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coldcode

It would be handy if people listed here all the alternatives that don't steal your customer info.

View on HN

https://usefathom.com/

https://goaccess.io/

https://github.com/NYPL/google-analytics-proxy

http://matomo.org/

https://ackee.electerious.com/

https://www.goatcounter.com/

https://count.ly/

I gave many of these a visit.

fathom - Looks great. I am OK with closed source products (my motivation is self-hosting/privacy) but the direction is not clear to me. Maybe they will have a blog about it at some point - https://github.com/usefathom/fathom/issues/268. Having multiple code bases is going to be super hard.

goaccess.io - this analyses web logs

google-analytics-proxy - project is dead

matomo - this is what i use now and it works great. has a lot of quirks but if you spend some time, you can make it work.

ackee, goatcounter - simple but looks like this does not track users/sessions. it's mostly for page hits.

countly - looks good if you are enterprise. there is no pricing :(

freshlytics (from another thread) - page says it's in beta and not production ready

GoatCounter author here: doing some form of session tracking is on the roadmap; check back in a few months. The project is still quite new, with the first "real" release only being last week :-)

As for Fathom, I find that last "since that people are confused"-comment rather funny, since their messaging on this has been confused for almost a year, haha

Will do! I am already following your project :)

Building https://sdan.io/pingpong. We're dedicated to building the fastest client-side load analytics engine available. If you want to stay in the loop on how development is going please do so! https://forms.gle/MhojBWWfdiWjZatC7

- Simpleanalytics[0] (also commented elsewhere in this thread)

- Goatcounter also came up a few days ago on HN and got a lot of traction/discussion[1]

I can't find the comment it was posted in, but a HN user did a good comparison of a few privacy-focused analytics tools[2]

[0] https://simpleanalytics.com/

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22044854

[2] https://dev.to/hmhrex/a-comparison-of-the-top-3-privacy-focu...

Edit: I found the OG comment for the blog post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21716544

If you're using WordPress, there is https://wordpress.org/plugins/koko-analytics/. Open-source, self hosted, no external services & very performant.

I think including prices in this list would significantly improve it.

Or just use server log analytics. Client-side analytics are a significant contributor to the proliferation of JavaScript bloat and unnecessary 3rd party cookies.

I've been surprised lately by how much more pleasant, readable and usable the news/blog-web is with JavaScript turned off. JavaScript is basically just used for the user-hostile ad-tech.

I've been wondering about this recently: perhaps we'd actually be better off with simpler browsers that did less so that the websites would do less?

I've been thinking the same thing, and started[0] experimenting[1] with some ideas. I think it be fun to make a web browser that implements a few HTML tags, flexbox and a few other CSS primitives (no animations), and no JS. Sites that are compatible with it would still work on current browsers.

[0] https://anderspitman.net/19/#netcatable

[1] https://anderspitman.net/17/#curlable

It's why I'm somewhat against WASM, even though it's very cool from a technical standpoint. It makes the web even more of an operating system, where I'd like it to be less.

I recently found https://text.npr.org/ (linked down in the footer of the main NPR site) and it made me very happy.

You automatically get that if you visit them from the EU and decline tracking, it’s amazing :)

Agreed if you're already self-hosting. However, I don't know of a JS-free solution if you're hosting on a 3rd party like GitHub pages or Netlify for example.

(Netlify does sell access to log data but it looks expensive for most hobby / personal sites)

You can probably use the "tracking pixel" method with at least some analytics tools. This is a very old which probably predates even the invention of JavaScript.

Basically, if it accepts a GET with query parameters, it should work.

Right, but don't you still need to own a server in order to log these GET requests?

You can do it with one of the hosted services. I don't know which ones support it exactly, but GoatCounter does (although it's kind of an undocumented feature until I merge PR #122).

Cool, I saw GoatCounter on HN a few days ago. I've looked into ways to get a user count without JS and without paying for hosting, but no luck yet. If you find out what free services support it I'd love to know.

Well, GoatCounter does :-)

But any service that sends something like "GET example.com/collect?path=/foo" can be loaded with an <img>. It's perhaps not an explicitly documented feature, but it will still work :-)

Perfect! I'll give it a go :)

Depending on which solution you use; some of them are just a few KB, which is not so much.

Doing log-analysis has its own drawbacks: not everyone has access to them, bot traffic will be a lot higher, and certain information is hard to access (like screen size). You can't always "just" use it.

https://simpleanalytics.com/

Disclaimer: I am the founder of RudderStack (https://github.com/rudderlabs/rudder-server)

With our open-source data collection framework like RudderStack (an alternative to Segment), dumping data into a warehouse (Redshift/BigQuery/Druid etc) and sticking another open-source visualization layer on top (e.g. like SuperSet), it is possible to put together an alternative to Google Analytics. One of our early users did it and we wrote a blog about it

https://rudderstack.com/blog/open-source-analytics/

Or roll your own: https://www.pcmaffey.com/roll-your-own-analytics

https://github.com/sheshbabu/freshlytics

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