Google Analytics alternative that protects your data and your customers' privacy • Hacker News Board

Re: Google Analytics alternative that protects your data and your customers' privacy

#51

Post by jhpacker » Sun, May 07, 2023, 3:48 PM UTC

Matomo is decent, but my main issue with it is the performance when run at any sort of scale. It's PHP/MySQL, which is nice for ease of self-hosting, but it means a lot of things need to be pre-calculated. Most of the newer and more performant GA alternatives out there are using things like ClickHouse.

ClickHouse: Piwik PRO, Plausible, PostHog, Yandex, Cloudflare

Snowflake: Amplitude, Piano, Snowplow

SingleStore: Fathom

I've written a book on the subject including evaluating the 15 most widely used options: https://gaalternatives.guide

Re: Google Analytics alternative that protects your data and your customers' privacy

#52

Post by prithsr » Sun, May 07, 2023, 3:50 PM UTC

gerenuk wrote: post #17

Usermaven.com does the same and covers product insights as well. Free tier is pretty generous (1M events per month).

Thanks for sharing this! Just got it set up on one of my domains and very pleased.

Re: Google Analytics alternative that protects your data and your customers' privacy

#53

Post by nmstoker » Sun, May 07, 2023, 4:01 PM UTC

Haven't used it in six years but back in the days it was Piwik it was ideal: easy to set up locally, a good range of features and a friendly community (v. responsive to an upgrade issue we experienced but apart from that everything worked exactly as expected).

Re: Google Analytics alternative that protects your data and your customers' privacy

#54

Post by acidburnNSA » Sun, May 07, 2023, 4:04 PM UTC

nmstoker wrote: post #53

Haven't used it in six years but back in the days it was Piwik it was ideal: easy to set up locally, a good range of features and a friendly community (v. responsive to an upgrade issue we experienced but apart from that everything worked exactly as expected).

Back in my day it was awstats. Still works great. I have 18 years of data.

https://www.awstats.org/

Re: Google Analytics alternative that protects your data and your customers' privacy

#55

Post by jhpacker » Sun, May 07, 2023, 4:06 PM UTC

graftak wrote: post #35

ZacnyLos wrote: post #4

More alternatives: https://european-alternatives.eu/alternative-to/google-analy...

This website is off to a bad start when the first item says > Because it does not use cookies there is no need to show cookie banner for this service. which is a blatant lie/misinformation. The ‘cookie law’ has nothing to do with the actual use of cookies.

To defend this site, that is the claim of the vendor and I wouldn't expect a site that focuses on listing EU alternatives to be critically evaluating a claim like that which hasn't been explicitly nay-sayed by any regulatory agency. Plausible uses a visitor id based upon a hashed + salted user agent plus IP address where the salt is rotated daily. The choice of whether consent is required for that is for the individual implementing site to make up their mind upon, but I don't think the vendor claim is unreasonable.

A similar (but better, IMHO) site that focuses just on analytics is: https://newmetrics.io/

Re: Google Analytics alternative that protects your data and your customers' privacy

#56

Post by jhpacker » Sun, May 07, 2023, 4:13 PM UTC

riogordo2go wrote: post #44

soared wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> tracking users across the web like GA does What does this mean?

At least in prior Google Analytics versions, a third party cookie was used, giving the possibility to link you to every site that implements Google Analytics. But Google explicitly states not to do this, so you are correct in calling me out here.

GA4 still uses the doubleclick cookie. It also encourages the use of Google Signals and runs measurement requests off of the main google.com domain to help it track users based upon their Google login.

Re: Google Analytics alternative that protects your data and your customers' privacy

#57

Post by stoicjumbotron » Sun, May 07, 2023, 4:15 PM UTC

Thoughts on Microsoft Clarity? https://clarity.microsoft.com

Re: Google Analytics alternative that protects your data and your customers' privacy

#58

Post by jhpacker » Sun, May 07, 2023, 4:17 PM UTC

EGreg wrote: post #34

RHSeeger wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I build a web site, and it is my preference to know what pages get clicks on what elements (presumably, so I can make my site better)... whose preference gets priority; mine or my users? It's not as black and white as your question makes it sound.

I don’t get it, how can they stop you from recording this on your own server? Are you talking about CNAME cloaking? Pretty sure Apple only cares if one specific server gets all the CNAMEs. It doesn’t block CNAMEs in general.

ITP now also degrades first party server-set cookies to 7 days where the first part of the IPs don't match. So if you're using CNAMEs for your measurement and the you have a.a.x.x and b.b.x.x it will downgrade.

Re: Google Analytics alternative that protects your data and your customers' privacy

#59

Post by RobotToaster » Sun, May 07, 2023, 4:21 PM UTC

Worth noting that it seems to be only "open core", there's a bunch of paywalled features that I presume aren't open source. https://matomo.org/pricing/

Re: Google Analytics alternative that protects your data and your customers' privacy

#60

Post by jhpacker » Sun, May 07, 2023, 4:23 PM UTC

preinheimer wrote: post #12

I wish some of the privacy focused GA alternatives had SOC 2 reports, or ISO 27001. We’re working towards our first SOC 2, which makes it hard to incorporate anything without one into our product. On prem is a lot of work, and not something i want to approach lightly.

Piwik Pro is SOC2 certified.