A list of privacy-friendly Google Analytics alternatives

Nice list. This topic comes often and is always interesting to see if something new appears, but unfortunately it's very hard to compete with Google Analytics.

Most people in marketing departments just don't care about privacy, and it's hard to beat inertia, especially for a solid product with a lot of documentation which is "free as in beer".

I personally use http://microanalytics.io which is very slick for my needs and free for up to 10k visits per month, but I don't think it's a Google Analytics replacement.

>Google Analytics is free, although it is not. Google Analytics makes money off the personal data they collect from their customers.

This isn't strictly true though. Google Analytics has a free and a paid tier with GA360, which is for larger businesses.

More to the point, half of these aren't suitable for marketing decisions when you have multiple paid entrypoints to your site. The major, but simple, ones for marketing;

* Channel Groups - being able to merge multiple UTM tags or referrers into a single channel for comparison

* User Retention - even privacy first, it's important that you can track user activity onsite via a logged-in user ID.

* Bot Removal & IP removal - Excluding an office from the GA stats is important to track actual users compared to your colleagues checking in on details.

* Channel comparison for conversion rate - i.e. Google Ads vs FB Ads.

Fathom seems like the top one from this, but it still doesn't have any of these features. It has self removal via the console, but that's not quite the same. The dashboard Pirsch shows doesn't show any of these features, and most of them seem to have filters, but no general comparison windows. Same for Umami.

Note on Plausable analytics, you can actually host it yourself and pay nothing'!

I'm paranoid enough to think Google will, at some point, decide to penalise your website if you're running other analytics

I totally get your point! The thing is, in my opinion loads of people use GA simply because they do not know of any other alternatives, and among them there might be folks who do not need GA in first place because they simply want to get some insights about the traffic happening on their website, because it would be interesting for them to know.

For those folks, I would recommend to use a GA alternative (for example one from the list).

But you are right, at the top enterprise level, for folks focusing on marketing measures and decisions, most of the GA alternatives might not be suitable simply because they are missing some features.