0] which you might find useful.

[0] https://goaccess.io/

Snowplow Analytics has server side trackers among several others.

Depends what you want to do. With MixPanel you get a much deeper insight into your product and your users. The analysis you can do like retention, funnels etc exceeds the capabilities of GA.

Note: I am biased, I work at Mixpanel.

If you are into web but also want to expand to mobile and desktop in the future, check Countly. Open source and can be deployed on prem, too.

No analytics.

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