Migrating my web analytics from Matomo to Umami | Hacker News Reader

Migrating my web analytics from Matomo to Umami

stanislas.blog

62 pointsangristan15 comments

For things like my personal blog I don’t really need complex analytics, just page views is fine so I’m using goatcounter which has been really great so far. It has all I need and nothing more.

https://www.goatcounter.com/

Another one for personal sites is GoAccess. No DB needed, only log files. It shows nicely; which page was visited, how often, browser statistics etc. https://goaccess.io/

Nice! Never heard of goat counter before. What does it give you that log analysis with tools like goaccess or webalizer don’t?

https://www.goatcounter.com/help/logfile

> - There will be more bot requests.

> - Some data won’t be available: screen sizes, page titles.

> - It won’t disambiguate to canonical paths from <link rel="canonical">; i.e. /page and /page?x=y will show up as two different paths.

Don't use analytics provided by third parties. Some (many?) people blacklist Google Analytics and other tracking tools at the DNS level or through browser extensions. As far as I am concerned, I consider it as malware running on my machine, and will not allow it. Do your tracking server-side if you must.

i dont get backing up analytics data of 10 years, its bit unusual.What is the utility of it other than research? i have also not seen commercial analytics providers, providing data retention beyond 5 years.

It's for my blogs, so it's mainly just for fun :) Seeing what's read over the years.

What's wrong with the PHP stack? I also use it for my UXWizz platform, which is sort-of a more modern Matomo, and it has worked great so far, very robust and almost no security or upgrading issues (I don't use composer though or external packages, I simply have all the libraries directly in my repo).

I have been using Plausible for a couple years, it works great and is opensource https://plausible.io/

Umami is a NextJS app.

I’ll pass.

> Finding a modern alternative to Matomo

And not a hint on why.

> Matomo has barely evolved in terms of UI, and it feels pretty dated now

It's so sad what my Phillips screwdriver barely evolved in the last 100 years. D'oh!

> It has a few gotchas like this weirdness around updating it in its Docker image.

I'm just clicking the update button in the web UI and waiting a minute.

> Umami is a NextJS app with PostgreSQL

Aaaaand? It would be somewhat understandable if you ran metrics for the hundreds of sites. But you only have two. So - why? Why is this even matters for you?

> no plugins

Ah, the famous 'but I don't need MMS [despite everyone in the world uses them]' line of thinking. BTW you could, you know, just not installing any plugins in Matomo - it would be effectively the same result as not having a plugin support in Umami.

> reduced feature set

Five years ago? Maybe. This is one of the reasons I didn't bother with repairing it when my installation quietly died on itself. But looking at the current list it's hard to say Umami has 'a reduced feature set'.

> that their Cloud hosted version has an import feature, but it’s not open source

And a hard pivot to the 'cloud-first' was another reason why I decided not to bother with Umami anymore. It was heavily advertised as an open source and open source alternative to the other solutions on the market and now you can't even find what you can self-host it on the front page! Of course if don't count . Contribute . as a such description. No mention of self-hosting on Pricing at all.

> Now, I’m free to say goodbye to Matomo, and save resources.

How much resources do you save?

Overall I'm glad what you found a way to preserve the data instead of just throwing it away - and even shared the story and tools to everyone.

Ironically Phillips screwheads are often considered subpar compared to more recently (relatively) invented screw types.

Pozidriv is also often misidentified as Philips when it is far superior if one uses the correct matching driver.

> Phillips screwheads

Yes, but the screwdriver itself?

The best part here is what if you look at the screenshots of both Matomo and Umami you couldn't distinguish them if you are not explicitly told who is where.

I use Umami. It definitely appears to have a lot less features than Matomo. I wouldn't say that necessarily means it uses less resources, though? An analytics server is probably spending 99.999% of its time just receiving a tiny HTTP event rather than drawing UI unless you are sat refreshing the stats all day.

Umami got rooted twice this month because of holes in React, partly because of the enormous complexity of that framework.

Just my two cents.

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