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Lightweight Alternatives to Google Analytics

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Re: Lightweight Alternatives to Google Analytics

#231

Post by PhilippGille »

JackWritesCode wrote: post #123

Thanks for all the kind words about https://usefathom.com . We’ve been in business since 2018 and both founders now work full time on it. We’re fully bootstrapped, actively rejecting millions of dollars in venture capital, and we are sustainable. That is the key. We are priced fairly, and at a level that allows us to ensure the longevity of our business. We are used by governments, small businesses, multi billion dol…

> We are fully GDPR compliant and use zero cookies.

From the GitHub repo [1]:

> At present, Fathom Analytics Lite is not PECR compliant due to the fact that it uses an anonymous cookie. Our PRO version is PECR compliant, and we'll be making changes to this codebase some time in the future to make it compliant.

The open source version seems to be lacking behind and might generally be treated without much love, given that their website doesn't even link to it (which is understandable from a business point of view, but doesn't inspire much confidence in its future maintenance).

[1]: https://github.com/usefathom/fathom/blob/69baac5c4a4d96880a2...

Re: Lightweight Alternatives to Google Analytics

#232

Post by jayd16 »

jwr wrote: post #28

I turned off Google Analytics, because I realized that it doesn't actually report any useful or actionable data, just vanity metrics, and many of them of dubious quality. I run a SaaS and what matters for me is paid subscriptions. "Visits" (even if by humans, which is hard to tell) really do not matter much. Yes, I do want to increase conversion rates, and run bandit experiments, but I'm better off doing that myself.…

Do you not find value in adding events to your pages so you have user funnels for conversions? Or do you think bots cause too much noise for this?

Re: Lightweight Alternatives to Google Analytics

#233

Post by JackWritesCode »

tedivm wrote: post #224
tutuca wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fathom is open source https://github.com/usefathom/fathom

That's the old project- they have decided not to open source the new one. The open source project is barely maintained at this point- they update the readme and get the occasionally pull request, but it's not really being developed. I unfortunately switched to Fathom back when they were telling people they were committed to open source, so now I'm looking to migrate off to something a bit more trustworthy.

You've been saying this since last year. If I can help you migrate off of Fathom Lite to something else, please let me know.

Re: Lightweight Alternatives to Google Analytics

#234

Post by JackWritesCode »

clairity wrote: post #227
JackWritesCode wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We're not announcing anything just yet but it'll be our best release to date

> "We're not announcing anything just yet but it'll be our best release to date" not a knock on you or fathom, but it seems like you're in fast-response sales mode here (which is totally fine)... the above is a particularly empty statement. why would any next release not be the best to date? maybe say it should be an exciting release, which is similarly anticipatory without being meaningless sales-speak.

Good point, heh. We're going to be improving speed of aggregation, real time dashboard, page / ref level metrics, more advanced goals and various other pieces.

Re: Lightweight Alternatives to Google Analytics

#235

Post by JackWritesCode »

PStamatiou wrote: post #192

Been using Fathom for a few months now (after migrating away from Gaug.es which I've had for at least 6-7 years prior but they got acquired by some random companies that has zero support and makes no improvements) and have been loving it so far. They're really responsive and always improving things. I like that I can cname the tracking script to my domain

Thanks so much, really appreciate the comment here :)

Re: Lightweight Alternatives to Google Analytics

#236

Post by Kjeldahl »

srrr wrote: post #105
Kjeldahl wrote: post #92

I was recently looking for a good tool that supports both web site analytics and app analytics (custom events, typically pushed by SPAs). I looked at GA, Amplitude and finally Matomo (which I ended up with). GA and Amplitude either did not offer or made it hard to work down to the micro level, essentially tracking known individual users down to the singular event level. Matomo makes this easy, although it certainly l…

There are many packages listed at https://github.com/onurakpolat/awesome-analytics . Heap is an example of macro+micro+web+app.

Thanks for the tip. One of Heap's selling points seems to be that tracking events "manually" is over, everything is automatic. That might work if all "work" is defined as "stuff users do". For other types of "work" (calculation pipelines, job delegation etc) I'm sure being able to "micro manage" events can be useful. But sure, my use case might be different.

Re: Lightweight Alternatives to Google Analytics

#237

Post by Kjeldahl »

JackWritesCode wrote: post #94
Kjeldahl wrote: post #92

I was recently looking for a good tool that supports both web site analytics and app analytics (custom events, typically pushed by SPAs). I looked at GA, Amplitude and finally Matomo (which I ended up with). GA and Amplitude either did not offer or made it hard to work down to the micro level, essentially tracking known individual users down to the singular event level. Matomo makes this easy, although it certainly l…

Less companies are focusing on user level tracking, as it’s an invasion of privacy and compliance doesn’t allow it

And I'm sure that makes sense if you have lots of users and low revenue per customer. If your use case is the opposite, tracking individual usage becomes more important. At least until you have lots of those users. After that, who cares! :P

Re: Lightweight Alternatives to Google Analytics

#238

Post by JackWritesCode »

GordonS wrote: post #223
jbrooksuk wrote: post #42

I've been happily using Fathom Analytics: https://usefathom.com and I have zero complaints. No tracking. Privacy focused. Lightweight. You embed from your own domain. They even do site monitoring now!

> No tracking Personally, I think that Fathom strikes a good balance between privacy and usability, but it does still use tracking (or at least it did when I was looking at it a few weeks back) - the difference is that it uses fingerprinting instead of cookies. I think it's implemented in a privacy-focused way, but it does look like they are ignoring some of the EU ePrivacy guidance, which explicitly states that cons…

We're not ignoring the guidance, it's just such a grey area when it comes to PECR / ePrivacy. Even the ICO's guidance, it talks about "cookie-like" technology. Our technology isn't cookie-like. And our processing isn't cookie-like either. We've had lawyers look at our documentation and all of them have said it's a grey area.

You'll know this but some people reading might not: Under GDPR, there are multiple legal bases for processing and we rely on legitimate interest. PECR / ePrivacy is the grey area for us and other services.

Having said all of this, we're fortunately moving away from requiring any compliance at all... by avoiding the complexities all together. We're rolling a refactor to our data collector over the next few weeks, and we won't have to have these conversations about grey areas anymore :) We've hired a top-tier privacy consultant and are going to be deploying a huge update, putting us at the top of the list for compliant analytics. Every single privacy-focused analytics service is in a grey area right now (some think they're not but they are). We will be the first to move out of this GDPR / ePrivacy grey area dance.

As you say, you see the logic behind the implementation we had, but we're dealing with politicians who don't understand the difference between Google Analytics and privacy-focused analytics. And that's fine, the work they've done has lead to better privacy for everyone, so we appreciate them.

Re: Lightweight Alternatives to Google Analytics

#239

Post by JackWritesCode »

PhilippGille wrote: post #231
JackWritesCode wrote: post #123

Thanks for all the kind words about https://usefathom.com . We’ve been in business since 2018 and both founders now work full time on it. We’re fully bootstrapped, actively rejecting millions of dollars in venture capital, and we are sustainable. That is the key. We are priced fairly, and at a level that allows us to ensure the longevity of our business. We are used by governments, small businesses, multi billion dol…

> We are fully GDPR compliant and use zero cookies. From the GitHub repo [1]: > At present, Fathom Analytics Lite is not PECR compliant due to the fact that it uses an anonymous cookie. Our PRO version is PECR compliant, and we'll be making changes to this codebase some time in the future to make it compliant. The open source version seems to be lacking behind and might generally be treated without much love, given t…

Our goal is long term sustainability of privacy-focused analytics. We're achieving that. We tried to do it with the OS codebase, and the original tech guy left the project. The MRR was around $1,300 between 2 people after many months.

When we focused on building a business, we were able to become a much more viable competitor to Google Analytics.

The reason we haven't written off Fathom Lite is because we've always had plans to come back to it this year and put out an update. Will we be launching new features? No. Will we be fixing bugs and ensuring it's a solid product for individuals? Absolutely.

Re: Lightweight Alternatives to Google Analytics

#240

Post by ghawkescs »

JackWritesCode wrote: post #206
ghawkescs wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I try to view your demo page I get 'Secure Connection Failed' every time. Firefox 77.0.1 on Windows 10.

Strange. Fully valid certificate. Try hard refreshing a few times.

Still no luck, this is the URL https://app.usefathom.com/share/lsqyv/pjrvs. Did not load in Chrome either.
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