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An alternative to using Google Analytics on your website

plausible.io

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Re: An alternative to using Google Analytics on your website

#281

Post by malodyets »

Richs99 wrote: post #268
thoraway1010 wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think if they can just be clear that they will do 10 million impressions per property per month for free forever that would clarify the free tier (and match google I think).

We do over 25m impressions a month and it's still get GA for free

I don't see why the price of GA is relevant to plausible's pricing.

With Google analytics, you are the product, not the customer. Free ad-supported SaaS is really a different value proposition from non-ad-supported paid services.

Re: An alternative to using Google Analytics on your website

#282

Post by XCSme »

seanwilson wrote: post #183

What do people suggest if you have a website that sells something? Knowing where your traffic is coming from, if your new redesign helped or hindered users in finding content, and knowing which traffic sources result in the most sales sounds business critical to me. I've seen lots of situations where when we look into analytics, it becomes obvious users are having trouble finding content or don't know the content is…

You can look over the product I'm building (self-hosted analytics): usertrack.net. It's not free though.

Re: An alternative to using Google Analytics on your website

#283

Post by Carpetsmoker »

tmikaeld wrote: post #22

Some open source alternatives: - https://ackee.electerious.com/ (Node.js based) - https://github.com/zgoat/goatcounter (Golang) (Commercial Licensed) - https://snowplowanalytics.com (Core-ware) - https://count.ly (Core-ware) https://www.visitor-analytics.io is also a great GDPR compliant alternative (Not open source).

> - https://github.com/zgoat/goatcounter (Golang) (Commercial Licensed)

Small correction: it's not really "commercial licensed", it's completely Open Source/Free Software according to the OSI definition and "four freedoms", and can be used for any purpose including commercial (EUPL license, roughly similar to the AGPL).

Only the hosted goatcounter.com SaaS operates on a "free for personal use, pay for commercial use" basis, but there is nothing stopping you from running your own instance for commercial purposes.

I think I need to clarify the README on this a little bit, as I had someone else ask the same question yesterday as well :-)

Re: An alternative to using Google Analytics on your website

#284

Post by bewuethr »

owenshen24 wrote: post #249
tmikaeld wrote: post #22

Some open source alternatives: - https://ackee.electerious.com/ (Node.js based) - https://github.com/zgoat/goatcounter (Golang) (Commercial Licensed) - https://snowplowanalytics.com (Core-ware) - https://count.ly (Core-ware) https://www.visitor-analytics.io is also a great GDPR compliant alternative (Not open source).

Shout-out to GoatCounter which was both free and easy for me to set up for my blog.

Another happy GoatCounter user here!

Re: An alternative to using Google Analytics on your website

#285

Post by bewuethr »

maple3142 wrote: post #133
munk-a wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your choice is, of course, your choice, but I'd strongly suggest GA for this use case. I understand and agree that Google is in fact evil and we should avoid feeding the beast, but a hobby website using GA is too minor to care about for any of the privacy reasons the author states and if it's fully static pages then ideally the performance will already be light enough that the bloat of GA isn't going to make a differ…

I have a blog hosted on GitHub pages, and I only want to know what pages are viewed the most. Before using GA, I have considered multiple alternative. For self-hosted alternatives, I don't bother to use it because I don't want to maintain a server just for my blog. As for other paid hosted alternative, I avoid them because I want it to be as cheap as possible. So I eventually choose GA, but in a different fashion, be…

I was in the same situation and ended up using GoatCounter (see one of the top level comments in this thread).

Re: An alternative to using Google Analytics on your website

#287

Post by eli »

megous wrote: post #149
ec109685 wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a really good point. It's very disingenuous of the parent article to not mention that. Google being a Processor of data removes their ability to use this data for targeting and profiling.

It may remove legal basis for using the data, but it certainly doesn't remove their abilities.

The implication here being Google might be conducting a massive illegal conspiracy to mine data they don’t have rights to use? I do not buy it.

Re: An alternative to using Google Analytics on your website

#288

Post by arp242 »

malodyets wrote: post #280
anakaine wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

$6 is about the cost of monthly hosting for many personal websites. I'd argue theres not a good value proposition here, at the low end of the scale at least.

I think $6/mo. for fast, privacy-focused analytics for small sites is very reasonable. There's no ad revenue to support this business — the website owner is the customer, not the product. That is a different business model from Google analytics or WordPress free analytics.

Depends what you use it for; if you're just vaguely curious about how many people visit which page on your site – which is probably what a large part of people use it for on their person sites – then $6/month is comparatively a lot, especially if you consider there are competitors which offer it for free (not just GA).

Re: An alternative to using Google Analytics on your website

#289

Post by Carpetsmoker »

jefftk wrote: post #104
londons_explore wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Photoshop is the defacto-standard in image editing, yet clones which are free and copy the photoshop UI are rapidly catching up for a segment of the userbase, eg. photopea.com If someone set up a Scroogle Analoytics which had a simple code snippet, was free, and had near-identical looking dashboard, I'd use it.

In general, you should be very careful about what third parties you allow on your page because you're delegating to them the ability to do anything that can be done from JS. I trust Google to take this seriously and not open me up to XSS, but I would be much more skeptical about Scroogle Analoytics. (Disclosure: I work for Google, and have run Google Analytics on my site since before I joined)

As someone who runs one of those 3rd-party analytics: the JS you add to your site is small, readable, and can be downloaded and included from your own CDN. Hell, you don't even need the script, you can just write your own (not very hard actually). I took a look at Plausible a while ago, and I think the same applies here as well.

With GA, I can do none of that; it's just a massive unreadable blob I can only load from the GA servers. I just have to trust Google doesn't do anything I don't want (including XSS, but also other issues). It's not even easy to figure out what information exactly it collects last time. It's very untransparent and un-auditable and the website equivalent of loading binary kernel blobs.

Re: An alternative to using Google Analytics on your website

#290

Post by nipinium »

hidiegomariani wrote: post #62

Yes! I've just removed GA from one of my pet projects (shameless plug https://golang.cafe ) - And started using Cloudflare NS https://www.cloudflare.com/dns/ . Now I get users/analytics reports at DNS level. No bloated JS trackers, no privacy policies and weird stuff and I can track visits even when adblockers are enabled. This would definitely be overestimated as bots would be counted in but it seems pretty accurate…

Correct me if I'm wrong but cloudflare only provides analytics for "proxied" records.

And for my experience proxied websites (in free plan) are way slower compare to bare websites, like 300ms latency vs 50ms latency.

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