All of these web tracker alternatives but what I've really been itching for is a very low barrier to entry, no hassle to scale, easy/fast to query adhoc event tracker. Something like a self hosted amplitude or keen.
Lightweight Alternatives to Google Analytics
271–280 of 320 posts
Re: Lightweight Alternatives to Google Analytics
#272I'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!
Fathom started out with much fanfare as being Open Source, but as soon as their paid service gained enough traction they went proprietary only. Can't recommend a company which pulls crap like that. :(
Interesting take. For every star we had on GitHub we did 21 cents in monthly revenue for (around $1300). We needed to turn Fathom into a viable competitor to Google Analytics. We can't do that if we are working a few hours a week on it, we needed to be full time.
Here's a comparison I've always looked at. Here are 2 solid database tools:
Table Plus - https://tableplus.com/ SQLite Browser - https://sqlitebrowser.org/
Table Plus is about 3 years old, SQLite is 6 years old. I have used both but Table Plus is 10000x better and more popular. Everyone talks about it and they innovate fast. They work full time on it too, $59 a license. They are so active, and have so many great features. Full time salaries help with that. SQLite has $102 in Patreon support. Table Plus makes that in 2 sales.
Look at Sequel Pro. One of the best products in the game but it never built a sustainable business model and it wasn't economically viable to continue, and look at it now.
I'm happy to say that we're achieving our goal every day. Our goal is to build a sustainable, profitable business (profitable businesses don't typically close down) that we can we can work full time on every day, moving people away from Google Analytics. For every 1 negative comment we get, hundreds / thousands of people signing up for Fathom.
We've spoken about it here too: https://usefathom.com/podcast/opensource
Re: Lightweight Alternatives to Google Analytics
#273Earlier quoted context omitted.
One of the reason Google Analytics (and logging solutions like it) is popular is that people don't have access to server logs.
Server side logs aren’t an accurate way of doing analytics and bring up compliance challenges (storing access logs and using them for purposes other than security etc.)
> Server side logs aren’t an accurate way of doing analytics ...
Based on what? Server side logs records what the server itself sent. That sounds like it should offer far more accuracy than what a JS only solution would do.
That being said, if the code for analysing the server logs is lousy, it's not going to help. :)
Re: Lightweight Alternatives to Google Analytics
#274Earlier quoted context omitted.
My websites are behind Cloudflare. If not Cloudflare then I'd use another CDN. Therefore I don't have logs. Also I disagree about the slowness. The script is loaded asynchrously, it does not block the page and I measure my loading times, which are really good actually. Just did a measurement and my front-page loads in 271 ms and this includes all network requests, including Matomo. I don't think this is a real concer…
> Just did a measurement and my front-page loads in 271 ms and this includes all network requests Is your audience just the people in your locality, or the entire world?
The test wasn't local.
Re: Lightweight Alternatives to Google Analytics
#275I've been building Watch.ly, which can provide you reporting like this (this is the daily email, mine in this case)
Re: Lightweight Alternatives to Google Analytics
#276I have my own self-hosted Matomo instance [1]. Via Docker & docker-compose it's quite easy to install and keep up to date and Matomo is open source, well maintained, very well behaved and pretty hands off. And I configured it on my websites with cookies turned off [2] and with IP anonymization [3]. In such an instance you don't need consent, or even a cookie banner, because you're not dropping cookies, or collecting…
> And I disagree with another commenter here saying Analytics is just for vanity. That's not true — even for a personal blog analytics are useful to see which articles are still being visited and thus need to be kept up to date, or in case content is deprecated, the least you could do is to put up a warning.
I mean, I'm not making the argument that analytics are useless, but this seems like the worst possible example. You can do this trivially with a script to analyze your server (e.g. Apache) logs. And you don't need "a VPS with 1 GB of RAM" for that - which is four times the RAM of the VPS my personal website has run on for the last half decade.
This approach also uses no client-side javascript to collect data, so you wouldn't have to alarm users with potential privacy threats, because nothing is stored other than what's in the HTTP headers.
Re: Lightweight Alternatives to Google Analytics
#277Earlier quoted context omitted.
Fathom started out with much fanfare as being Open Source, but as soon as their paid service gained enough traction they went proprietary only. Can't recommend a company which pulls crap like that. :(
Interesting take. For every star we had on GitHub we did 21 cents in monthly revenue for (around $1300). We needed to turn Fathom into a viable competitor to Google Analytics. We can't do that if we are working a few hours a week on it, we needed to be full time. Here's a comparison I've always looked at. Here are 2 solid database tools: Table Plus - https://tableplus.com/ SQLite Browser - https://sqlitebrowser.org/…
> For every star we had on GitHub we did 21 cents in monthly revenue ...
Who gives a crap? You guys started out as OSS and said it would continue to be. That turned out to be bullcrap, just looking for exposure.
> I have used both but Table Plus is 10000x better and more popular.
sigh Table Plus supports many different types of database. If people are looking for a macOS specific solution that does that, Table Plus might be a decent choice.
"SQLite Browser" on the other hand is specific to a single database. Though is cross platform and fairly popular in it's niche.
That being said, where are you getting "more popular" for Table Plus from though? Measured by what things?
> SQLite is 6 years old
Huh?
> SQLite has $102 in Patreon support.
You seem to be meaning DB Browser for SQLite.
Do we seem like a commercial project to you?
We recently added a Patreon link to our download page, after forgetting to put it out there much. The Patreon was originally created to cover our server costs (about US$75/mo from memory) some years ago, a goal we reached in 3 days.
That being said, we're trying out various things for a SaaS model as well because - like yourselves - we recognise success there will help with sustainability.
But we're sure as hell not going to bait and switch anyone.
> Look at Sequel Pro. ... and look at it now.
Seems like a commercial product whose organisation went broke, released the software as OSS, and couldn't get traction for that either?
People do appear to have picked up the project again recently, in an attempt to move it forwards:
https://github.com/sequelpro/sequelpro/issues/3679#issuecomm...
> Our goal is to...
Sure. You guys started out by bullshitting people. Unfortunately, the lack of integrity doesn't seem to be directly hurting. :(
One can hope it'll mean missed important opportunities for yourselves later, but who knows. You seem to be really leaning into the sales thing here on HN though.
> We've spoken about it here too ...
With an established history of lying, who cares?
Re: Lightweight Alternatives to Google Analytics
#278I have my own self-hosted Matomo instance [1]. Via Docker & docker-compose it's quite easy to install and keep up to date and Matomo is open source, well maintained, very well behaved and pretty hands off. And I configured it on my websites with cookies turned off [2] and with IP anonymization [3]. In such an instance you don't need consent, or even a cookie banner, because you're not dropping cookies, or collecting…
> And I disagree with another commenter here saying Analytics is just for vanity. That's not true — even for a personal blog analytics are useful to see which articles are still being visited and thus need to be kept up to date, or in case content is deprecated, the least you could do is to put up a warning. I mean, I'm not making the argument that analytics are useless, but this seems like the worst possible example…
My blog is hosted on GitHub pages, so I have no direct access to server logs.
Re: Lightweight Alternatives to Google Analytics
#279Are there any good HeapAnalytics-like frontend widget that can do auto-tracing? The collect-everything retrospective analytics is great tool.
Re: Lightweight Alternatives to Google Analytics
#280What are alternatives to Google Analytics for mobile? We'd just like to collect basic events (eg. this feature has been used), number of active users, OS usage… nothing fancy.