Ask HN: Any Alternatives to Google Analytics?
Any alternatives to Google Analytics do you know / use?
The main startup alternatives are Mixpanel, Amplitude, and Heap. All three are unicorns or are close to being a unicorn. The main issue with GA is it's focused on analyzing pageviews. While you are able to get a lot of information from what pages people are viewing, very little of it is actionable. Mixpanel pioneered the idea of "event-based tracking" where you instrument the actions you care about and run reports over them. This let's you more complex reports like, of after a user sign up, after N months, how many of them are still signing in. Or, how does the conversion rate from users on the free trial differ based on location of the user.
The main enterprise alternative is Adobe Analytics, formerly known as Omniture. Pretty much every really large business that uses an analytics product uses Adobe. IIRC, the minimum price you will be quoted for Adobe is around $100k.
Besides using an end-to-end analytics solution, the other alternative is to use multiple services together. For this approach people will use a tool for data collection such as Segment or Freshpaint (disclaimer, I'm the founder of Freshpaint) to instrument their website. They will send the data from their data collection tool to a data warehouse such as Snowflake, BigQuery, or Redshift. Then they will use a tool such as Looker or Tableau to visualize the data in their data warehouse.
Thread on Indiehacker, some great answers there.
My choice is https://plausible.io.
Check them out. Many are better and faster.
The best ones I found - usertrack.net , gaotcounter, plausible,
Self-hosted (PHP/MySQL) open-core product. Also hosted version available.
userTrack is mostly a self-hosted alternative to Google Analytics and Hotjar (heatmaps/session recordings). It also allows for easy A/B testing.
I am the author, ask me anything :)
I looked a bit into adding Postgres as an option, but it takes some time to recreate the schemas and queries and maintain both DB options. Being on MySQL also makes it a lot easier to install on DigitalOcean, using the LAMP image.
Why would you prefer to have Postgres over MySQL? Is it because you are used to Postgres or because of performance considerations?
I think it's fine as long as I can get it running on MariaDB 10+ and PHP 7.5 without issues.
I'm interested in a clarification on "Track unlimited websites on one dashboard." - does this software phone home or lock itself down? I usually scale out rather than up, including for personal projects, so "one dashboard" might be running across multiple machines.
It means that there is one overview page, where you can see last 14 days graphs, 24hours visitors count and number of live visitors for all the websites tracked at once.
> does this software phone home or lock itself down
I am not sure what this means. Currently there is no domain lock, so you can install multiple dashboards on multiple servers. The only "phone home" that it does was recently added, and it just checks the userTrack server for version updates in order to offer one-click updates of the platform.
> usually scale out rather than up
I understand. From what I heard from existing users, performance is really good with userTrack, there are users who get 300k+ monthly sessions on cheap server and performance is good. That being said, the current license allows you to install userTrack on multiple servers (that you own). The only drawback, as mentioned in the first point, is that you will lose the ability to easily see all stats in one place or switch between domain stats in the dashboard.
What is the scale you are expecting to use userTrack at (1k MAU, 100K MAU, 1M+ MAU) ?
Is it possible to turn off one click updates completely? I deploy as an immutable application container (I do the same for Wordpress; uploads are written to object storage and database is separate, the actual underlying code "can't change").
I never tested such setup, as a single server can handle a lot of traffic and don't have yet any enterprise client (that I know of) which has performance issues.
Server-side analytics, upsell tool (script interactions on your website), and bot protection all rolled into one.
We're happy to answer questions (see profile) and we'd love to get insight into your decision process.
We were not aware of Shibboleth single sign-on before we launched, and someone noted the name collision on our Show HN thread. If many people are confused about this, we would certainly consider a different name. The development team wanted a non-generic name (e.g. CAPTCHA), and naming has proved a challenge for us, so if you have any suggestions, please let us know.
For enterprise Adobe comes to mind but that's super $$$$$$$