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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?

#93

I find it a bit frustrating that most analytics tools does not have support for sending events through api calls. Like in mixpanel where it is possible to send events from backend rather than embedding a js on frontend. Why is it so?

Plausible has an events API that allows you to record pageviews and custom events without JS.

https://plausible.io/docs/events-api

(I'm the cofounder)

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

#95
post #55

as a side note - is there something that does not require to install shitload of unnecessary software, databases and services? Let's say simple PHP+MySQL

Yes! Here is my 22 lines of old school php code thrown on a old and unsexy lamp server: https://gist.github.com/mickael-kerjean/289d3d0be8fab2f90e2f...

It has been used for about 3 years with metric tracked directly via sql queries. Today, I got a more fancy dashboard that make graph from the sql queries but that part is optional (my grafana dashboard screenshot: https://ibb.co/S3RTyjm).

After trying a few other analytics tools, it's hard to beat the power of just asking a question in sql

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

#96

I use umami. Its lightweight and doesnt have too many dependencies. https://umami.is/docs/features There is also goatcounter with a slightly uglier UI but it does its job well and consumes even less RAM than umami

+1 for Umami. Easy to setup and lightweight UI. With the provided Docker Compose, it's up and running in less than 5 min.

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

#97
post #61

PostHog: https://github.com/PostHog/posthog if you want to deploy it yourself and https://posthog.com if you want the SaaS. I was using Avodocs ( https://www.avodocs.com ) to produce a privacy policy for our MLOps platform, https://iko.ai , but they didn't have PostHog in the list for the "Analytics" section, and they assumed that doing analytics implied sending user data to a third party site or something. I tweeted…

Side question. Posthog describes an event pipeline. Is there a saas/open source server with event pipelines where you can do add logic to do things, like: send email, notifications, send api call, maybe add custom logic etc. Ive seen things like segment.io, but didn't find a straightforward solution. Example: - if a user finished three workouts, send this notification. - if a user hasn't done a workout in a week remi…

Potentially Mautic, I can’t think of any other open source marketing automation tools.

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

#98
post #23
post #14

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 enterpr…

I've been a Snowplow user for nearly a decade. It's a bit of work to set up, but it's the best engineered of all those options. Snowplow's JSON schema events and contexts give you complete flexibility to define a data model that suits your business. Combined with DBT and a BI tool, like Apache Superset, it's vastly more capable than Google Analytics. We have clients running Google Analytics 360 that can't do the stuf…

What do you use to visualise the data you collect with Snowplow?

I think folks forget that a significant part of the value from GA is how it presents the data in an easy to understand manner for non technical users.

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

#99

Why are most tools for analytics so expensive? Compared to other saas products I find them to be at least. Is there a significant amount of traffic that is the reason? I was thinking about implementing something myself once, but was worried about the cost of receiving all the event traffic.

Because their customers understand the value of the data and are willing to pay for it.

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

#100

Of the answers posted here I am curious if any of them are suitable for mobile (iOS/Android) or desktop (Mac/Windows) apps, or if they are all web-oriented?

PostHog has iOS/Android/Flutter/React Native libraries for analytics - full details https://posthog.com/docs/integrate#client-libraries . We don't have session recording / feature flags everywhere yet though (I work there)

Do the PostHog Android and iOS libraries automatically collect & report metrics like OS version & app version so I can easily track how many users are on each version? We're still using Flurry right now but looking for a replacement.
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