Ask HN: Good open source alternatives to Google Analytics? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Good open source alternatives to Google Analytics?

333 pointsTekMol150 comments

Are there good alternatives for Google Analytics which you can easily host yourself?

PostHog: https://github.com/PostHog/posthog if you want to deploy it yourself and https://posthog.com if you want the SaaS.

I was using Avodocs (https://www.avodocs.com) to produce a privacy policy for our MLOps platform, https://iko.ai, but they didn't have PostHog in the list for the "Analytics" section, and they assumed that doing analytics implied sending user data to a third party site or something.

I tweeted at them and they were lightning fast in reaching out and adding PostHog to the options of the the privacy policy template. It's really cool: https://twitter.com/jugurthahadjar/status/144733750656389120...

+1 for PostHog!

Regarding PostHog: If am a Startup & still running my beta product, $1500 per month is very expensive for managed service. They should charge it by number of API requests. Then I can start using this and naturally grow into the product. I really do not have bandwidth to self host when I am busy solving core customer problem.

Click the "Cloud" option. Free to 1M events.

I'm not affiliated with PostHog nor am I privy to their internal tradeoffs; I therefore can't comment on how they should charge. However, their self hosting modality is rather straightforward: it's a docker-compose. It takes a few minutes to set up and mostly just works.

We need to include high availability, disaster recovery, managing db, security & other good stuff if we need to run in production. This is where managed services excel. I do not want to do all these if I am in early stage of a startup.

And we can find alternative open-source projects to Posthog here https://www.libhunt.com/PostHog/posthog.

In fact, we can find alternatives to most of the popular GitHub projects on LibHunt. All you need to do is open a GitHub repo and replace "github" with "libhunt" within the URL. Disclosure: LibHunt is a project I work on.

> In fact, we can find alternatives to most of the popular GitHub projects on LibHunt

How does it compare to alternativeto?

LibHunt is focussed on open-source projects only. It's primarily based on common mentions from around the web.

On the other hand, SaaSHub (another project I work on) is a direct competitor to AlternativeTo

Side question. Posthog describes an event pipeline. Is there a saas/open source server with event pipelines where you can do add logic to do things, like: send email, notifications, send api call, maybe add custom logic etc. Ive seen things like segment.io, but didn't find a straightforward solution.

Example: - if a user finished three workouts, send this notification. - if a user hasn't done a workout in a week remind them etc.

As far as I know, PostHog uses ClickHouse, Redis, and Kafka among other things.

https://posthog.com/docs/self-host/architecture

From the use cases you're describing, you might want to check out https://customer.io

There is a minimal setup of Posthog with postgres and redis, if I'm not mistaken. The default setup is geared towards large scale deployments.

Edit: The base docker compose is: https://github.com/PostHog/posthog/blob/master/docker-compos...

Customer.io seems closest!

Nobody else does this, I have like 100's of transactional use cases: - Trial almost ending - New signup - CC expired - Reminders, confirmations - Workouts affirmation, reminder etc.

etc.

A pain to write a proper rule system and keep overview in own application.

The challenge is not the simple emails / notifications. But to combine it with more complicated rules, and and + time conditinos

I have the events already in the system, would love to transfer them and have a stable UI / where I can add, create pause etc.

PostHog released plugins recently (posthog.com/plugins) - these let you trigger webhooks in other systems based on realtime events that have taken place (as well as exporting/importing data/transformations etc).

You just write a few lines of TypeScript in the platform (avg LOC is something like 80) - see https://posthog.com/docs/plugins/build. There are a bunch prebuilt too.

Disclaimer: I work there

Potentially Mautic, I can’t think of any other open source marketing automation tools.

If you write your data into a data warehouse or clickhouse you could use something like https://hightouch.io/

We created a one-click deploy for Posthog if you want to kick the tires: https://render.com/docs/deploy-posthog.

More OSS analytics tools here: https://render.com/docs/docker#analytics-and-business-intell...

I wrote two articles about this for LWN last year. Several of them are self-hostable. Summary:

https://lwn.net/Articles/822568/: lightweight options: GoatCounter and Plausible (open source), Simple Analytics and Fathom (closed)

https://lwn.net/Articles/824294/: more alternatives: Matomo and Open Web Analytics (fairly heavyweight but both open source), Countly (open core), Snowplow Analytics (open source but enterprise roll-your-own product), GoAccess (open source; analyzes web server logs)

I've been a Snowplow user for nearly a decade. It's a bit of work to set up, but it's the best engineered of all those options.

Snowplow's JSON schema events and contexts give you complete flexibility to define a data model that suits your business. Combined with DBT and a BI tool, like Apache Superset, it's vastly more capable than Google Analytics. We have clients running Google Analytics 360 that can't do the stuff we're able to with Snowplow.

I've also used Snowplow fairly heavily (several years ago). It's good for big stuff where you need lots of control and data customization, but it's significantly overkill if you just want basic analytics for your blog or small business website.

For sure... Bit overkill for that unless you're using Snowplow mini. A good rule of thumb to decide on Snowplow is whether you're considering GA 360.

What do you use to visualise the data you collect with Snowplow?

I think folks forget that a significant part of the value from GA is how it presents the data in an easy to understand manner for non technical users.

We use Superset and R markdown reports mostly.

It's quite common for us to rely on Snowplow as a source of truth, but use GA for quick exploration. Certain reports in GA are setup so nicely, like "navigation summary" and the more intuitive session definition for marketing. And while Snowplow is real time, there's no effective way to see the same reports as produced by GA.

Hi, Great to hear your views on Snowplow. Cheers, Eddie

Fathom started as an open source project and then closed- when called on it one of the cofounders got extremely hostile and lied about saying it would stay open (then blocked people who shared the screenshots).

Plausible on the other hand has been really engaged with the community on their Github Discussion board.

ahh that upsets me, i proposed and implemented it for a client about 6 months ago

> Matomo

Google may sometimes disable AdWords campaigns on sites that use Matomo. They "fix" it every once in a while when Matomo devs reach out to them, but the problem returns after a few months each time.

https://forum.matomo.org/t/adwords-campaign-rejected-for-goo...

Makes me think Matomo's doing something right

Yes but also if you want to reach people you can't "side" with them or you will be losing business. That's the power of the monopolies for you.

> google assistance told me that “you need to remove the Matomo javascript as it is a malware”

so Google wants Google Analytics to never be threatened for marketshare.

A great sign that the free analytics service offered by the advertising company should not be trusted.

Google analytics is only used for advertising purposes if you have that setting is enabled for that website.

Is this the case only on the site it is configured in this manner? Or are you saying that Google analytics data is not collected or used on the site with this setting disabled, but that data from the site with the setting disabled may still be used for advertising purposes on other sites?

Sorry if my phrasing is strained, as I was trying to be precise but it may have impacted readability.

Maybe reading Google's support article for it will help.

https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/9626162?hl=en&re...

> Google may sometimes disable AdWords campaigns on sites that use Matomo.

I first used Matomo to monitor users webapp experience, it was amazingly simple to set up, good privacy protection/anonymisation, and perfect for insights on workflow patterns.

You're mixing analytics and counters.

For example, GoatCounter, Plausible and GoAccess do nothing but count and there's nothing you gain as actionable intels.

I use plausible for my very low traffic side project, mostly because it's easy to host yourself and free if you do so.

https://github.com/plausible/analytics

I'm really into Plausible. I use their hosted version, and I really like their approach to privacy - it doesn't even use cookies, which means it doesn't trigger the need for an ugly GDPR cookie banner in the EU.

I also like plausible - low cost for a low traffic site, but without all the more intrusive tracking/features that google has. I use it on about a dozen sites I develop/maintain.

Also has a self-hosted option which is 'free', but you need to pay to host it someplace. I just pay them instead.

+1 on that.

We are using it on sites that generate between 15 and 100k monthly views [1], and it works flawlessly!

Also has a super easy API to add custom events (gone is the nightmare of configuring it in GTM)

[1] https://devitjobs.us and others

Thank you!

I'm the maintainer of the project and it's so heartwarming to see it being recommended on this forum.

All the projects mentioned here are great. What I think sets Plausible apart is that we've managed to create a profitable business around a 100% AGPL-licensed codebase (i.e. no dual-license for enterprise version). This means we can keep investing into the product and adding new features without being in the 'thankless OSS maintainer' role that so often ends in burnout.

We're currently working on importing historical data from Google Analytics into Plausible[1] which should make switching even easier for many folks. Stay tuned.

1. https://github.com/plausible/analytics/pull/1466

I know that it's not a support channel here, but I set up plausible on my blog (rmpr.xyz) was very happy with it, decided to pay for one year. The thing is, when I try to pay, it says my bank refused the transaction (when I pay on other websites like Amazon) it's perfectly fine. And one thing I should note is that I'm charged then refunded a bit later, I don't know if the problem is my bank or your transaction provider. Thank you for such an amazing Product, easy to use and without overhead at all. Kudos to you

hi! we use Paddle for all the payments. i've sent an email to them now to see if they can tell us more. in majority of cases when transactions fails because the bank refuses the transaction they tell us to tell you to contact your bank or to try a different payment method. will get back to you with their response.

(the second Plausible cofounder)

Another huge plausible fan here! I pay for the hosted version but the option to self host in the future is really nice.

I've been using plausible like 8 months now, i very like it!

I also recommend Plausible, I am a happy customer for maybe over one year. It is lightweight and easy to use interface at a great price.

I use it on https://allaboutberlin.com, which has medium traffic.

Plausible is enough for most, but it doesn't track as much as Google Analytics. It's enough to know which content works, but not enough to understand your users' behaviour.

However removing the cookie banner is a great UX improvement, and respecting your users' privacy is what you ought to do.

I'd also add that the maintainers were nothing short of excellent, and took care of two tickets I opened before.

I installed Plausible a few hours ago on my VPS. The installation process when very smooth and it gives me the data I'm interested in. I really did not want to use Google Analytics, and since I have some capacity left on my server, Plausible seemed like a good bet.

The standard recommendation is https://matomo.org/. I’ve used it in production once (when it was called Piwik) and it seemed reasonable, but I’m not sure how it stacks up right now.

Thanks, I will take a look at it.

We use matomo right now. Querying is a bit tougher (no instantaneous segments), but I find that it works fine for most of our use cases.

We use their hosted version.

Matomo is also dead-simple to develop plugins for. So if you're looking at a product that can be customized beyond simple analytics, Matomo is a great choice.

I also used it a lot back when it was Piwik and the biggest issue was that it is backed by a MySQL database, and the way the reporting engine was designed meant that it would get pretty slow to work with custom date ranges with large volumes of data. But it did support caching and would pre-build reports over certain date ranges (by day, by month, by week, MtD, YtD).

A company I used to work for used Piwik and that's what I was going to suggest - I didn't realise it was now called Matomo.

Currently using a single instance of Matomo for all of my sites, it's pretty good!

Doesn't take too much resources, the UI is pleasant, the functionality is everything that i'd expect from a lightweight analytics solution like Plausible plus bunches of additional stuff in regards to enriching the data (e.g. events, information about devices and software, even performance data in the latest releases).

My only concerns so far are that if i try to open the aggregate view of all of my website data in the past month (<20 sites, most popular of has 50k views i think) the CPU usage for both the main instance and the DB behind it spike for a while, which makes me think that the code underneath has either an N+1 problem, or there's inefficient data aggregation going on. I mean, if Zabbix can show me data about a dozen servers in a single view, why can't Matomo do something similar without sometimes throwing errors?

Apart from that nitpick, it's also pretty reasonable as far as GDPR goes (there's a whole section of tools for it) - currently i don't even use cookies for tracking (a global toggle in the options is available, as well as config for individual sites), anonymize the IP addresses but have a GeoIP database set up (for free) that let's me figure out the approximate location and still get the device info which is enough to give me insights into who uses my sites and what screen resolutions etc. i should target.

Overall, i'm really pleased with my choice of Matomo!

Now, on the other end of things, i also think that most projects out there should have an APM solution of sorts, for which i use another piece of free software, Apache Skywalking, which is a bit more cumbersome, but still powerful and also Zabbix for server/VPS monitoring overall. It's really nice that we can set something like that up entirely for free (hosting costs aside).

As I predicted around 2018, most or all analytics/events products will eventually move to ClickHouse or related technology (forks).

Plausible: ClickHouse

PostHog: ClickHouse

Panbelbear: Clickhouse

https://pirsch.io/: ClickHouse.

PD: I should have a blog or something where I put this predicts :)

What is ClickHouse and why do all projects move to it?

https://clickhouse.com/

ClickHouse is an extremely fast SQL data warehouse that supports vectorized query execution, column storage, and efficient compression. It's also Apache 2.0 licensed and sets up on a dev laptop in about 60 seconds. The SQL is somewhat ideosyncratic (in a good way, I believe). It takes some experience to use it to its full capabilities.

Not all projects move there but if you want fast analytic queries on a few billion rows up to a few petabytes, it's really hard to beat.

Disclaimer: I work for Altinity, which supports ClickHouse.

ClickHouse is not good for updates and deletion, so if you want general storage of data, stick to RDBMS.

Analytics are typically append only, so ClickHouse works order of magnitude faster than RDBMS.

https://www.goatcounter.com/

I switched to goat counter recently and I’m happy with it. It’s not exactly an open source alternative to Google Analytics, because it’s more privacy oriented. If you want to track and profile your audience, it’s probably not what you want. I just want to get traffic numbers by page, though, so it’s perfect. They even support a hit counter pixel instead of adding a script tag if you want even more minimal, privacy-friendly stats.

> They even support a hit counter pixel instead of adding a script

Or putting the pixel in a noscript tag lets you have some stats when JS is disabled.

Huh, the UI seems refreshingly lightweight and boring! Feels very much like the first time i saw Kanboard and was surprised at how minimalistic and snappy it felt in comparison to something like Jira: https://kanboard.org/

(well, most software probably feels more snappy than Jira, but Kanboard was also amazing)

GoatCounter has been the answer for me, and I love it.

I have been building a self-hosted analytics platform[0] (note that it's not free or open-source, just partially source-available) that is focused on the ease of self-hosting. It is most similar to Matomo but with a better performance, simpler UI and with features that they only provide in their paid plans.

I used simple technologies (MySQL/PHP) for performance and portability reasons and, compared to other self-hosted alternatives, it provides features that you can only find on expensive SaaS product-analytics platforms (heatmaps,session recordings,ab tests, etc.).

Let me know if you have any questions about UXWizz or self-hosting in general.

[0]: https://www.uxwizz.com/

Looks like a great tool! Questions: I think you might be based in the Netherlands(?), how does UXWizz conform to European laws of privacy? I see that it tracks IP addresses, is that legal? How does it handle cases where people don't respond or opt out of eu cookie consent?

Thanks!

> Looks like a great tool!

Thanks! I spent over 8 years working on it, I am still improving it :)

There is a page regarding privacy here: https://docs.uxwizz.com/about/personal-data-information

> I see that it tracks IP addresses, is that legal

My specific instance of UXWizz does not track IP addresses (you can disable that in the tracking settings), but only a hash of the IP+User Agent.

As for the privacy laws regarding tracking IP addresses, it's not very clear whether it requires consent or not as the law is ambiguous. The IP itself alone can not be directly considered personally identifiable information (PII) as having an IP address only, can not define which real person is the data associated with. Another thing to consider regarding IP addresses is that by default almost all services/servers/devices have an access log that does store IP addresses in plain text, so even if UXWizz does not store the IP, your OS/server/router/ISP might do.

> where people don't respond or opt out of eu cookie consent

As explained in the documentation above, UXWizz does not use any cross-session persistent storage on the user's system (not cookies nor localStorage). Also, being self-hosted, no data is shared with/sent to 3rd parties.

If you need more detailed answers or want a deeper discussion on this subject you can contact me on Twitter or via the contact form on uxwizz.com.

Thanks for feedback, will contact if I have more info. Again it looks great and seems to be super fast.

> it looks great seems to be super fast

Thanks. I tried to optimize it as much as possible (mostly MySQL optimizations). All the data shown in the dashboard is generated on-the-fly in real-time (no archives/cached results). It's hosted on a cheap VPS in Germany (5EUR/month).

The performance does degrade a bit when your database reaches 20 million+ sessions tracked, but for the average website receiving <100k monthly visits it should be fast.

> As for the privacy laws regarding tracking IP addresses, it's not very clear whether it requires consent or not as the law is ambiguous. The IP itself alone can not be directly considered personally identifiable information (PII) as having an IP address only, can not define which real person is the data associated with.

"PII" has a specific meaning, in American law. Sites with references to it are likely not relevant to you, as you are based in Romania. The GDPR is crystal clear that IP addresses are personal data. There is no ambiguity. Depending on how you derive the hash of the IP and user agent, this could also be an "identifier" that may be personal data.

But! There are six different reasons you can legally process personal data. Consent is only one of them. It is quite likely that a website owner would have a valid legitimate interest basis for having analytics. This does not require consent from the user.

The only caveat to that; is that if the analytics needs a cookie (or local or session storage item) then you must seek consent for the cookie.

https://panelbear.com/ isn’t open source but privacy friendly. I found it on HN (the founder is on here), can’t speak more highly of it. If you are tracking more than one site and want to get a good overview I recommend it.

Panelbear is truly great. I moved crontab.guru to panelbear in October and I’ve been extremely happy. The site does millions of page views a month but the analytics are still fast and responsive.

crontab.guru is really amazing

Does it advice on systemd timer jobs too?

I'm using https://umami.is for 5 sites. I also tried https://ackee.electerious.com/ but didn't like it.

Now I would probably try https://plausible.io/

While not focused on OSS, this was asked 20 days ago at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29662859 as "Ask HN: Best alternatives to Google Analytics in 2021?". It listed some OSS versions there.

I use umami. Its lightweight and doesnt have too many dependencies.

https://umami.is/docs/features

There is also goatcounter with a slightly uglier UI but it does its job well and consumes even less RAM than umami

+1 for Umami. Easy to setup and lightweight UI. With the provided Docker Compose, it's up and running in less than 5 min.

i've tried this for a high volume site, but since all events are stored in normal RDBMS, it gets slower [1][2]. it works well for low-traffic site though.

[1] https://github.com/mikecao/umami/issues/592

[2] https://github.com/mikecao/umami/discussions/909

Another vote for Plausible, I pay for the hosted version as I like to support their way of doing things but I know people who self-host it and it's not hard to do.

https://simpleanalytics.com is what I use on all my sites and I love it

https://www.goatcounter.com

I've been very happy with goatcounter as well.

If you're looking for self-hosted the repo is here: https://github.com/arp242/goatcounter

https://goaccess.io/ is nice, analyzes the logfiles instead of requiring it be added to the pages.

It's much simpler, though. You get aggregate stats on who is sending you requests, which is useful but not what people have come to expect from "product oriented analytics."

Using a middle-man proxy for GA is an interesting idea I've seen. GA can take input from the backend, rather than the frontend, if you wish. So you could do some tokenizing/removal/etc of sensitive data, like IP addresses, but still use GA for it's reporting strengths.

Edit: The GA api does allow for things like overriding the geolocation such that if you aren't sending the IP address, there's still relevant geo data to report on.

I have an indie project called Fugu (https://fugu.lol). Fugu is an open-source (https://github.com/shafy/fugu) and privacy-friendly product analytics. If you're looking strictly for web analytics, it might not be a good fit.

It's still an early version, but basic things like tracking events with properties, and analzying those, work very well. I'm currently working on adding conversion funnels. It's free to self-host, and I provide a managed version for $9/month flat.

I've started Fugu because I wanted a product analytics software that is privacy-first (e.g., no possibility of tracking unique users), open-source and simple. I liked using PostHog but it got too fancy, complex and convoluted for my taste - a common theme among analytics software in my experience.

If you're looking for a pure web analytics solution, I can absolutely recommend Plausible (https://plausible.io). I also use it for my static page at Fugu.

Edit: Added GitHub repo link.

Snowplow, also open source, has a comparison of a bunch of other open source analytics products for different functions:

https://snowplowanalytics.com/blog/2021/01/05/the-top-14-ope...

As an FYI, Snowplow recently launched its Open Source Quick Start, a set of terraform modules, which automates the setting up & deployment of the required infrastructure & applications for an operational Snowplow open source pipeline, with just a handful of input variables required on your side. Read more at https://docs.snowplowanalytics.com/docs/open-source-quick-st... Cheers, Eddie

Thanks, that’s good to know.

You're welcome. Hit me up if you want any other info. Cheers, Eddie

I've made an end-to-end encrypted web analytics SaaS. No need to host it yourself, your data is visible only by you.

Partially open-source at https://github.com/chiffre-io, with the aim of publishing it all in Q1 2022.

https://chiffre.io

As stated by others already, there's Plausible (plausible.io) and Matomo (matomo.org).

I have used both and stuck at Plausible. A few reasons (subjective):

1. Plausible is GDPR compliant by default, it has an effective way to measure analytics throughout the day without cookies

2. It is simple and that's key. I don't need to know much, Plausible just gives me that

3. It's fairly lightweight. Matomo is quite heavy and as my VPS'es are pretty much scaled down, less is just more

4. The Plausible self-hosting doc is centered around Docker, which is the architecture I use myself and is set up in literally a few minutes

Disclaimer: Plausible Analytics founder here

I think Matomo is quite similar to Google Analytics which many people feel is bloated and confusing from the user's perspective. The idea with Plausible is to simplify web analytics and make it more understandable compared to what GA/Matomo offer.

Granted, Matomo does have more depth and features in some areas. It can be the better choice if you want to go very deep into analytics and need some power features that Plausible might not support.

We wrote a little (clearly biased) comparison with Matomo[1]. I hope we're not too harsh on it because Matomo is a great project and still a good fit for many people. But obviously we feel like a modern and simplified take on web analytics fits better for the majority of website owners.

1. https://plausible.io/vs-matomo

Have you done a comparison with PostHog? I see a lot of people here recommending them also

PostHog is more focused on product analytics rather than web analytics. It's a very different product to Plausible so we didn't really do a comparison with them. I would say they're more of an alternative to Mixpanel, Amplitude and those type of products rather than an alternative to Google Analytics and other web analytics tools.

(the second Plausible cofounder here)

The most popular on alternativeto.net are: Matomo, Plausible, GoAccess, Open Web Analytics, GoatCounter, etc

https://alternativeto.net/software/google-analytics/

I find it a bit frustrating that most analytics tools does not have support for sending events through api calls. Like in mixpanel where it is possible to send events from backend rather than embedding a js on frontend. Why is it so?

Plausible has an events API that allows you to record pageviews and custom events without JS.

https://plausible.io/docs/events-api

(I'm the cofounder)

GraphJSON supports API calls :) Founder here. If you have questions let me know!

https://docs.graphjson.com/API/logging

Posthog! You can host the analytics yourself or let them host it for you.

I had to ask myself this question some time ago. I decided to build it myself instead. Starting point being the principle that Simple Analytics explained in their blogpost some time ago: if referrer is from the same site, then it's just a visit, otherwise it's a unique visitor. I mixed in some more browser details, also used some blacklist of known bots, and now it's functioning pretty accurately. I don't have the tracking that GA does, but that was exactly the point.

I finally made the switch from GA to Open Web Analytics. I'm already fairly experienced with PHP, which I considered a point in its favor, but I honestly haven't had to do anything with it other than copying it to a server and configuring a few basic settings.

The tracking code seems very lightweight, and I haven't found it lacking any of the features I was using in GA. I've tried a few, and OWA was the first that met all my criteria (100% free software, open source, actually works).

Shameless plug: I wrote a log-based analytics software that you can self-host on an Android phone.

https://github.com/lbrito1/android-analytics

Blog post: https://lbrito1.github.io/blog/2020/07/replacing_google_anal...

https://github.com/nullitics/nullitics

I've slowly been migrating everything to self-hosted Umami, and wrote this overview and setup guide a while back: https://pqvst.com/2021/07/26/self-hosted-analytics-with-umam...

Shynet: https://github.com/milesmcc/shynet

The goal is to provide modern, privacy-friendly, and detailed web analytics that works without cookies or JS. And it's completely open source.

Full disclosure: I am the primary maintainer.

https://plausible.io/self-hosted-web-analytics (https://github.com/plausible/analytics)

Why are most tools for analytics so expensive? Compared to other saas products I find them to be at least. Is there a significant amount of traffic that is the reason? I was thinking about implementing something myself once, but was worried about the cost of receiving all the event traffic.

Because their customers understand the value of the data and are willing to pay for it.

So are you saying that their profit is high or that the cost for running such saas is high?

I'm saying they have a very high profit margin.

Maybe you're underestimating the difficulty of doing it well.

https://counter.dev/

Thanks for mentioning, glad to see counter popping up organically ;-) I'd say what differs us from others is aiming at providing user value for free by aggressively optimizing hosting costs. But you don't need to care about that, it looks great and works and is free. For way over a year now. Cheers

https://kindmetrics.io/ and https://github.com/kindmetrics/kindmetrics

I'm using Ackee (https://github.com/electerious/Ackee) - it doest everything I need it to, you can self-host it and it's quite fast

We used to use Piwik (https://piwik.com/). It is now called Matomo (https://matomo.org/).

https://ackee.electerious.com/ Dead simple to use & to self host, respect privacy of your visitors. Not yet blocked by uBlock Origin BTW

Is there a good reason not to use GA for client side analytics? Is the juice worth the squeeze for a self-hosted/ FOSS solution?

Obvy client side isn't as 100% as looking at the logs, but I've worked with Adobe Analytics and GA (on the free plan) for a few years. UI in GA is much more intuitive to me than Adobe, and I use the tight integration with Google Datastudio pretty often to make reports or slide decks.

Personally I like the well documented GA API to run reports against + python and R API wrappers. For me the only downside is the level of sampling they use. With Adobe Analytics, the API is not as well documented, but they don't sample like GA, but also I wouldn't want to front the Adobe Analytics bill every month for my side projects.

I really liked RudderStack for gathering the data, also has some extra nice features for pushing upstream to other providers. Apache Superset for building the dashboards to display the data.

I think nobody mentioned Ackee https://ackee.electerious.com/

It is cookieless and that makes it really interesting

I use Countly for all my websites and mobile apps, self hosted: https://github.com/Countly

PostHog is the gold standard here. The feature-set goes far beyond GA and essentially replaces a lot of the other tools you may end up needing (FullStory, Amplitude, etc.)

I don't think the replay capability is as well integrated as other SaaS.

Pirsch Analytics: https://pirsch.io

Only the core (golang) is open-source though, so you won't get the dashboard.

Of the answers posted here I am curious if any of them are suitable for mobile (iOS/Android) or desktop (Mac/Windows) apps, or if they are all web-oriented?

Every time this question / topic comes up, I read through the replies and can never find one for Mobile apps. I guess it might be time to start my own.

PostHog has iOS/Android/Flutter/React Native libraries for analytics - full details https://posthog.com/docs/integrate#client-libraries. We don't have session recording / feature flags everywhere yet though (I work there)

Do the PostHog Android and iOS libraries automatically collect & report metrics like OS version & app version so I can easily track how many users are on each version? We're still using Flurry right now but looking for a replacement.

Yep! See [0] for an overview of the properties we automatically collect

[0] https://github.com/PostHog/posthog-ios/blob/8734361939c46647...

Cool, I will check it out. Thanks!

https://www.goatcounter.com/ simple effective visitor counting with a fast golang / postgress solution. easy javascript solution to count actions on a page. GDPR compliant! Just looks a bit spartan.

as a side note - is there something that does not require to install shitload of unnecessary software, databases and services? Let's say simple PHP+MySQL

Yes! Here is my 22 lines of old school php code thrown on a old and unsexy lamp server: https://gist.github.com/mickael-kerjean/289d3d0be8fab2f90e2f...

It has been used for about 3 years with metric tracked directly via sql queries. Today, I got a more fancy dashboard that make graph from the sql queries but that part is optional (my grafana dashboard screenshot: https://ibb.co/S3RTyjm).

After trying a few other analytics tools, it's hard to beat the power of just asking a question in sql

The best alternative is to server side aggregation of visit statistics without storing any info sent by visitors (such as IP address, user agent etc).

If you’re running on AWS, you could have a look at https://ownstats.com

For questions like this I always consult:

https://alternativeto.net/

https://jitsu.com/ maybe

I used umami, an open source one, it used to be release frequently.

and I amde some contribution to containalize it

https://count.ly/

Open source version is quite stripped down and enterprise was about $500 / mo or so iirc.

Plausible.io is my favorite. Cheap, self-hostable. Really stellar support.

Adblockers block all of those services, right?

Not necessarily. Depends how they’re implemented.

Not all of the self hosted ones, especially if host uses a reverse proxy to rewrite the URL to something random.

Which products offer this functionality? That’s interesting.

Afaik none of them offer it out of the box but I've seen devs recommend it.

Example: umami has a default umami.js file called by JS. uBlock Origin has a rule that blocks any file with that name. I rewrote its URL to something like somerandomfile.js using caddy. And now uBlock doesn't block it.

Check out Umami (https://umami.is/). Should be GDPR compliant. Not as advanced as Google Analytics, but it has pretty good features.

It's probably not the answer you want to hear, but don't use any analytics platforms. Let users be completly anonymous. :)

Plausible, Matomo

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