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Comment by benhoyt | Hacker News Reader

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)

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> 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...

> 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.

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.

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

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

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.

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