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Ask HN: Good open source alternatives to Google Analytics?

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Re: Ask HN: Good open source alternatives to Google Analytics?

#12

Post by simonw »

ggoo wrote: post #8

I use plausible for my very low traffic side project, mostly because it's easy to host yourself and free if you do so. https://github.com/plausible/analytics

I'm really into Plausible. I use their hosted version, and I really like their approach to privacy - it doesn't even use cookies, which means it doesn't trigger the need for an ugly GDPR cookie banner in the EU.

Re: Ask HN: Good open source alternatives to Google Analytics?

#13

Post by mooreds »

robin_reala wrote: post #2

The standard recommendation is https://matomo.org/ . I’ve used it in production once (when it was called Piwik) and it seemed reasonable, but I’m not sure how it stacks up right now.

We use matomo right now. Querying is a bit tougher (no instantaneous segments), but I find that it works fine for most of our use cases.

We use their hosted version.

Re: Ask HN: Good open source alternatives to Google Analytics?

#14

Post by benhoyt »

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)

Re: Ask HN: Good open source alternatives to Google Analytics?

#18

Post by mywittyname »

robin_reala wrote: post #2

The standard recommendation is https://matomo.org/ . I’ve used it in production once (when it was called Piwik) and it seemed reasonable, but I’m not sure how it stacks up right now.

Matomo is also dead-simple to develop plugins for. So if you're looking at a product that can be customized beyond simple analytics, Matomo is a great choice.

I also used it a lot back when it was Piwik and the biggest issue was that it is backed by a MySQL database, and the way the reporting engine was designed meant that it would get pretty slow to work with custom date ranges with large volumes of data. But it did support caching and would pre-build reports over certain date ranges (by day, by month, by week, MtD, YtD).

Re: Ask HN: Good open source alternatives to Google Analytics?

#19

Post by tyingq »

Using a middle-man proxy for GA is an interesting idea I've seen. GA can take input from the backend, rather than the frontend, if you wish. So you could do some tokenizing/removal/etc of sensitive data, like IP addresses, but still use GA for it's reporting strengths.

Edit: The GA api does allow for things like overriding the geolocation such that if you aren't sending the IP address, there's still relevant geo data to report on.

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