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RybbitL Open source Google Analytics replacement

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Re: RybbitL Open source Google Analytics replacement

#41
post #20

The market for Google Analytics alternatives is crowded. There's Plausible, Ahrefs web analytics, onedollarstats.com, PostHog, Matomo, Unami, Grafana, Microsoft Clarity (free at any scale), and so many others. Despite minor differences these products all compete for the same users (e.g. if someone is a PostHog customer they probably won't be using Ahref web analytics) yet most of these companies offer generous free t…

Posthog is pretty good but very pushy towards using their SaaS (understandably). Self hosting is not really advertised on their main site however is buried in their gh repo as a footnote [1] with indications of vague issues past 100K events/month. Haven’t delved into how to scale it past that though and they do provide some docs that I have yet to review.

Also the primary repo is not FOSS, and that "100% FOSS" repo is buried in yet another footnote [2].

Plausible follows in PH footsteps but is not fully faithful to open source. If you want to self host, you won’t have same set of features as their SaaS and need to rely on long term releases for their "community edition" [3]

On "Ahrefs", is there even an open source version of their product? I couldn’t easily find it (on mobile). [4]

Maybe I’ll take a look at others you mentioned later but if rybbit can remain faithful to their FOSS roots then I think there’s a real chance of it becoming huge.

For thosw that don’t want to self host (mostly corporate shitholes), rybbit can milk them with their managed SaaS product.

[1] https://github.com/PostHog/posthog?tab=readme-ov-file#self-h...

[2] https://github.com/PostHog/posthog?tab=readme-ov-file#open-s...

[3] https://github.com/plausible/analytics?tab=readme-ov-file#ca...

[4] https://ahrefs.com/

Re: RybbitL Open source Google Analytics replacement

#42

The documentation states that rybbit does not use cookies and is compliant with the GDPR. The first part is true but, looking at the code (very nice to have it available), the tracking is done by IP address, trading one piece of tracking data for another. I realize that this is probably the only way it could work but it is not clear to me that tracking by IP address (even over a single session and shredding the data…

I deal with GDPR daily and the truth is that GDPR enforcement doesn't understand what is acceptable from a GDPR standpoint and that is likely why they are in the process of revamping it. You can also anonymize data and that is no longer considered personal data under GDPR so it is possible to hash an IP address and that be acceptable.

So IP is considered personal information?

Re: RybbitL Open source Google Analytics replacement

#43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the IP address is hashed somehow it would no longer be personally identifying while still being unique enough for analytics purposes, correct? Does geographic grouping data depend on the IP address? If so I suppose it would need to be extracted first before hashing the IP, and I wonder how much that weakens the anonymization.

You can hash every IPV4 for a rainbow table. Needs some salt.

According to the author, Rybbit hashes IPs with a daily rotating salt.

https://www.reddit.com/r/selfhosted/comments/1kgytl4/i_built...

Re: RybbitL Open source Google Analytics replacement

#44
post #9

For me, the best Google analytics replacement has been nothing. Just don’t do analytics at all. Your web site will still work without it. In fact, it will work better!

Once upon a time we did analytics and error analysis by running shell scripts executing awk, sed and grep over a apache or nginx access log or error log. What I am trying to say is that you can still do analytics, even pretty advanced stuff with some more elaborate scripting, if you want. The only thing you need is the access log. Something which has been largely forgotten ever since tools like Urchin became a thing…

Except if any of your pages are cached between eyeball and your server and so your server logs don't capture everything that is going on. You can get fancy with web server logs, but depending on what you're trying to understand it may not be the data you need.

Re: RybbitL Open source Google Analytics replacement

#45
post #41
post #20

The market for Google Analytics alternatives is crowded. There's Plausible, Ahrefs web analytics, onedollarstats.com, PostHog, Matomo, Unami, Grafana, Microsoft Clarity (free at any scale), and so many others. Despite minor differences these products all compete for the same users (e.g. if someone is a PostHog customer they probably won't be using Ahref web analytics) yet most of these companies offer generous free t…

Posthog is pretty good but very pushy towards using their SaaS (understandably). Self hosting is not really advertised on their main site however is buried in their gh repo as a footnote [1] with indications of vague issues past 100K events/month. Haven’t delved into how to scale it past that though and they do provide some docs that I have yet to review. Also the primary repo is not FOSS, and that "100% FOSS" repo i…

> "Self hosting is not really advertised on their main site"

How would rybbit.io make money if they are only better at self hosting? Wouldn't the users they are targeting only self host anyways?

> "On "Ahrefs", is there even an open source version of their product? I couldn’t easily find it (on mobile)."

Not all of these companies are open source but they are still competitors because they have generous free tiers so the cost of self hosting an alternative wouldn't be justified.

Re: RybbitL Open source Google Analytics replacement

#47
post #20

The market for Google Analytics alternatives is crowded. There's Plausible, Ahrefs web analytics, onedollarstats.com, PostHog, Matomo, Unami, Grafana, Microsoft Clarity (free at any scale), and so many others. Despite minor differences these products all compete for the same users (e.g. if someone is a PostHog customer they probably won't be using Ahref web analytics) yet most of these companies offer generous free t…

Clarity is more of a Hotjar competitor, right?

It also tracks page views, referrers, geographic location, and other analytics common to rybbit

Re: RybbitL Open source Google Analytics replacement

#48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Upvote for matomo! This project here looks interesting, but is quite new. Lets see how it evolves in the future.

Matomo is an evolution of Piwik which was first released in 2007. So not 'quite new'.

Im talking about the project OP posted, not matomo.

Re: RybbitL Open source Google Analytics replacement

#49
post #20

The market for Google Analytics alternatives is crowded. There's Plausible, Ahrefs web analytics, onedollarstats.com, PostHog, Matomo, Unami, Grafana, Microsoft Clarity (free at any scale), and so many others. Despite minor differences these products all compete for the same users (e.g. if someone is a PostHog customer they probably won't be using Ahref web analytics) yet most of these companies offer generous free t…

As a founder in this space, it not as bad as you think. There are niches in this crowded yet broad space.

Plausible - good for self-hosting, but their SaaS is very expensive and FOSS vs SaaS offering differ.

Ahrefs - they will use your traffic to improve your competitor research, you really should use them cautiously.

Matomo - feature rich but can be overwhelming.

Posthog - its SaaS is US based so dismissed early by EU customers.

Clarity, like GA has serious privacy issues.

Our product, Wide Angle Analytics, has its own gotchas compared to competitors - its opinionated and there are folks who do not agree with our opinions, but the landscape of websites is so vast that you find your client nevertheless.

That said, we are still in business after 4 years, and we saw few competitors disappear or get acquired and extinguished.

So, all the best to the OP. Hope you find your niche :)

Re: RybbitL Open source Google Analytics replacement

#50
post #20

The market for Google Analytics alternatives is crowded. There's Plausible, Ahrefs web analytics, onedollarstats.com, PostHog, Matomo, Unami, Grafana, Microsoft Clarity (free at any scale), and so many others. Despite minor differences these products all compete for the same users (e.g. if someone is a PostHog customer they probably won't be using Ahref web analytics) yet most of these companies offer generous free t…

It's open source, why would you also need a free tier for hosting?
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