Ask HN: Best alternatives to Google Analytics in 2021?
I don't like the new GA interface. It's hard to do simple things like display full-urls when you serve multiple subdomains.
What alternatives do you like and why?
What alternatives do you like and why?
Inspired by Plausible, I recently launched Fugu (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.
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.
See https://github.com/rraval/zeroindexed/tree/master/packages/t...
The blog explains expanded motivation: https://zeroindexed.com/privacy
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.
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.
It is a real shame. I went to Plausible because they had posted on here, and I'm all for supporting people that show up on HN and seem to be decent human beings. They did not reply to my Tweet to them, I only got support through e-mail, which they weren't that quick about. I'm bummed because the software seemed to be what I wanted, but they've lost my trust now.
@dang - any ideas on this one?
The issue with Plausible's server: I didn't want to put it out there because then they get the fix for their commercial product for free after I spent the time doing all the work for them, but I feel like the same bug might actually exist all over the Web, so I'm going to write it up and post it online.
Yeah, no. So far, you only say there's a bug in their server configuration that prevents logging in some cases. I self host plausible and I'd be very much interested in what misconfiguration I could have triggered.
Is it a TCP pool connection problem ? A pre-flight request thing ? Wrong CORS headers ?
On one hand you could be doing FUD, on the other there is a gunfoot problem that could impact self hosters but the knowledge doesn't come out.
I suppose it's a problem that can be pinpoint from the outside, without knowing the proxy stack running at plausible so it should be observable with HTTP sniffer/wireshark.
I didn't feel I was being unreasonable asking for free use of their product for a year (after which I would obviously have to pay), for a web app I am writing which currently has practically zero traffic. As bug bounties go, it wasn't a bad deal I thought.
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.
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.
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.
Is that what your service Fugu aims to achieve?
EDIT: You absolutely can! https://plausible.io/self-hosted-web-analytics
User journey, heatmap, filter by users that took several events?
That's the only full featured open source competitor I am aware of, so it should be mentioned.
https://snowplowanalytics.com/
Somewhat FOSS. There was a story there, but I don't remember the details.
If you don't need much, plausible.io is decent but very low on details.
Cloudflare seems to offer the same amount of data as Plausible, unblockable, and with no JS to load [especially if you pay $20 for the better analytics], but I don't know what data they lose by browsers that cache dns queries etc.
Funnels and A/B testing is not (see: https://plugins.matomo.org/).
Now it is built, and is available forever.
The author seems to have the same itch when went to create this product: https://www.goatcounter.com/why
This isn't for everyone, I'm super comfortable doing this because of familiarity with all the components. But there's no out of the box dashboard for this so you have to replicate the UI parts you value. At least with Grafana once done you're in control of it and you own it.
I prefer server logs from the edge for their completeness. There are things missing... I.e. client side knowledge of screen sizes and device types. But server logs are so much more complete than client side JavaScript from third parties that are frequently adblocked.
Plus, I think the vast majority of companies overestimate the importance of the data they collect. Maybe there's some interesting insights buried in GA but if you aren't actually using them what difference does it make.
I respect my site's visitors so I use a monitoring system that I personally have no problem being tracked by. I block GA in Firefox so why should I subject my visitors to it?
* it's open source
* you can self host as a docker container
* you can log from the client side or from the server side
* awesome founders with HN accounts :P
It's basically a real time website log analyser which gives you enough information to know whats happening on your website but doesn't require any pesky Javascript etc to do it.
Also since it is works by analysing your log files it can never be blocked.
If I try to process my server logs directly I either need to manually filter out bots, which are the majority of traffic, or I need to use some sort of collaboratively maintained bot identification system. Alternatively, I can use any of the services people are mentioning here and they will do that for me.
This is because goaccess aggregates reports to single HTML file. If you give it a year of logs, it compresses whole year in one graph. It didn't seem to have interactive way to explore whole year.
Most people don't care and just generate monthly HTML report file, but that has same flaws as yearly file.
CTO and cofounder of Firstparty here, just wanted to mention our trial comes with 1,000,000 events free so if anyone wants to kick the tires it should be free for a long time for projects that don’t do a ton of web traffic, and we would love your feedback.
1. Product analytics on logged in users in a SaaS platform
2. Aggregate analytics on anonymous users with funnel analysis, referral analysis, etc.
Yep, GA being blocked is a major issue. You can use server-side analytics [0] to prevent any JS from being blocked.
[0] https://docs.pirsch.io/get-started/backend-integration/ (I'm the co-founder of it)
Seems similar to Pirsch in terms of cookie less tracking, GDPR / DSGVO compliance, being open source, self-hostable, having a decent UI and API.
To simplify things I am building Raport[1]. Raport integrates metrics from multiple sources (GA, Search Console, Stripe, Adsense) and displays them in clear and simple to use dashboard. It is not an alternative to GA and other tools, but rather works alongside them as an additional interface, where you can view all your data. For me personally Raport saved me a lot of time I spent in GA and Search Console.
I checked out your tool. Looks perfect for my needs but I need do dive a bit deeper to say more. I assume you plan to add more integrations in the future. Have you thought about adding an integration with LinkedIn? That’d be helpful for me.
Our plan is to create integrations for social media platforms next (Facebook, Instagram, Twitter). I do not have experience with LinkedIn, but we'll definitely add it too, if there is data to analyze.
Feel free to explore the app and leave us a feedback if you want.
It can track page views and events, the script is fairly small, is GDPR compliant, and gets out of your way.
A lot of companies claim to be GDPR compliant, and they’re not. We’ll be blogging more about this in the future as we don’t like folks being lied to.
I also switched from Google Analytics this year and happy I did.
It's 90% requests made by bots, so I didn't bother making a UI.
SimpleAnalytics, Fathom, Pirsch and Plausible. They are all very similar from pricing, to display layout. The problem is they dont track returning visitors. Some argue that is against privacy, some think it is acceptable for 30 days period. I remember there was one Analytics from EUR that offer returning visitors stats but again.. Bookmarks on browser is practically useless. So I cant find it anymore.
https://ga-dev-tools.web.app/query-explorer/
Dead simple to create the queries I want and then copy/paste into a spreadsheet.
You can also use the query URLs with the access token to easily get data into Jupyter Notebooks or whatever else you want to use for deeper analysis.
* Simple dashboard
* Displays which:
* businesses are visiting your documentation pages.
* locales they are coming from (geolocation data in aggregate).
* pages are most frequently visited.
Edit: formatting
What do you actually get out of counters like plausible compared to real analytical services?
I consider counters nothing but seeing how many visited and there's pretty much no action to do based on the numbers but stare at it.
Cookie free, API first and open source with a focus on speed. It's not as featured as some of the other well known projects in this area, but it's a work in progress.
No cookies and banners to setup, custom domains, simple UI, share monitors with others, basic custom events support. Just the things that I needed, nothing more. Hope will come useful to somebody else!
It was painless, the ux is clean and polished, and I can see panelbear tracking 5% greater visits over the same time period as GA due likely to people who had adblocked GA.
Less UI clutter is nice also for colleagues.
No cookies, GDPR compliant, simple interface
It is cookie-less, so no opt in is required in EU.
And off course you could have a look at goaccess. It’s parsing your access-logs and generates some nice metrics-dashboard. https://goaccess.io/
No cookies, open-source core, GDPR compliant, nice UI, and an extensive API.
What really is the major gain to a big third party analytics platform when you really just need to know how somebody moves through your site, what the hot and cold paths are, and what influences retention and revisits?
I’m Jack Ellis, the cofounder of https://usefathom.com. We’re a two person, self-funded company from Canada. Our software is used in projects by companies like IBM, GitHub, Tuple, Tailwind and lots of other awesome companies.
You shouldn’t use Fathom if you flinch at $14/m for a highly available service. We’re self-funded, priced to be sustainable long term, and we don’t guess on privacy law.
Recently, we launched a feature called EU Isolation following the Schrems II ruling (where Max Schrems sued Facebook). Long story short, if you’re using analytics and are passing your EU website visitors personal data (IP & User agent) to US-controlled cloud servers (even if they’re located in the EU), you’re violating the GDPR. Well with Fathom, we use both EU infrastructure and US infrastructure, but we automatically route all your EU visitors through German-owned infrastructure, and hash all personal data there, meaning your EU website visitors personal data will NEVER touch our core US infrastructure. This approach was put together with our Canadian and EU lawyers, and hasn’t been seen before in the analytics space. Lots of companies run on “EU servers”, but they’re controlled by US cloud providers and subject to FISA. This means they’re not GDPR compliant.
We don’t guess on legal matters, and we don’t cheap out on infrastructure. The lawyers we invest in work with some of the world’s largest companies, and they’re a big budget item for us. We run our infrastructure across multiple availability zones and invest heavily in serverless infrastructure. If you compare Fathom against most privacy-first analytics providers, you’ll see our uptime is uncontested. It costs us more, yes, but keeping our customers’ analytics reliable is of crucial importance to us. We run only on managed services, as we want experts (like some of the DevOps folk on here) maintaining it for us, and we stick to our strength (building our application).
With our custom domain solution (to bypass adblockers), we handle automatic SSL for you and serve your website visitors from a CDN, keeping things really fast.
We’ve also recently launched multi-domain, which is super powerful for holding multiple domains under a single dashboard (something the OP was speaking about). Especially since you can also then utilize our API to generate custom reports.
We’re going from strength to strength, and we’re the best option for folks who need GDPR compliance. We are also based in Canada, so we have adequacy ruling under the GDPR.
Hope this post is helpful for anyone who is already wondering about Fathom :)