Google Analytics alternative that protects your data and your customers' privacy

> Matomo is decent, but my main issue with it is the performance when run at any sort of scale. It's PHP/MySQL, which is nice for ease of self-hosting, but it means a lot of things need to be pre-calculated.

I've never actually run into performance issues, neither when using it in production professionally, nor for my self-hosted sites (with Matomo always running on-prem). I'd say the performance of PHP and MySQL/MariaDB is most likely decent as long as you don't go too far into specialized workloads, for example log aggregation/tracing; though even some APM solutions like Apache Skywalking also support using traditional RDBMSes for this purpose as well: https://skywalking.apache.org/docs/main/v9.0.0/en/setup/back...

That said, I can't help but to wonder at what actual scale (number of logged events/second, given certain hardware) you'd run into issues. Luckily, because adding basic analytics is usually quite easy, testing this for your own workloads shouldn't be out of the question - then you can let the data speak for itself.

What kind of scale are you looking at?

I'm building UXWizz, which is on the same stack, and in my experience on a single server you can track up to 10-15 million sessions total (~1M sessions per month, with 1 year retention). To scale, for now I made it so you can have one database per domain, so the data is sharded by domain (if you are tracking multiple domains).

The biggest bottleneck is querying a large dataset, the storing of data seems to work pretty well. You could of course archive the data and automatically create stats using cron jobs, but this leads to a lot less filtering options and not so fresh data.

Last I checked, Fathom’s open source product hadn’t been updated for a couple of years. So, I switched to Plausible which is more reasonably updated.

Fathom is run by some goofy marketer who has openly slandered (on HN) other analytics products in this space. Sadly, can’t support anyone who does that. They’re not open-source either.

Stay far away from fathom. Bro culture bullshit at the worst. Don’t believe a word they say.

"GA's interface is complex and confusing, especially for basic use cases."

As I said in another comment, it's been eight years since I used that accursed interface, and I'll be ready to try it again once the flashbacks go away.

I'd love for you to add Amplitude (amplitude.com) to your guide. Ensuring we have the same easy out of the box experience GA does is a top priority for us this year. Let me know how I can us get added!

You can usually rename the tracker to something that's not on the blocklist.

Why spend time undermining people's preferences?

> tracking users across the web like GA does

What does this mean?

At this point in history, tracking on the web is no longer a trusted activity where people can assume that the person behind the tracking is doing it for benevolent purposes. It's the same thing with email and spam, especially when attachments are involved.

Writing your own analytics can give some additional benefits in that you are only collected what you need while taking into considerations your users needs. I expect however that in time browsers will block more and more by default, similar in how email clients and services has progressed in their arm race with spam.

Is it also blocked when you don't even enable cookies? You loose some accuracy, but clients can't prevent ending up in your logs and they have to share some info with the server.

That's an odd choice as WordPress, which is by far the most popular CMS, uses ?s= as a search query.

I would expect those pages to be included in the data. They could offer some sort of segmentation if they think they they can separate out searches, though.

Just disable website search or change the search parameter inside website settings to stop Matomo from interpreting the 'q' parameter as search.

Record tracking pings independently of any solution and figure things out later, a 1x1 GIF can absorb an unlimited number of query strings, and S3 storage for log files is extremely economical. It doesn't matter which analytics solution you end up with, you'll always be throwing away data. IIRC even GA enterprise doesn't allowing pulling the original click log back out of it, only some form of sampling or another. Put a 1x1 GIF in an S3 bucket, create a CloudFront distribution and enable logging for it into another bucket. Tada, unlimited scale achieved for pennies.

Matomo and GA's trackers both allow sending the query to a URL of your choice. Treat the analytics system as an index over the logs, rather than treating the logs as an auxiliary artefact of the analytics system

Any links? I'm assuming you mean something more than the periodic rollups?

why? Having gone through a few SOC-2s, I don't see any value it other than it being a racket.

Piwik Pro is SOC2 certified.

Your customers might love you for making a better website, and this is hard to do without feedback, of which analytics is one kind.

In all these threads, there is never a project manager from a large establishment telling

- Thanks. we will migrate - we did and it was <good/bad>

More or less everyone is after $.

Half of the "alternatives" there are dead (website is offline) and the rest is not free. Those are hardly alternatives, more like band-aid solutions.

This website is off to a bad start when the first item says

> Because it does not use cookies there is no need to show cookie banner for this service.

which is a blatant lie/misinformation. The ‘cookie law’ has nothing to do with the actual use of cookies.

The terms on-premises and on-premise and on-prem are synonymous within enterprise lingo.

Google bad

I'm guessing because of this:

https://blog.google/products/marketingplatform/analytics/pre...

> All standard Universal Analytics properties will stop processing new hits on July 1, 2023.

Analytics are widely used in communication departments in European enterprise, and where that previously was very often Google Analytics, it’s hard to use it because of Google’s inability/unwillingness to change their enterprise targeting business model to be GDPR compliant. I’m not personally convinced you really need an analytics tool in most European communications departments. As long as saying something like that is akin to heresy, however, I think it’s safe to say that a lot of people are interested in alternatives to Google Analytics.

It’s likely not just in Europe anymore. Privacy seems to be a tend that is on the increase everywhere. But as I understand it, things move to the top of HN if they are interesting to a lot of people, and privacy is interesting to a lot of people these years. Not just to the “nerds” either, at least I tend to see more and more discussion on it outside of tech circles. In the EU specific you do have the very real “motivation” of dropping Google Analytics because using it puts you in the lovely area of breaking the law.

Back in my day it was awstats. Still works great. I have 18 years of data.

https://www.awstats.org/

One thing is that it doesn't send any data about your users to Google.

You need a GDPR banner for sharing information with third parties. Why would you need one for self-hosted Matomo?

Clarity is awesome--the metrics and the way it combines a visualization of our site with user session data is amazing. It shows you the actual locations on the page that users visit as well as the path they follow to get there. The insights are far more actionable than Google Analytics from my experience. (We use both.)

p.s., Under the covers Clarity runs on ClickHouse.

I think we learnt enough when big tech offers something for “free” and when they call it “absolutely” free it just means you are absolutely the product.

So thanks but No thanks

Thanks for sharing this! Just got it set up on one of my domains and very pleased.

This would be nice. I don't track users on my personal blog. I don't give a flying duck about what people do there.

However I make money from running a website which is really useful to a lot of people. I absolutely need to know what works and what doesn't. I can't write and edit in the dark, possibly missing by a mile what my readers really need. It would be like flying a plane without instruments.

For instance, I see that a lot of people use the search to find a single guide, which should definitely be linked on the home page. Without basic tracking, I wouldn't even know which pages are important to my users.

There are many gaping holes in your website that you could be completely blind to without a basic sense of what your users do on your website.

I also caught many illegal copies of my website through referrer tracking. Three of them were phishing websites, and I got them shut down.

So there are many legitimate reasons to have basic traffic counters, and you can have those while respecting your users' privacy and following the spirit and the letter of GDPR.

I wonder if someone's made an AdNauseam for tracking libraries yet. Going on the defensive clearly doesn't work, some more offensive action is required.

Send a whole bunch of plausible events, pretending to click every link, changing your identifiers and stuff like resolution every time, make it impossible to determine what data is real and what isn't. Bonus points for leaving websites alone if they don't load tracking scripts until you've consented.

We can't stop trackers, but we can try to make them useless. Even if they filter out such tracking they shouldn't be able to figure out what data was real, making their tracking attempts worthless.