6 Open Source Alternatives to Google Analytics

Once again, the open source. This time I present six free alternatives to Google Analytics based on BTW’s open source alternatives, lightweight and cookie-free self hosted applications, and some even with a plugin option for WordPress CMS based websites like D-Art.Work and more than 42% of websites world.

Matomo Analytics – Total Data Protection

Matomo Analytics, formerly Piwik, is the number one alternative to Google Analytics. It’s a free and open source web analytics application developed by a team of international programmers, running on a PHP/MySQL web server, offering a wide range of features, security and users privacy protection. Matomo allows you to learn how to improve your website, making the right decisions for your business and differentiate yourself from the competition in a safe and reliable way.

Matomo’s mission is to enable you to give control and ownership of the data back to the user. By hosting the web analytics on your own server, there is no third-party ownership, no sale of data, and no one can access this same data. This means that by installing Matomo, in a few clicks you are in total control.

Amongst the many features, the most important is the 100% control of your data, also very easy to install, with a very intuitive interface and turnkey features, including many ecommerce shops, requiring less manual setup than Google Analytics, free to use forever, no data sampling, GDPR manager, opportunities to increase functionality with a growing market, Matomo’s Tag Manager, many features to anonymize data and IP addresses, features to export and delete data in compliance with all international data protection politics, ability to configure data retention and so much more.

Matomo even has a WordPress plugin with support for WP Rest API, support for WordPress multisite, WP shortcode for embedding an opt-out feature on your site and more.

Matomo also has a premium version hosted on the Matomo’s Cloud for the ones interested in extra features.

Matomo is used by over 1.4 million websites in over 190 countries and has been translated into 54 languages. New versions are released regularly.

Plausible Analytics – Simple And Privacy Friendly

Plausible is a lightweight, open-source web analytics, cookie-free and fully compliant with all international data protection policies. The simplicity of the application contrasts the complexity of Google Analytics whose data collection ends up being overkill for most websites, still requiring time to understand and use correctly.

Plausible is easy to use and understand, with no training or prior experience required. It presents metrics in a simple, intuitive and very practical way, focusing on the measurements that really matter, avoiding layers of navigation menus, custom reports and a whole panoply of useless information for most websites. Plausible is specially thought in the entrepreneur that wants the creation and fast evolution to a better website, providing all the important analysis in only one page of immediate comprehension.

Using Plausible will also contribute to a faster loading speed of your website as the Plausible Analytics script is over 17 times smaller than the Google Analytics script and over 45 times smaller than the recommended Google Analytics integration using Google Tag Manager.

Plausible also has a plugin for WordPress, updated several times a week, with Google Search Console integration so you can see your position in Google search results and much, much more.

However, the only free option of this application is in self hosted mode, but you must have a dedicated server or a hosting provider that includes this application in your hosting control panel. Even in WordPress and using the plugin, you will always have to subscribe to a monthly subscription to view your website data analysis.

Umami Analytics – Free, Simple And Fast

Similar to Matomo and Plausible, Umami is a simple and easy to use analytics solution, collecting only the metrics that matter and on a single page, as an alternative to the heavy and complex Google Analytics framework.

Umami is also a self hosting application, on dedicated hosting, it does not have a plugin for WordPress, but it is totally free and without premium options.

Some of its features covers unlimited web page tracking including subdomains and individual URLs, effective ad-blocker bypass (unlike Google Analytics), super lightweight tracking script, the lightest on the market, supporting legacy browsers, multiple account support, public data sharing option, mobile optimization and management, full data anonymization, full data ownership and much more.

Umami is open source and licensed under the MIT license. The source code is available on Github.

Countly Analytics – Product Analytics And Innovation

Countly is the best open source enterprise and marketing analytics platform for web analytics to help understand and improve customer experience across web, desktop and mobile applications. 

Among the features that set it apart from other similar platforms, Countly provides analysis directly and in real time when most competitors show their results long after the data has been collected, usually hours later. It also has a modern and pleasant interface that is effective and focused on user satisfaction.

Countly has received several awards and mentions since 2013, including recognition by G2 who ranked Countly in the list of top 10 mobile analytics products and Mobbo who listed Countly in 7th place as the largest deployed Android analytics SDK worldwide.

Countly does not have any WordPress plugins, but offers a free plan in addition to the paid enterprise plan.

The company has over 150 enterprise clients, helping them to grow their businesses more solidly.

PostHog Analytics – Self Host to Keep Data Private

PostHog is a self-hosted, all-in-one open source platform for developers and product teams, enabling deployment of individualized infrastructure, offering a suite of analytics tools, including funnels, experimentation, collaboration, heatmaps, session recording, trending, diagnostics and more. This enables data and engineering teams to get information faster without having to write any SQL to get product answers, while teams that prefer to avoid direct data manipulation are able to self-serve and get answers without needing support.

PostHog helps programmers and engineers build better products without sharing their data with anyone. Deploy in your own infrastructure and automatically collect events, session recordings and more.

Posthog has one free plan and two premium plans tailored to customer needs.

Rudderstack Analytics – Privacy And Security Focused

Rudderstack is a Hosthog-like application, a platform created by data engineers and scientist for data engineers and data scientists.

Provides data pipelines that make it easy to collect data from each application, transforms the engineer’s data warehouse into an open customer data platform.

RudderStack’s open source, enterprise-grade customer data infrastructure makes it simple for data engineers to capture event data from applications and websites, process it and route it to both their data warehouse and the cloud applications used by other teams in their company.

RudderStack has a free plan with limited events and two premium plans tailored to the client’s needs.

Common to all alternatives is the concern with total privacy and data control, the lightness of script code so as not to harm the performance of websites and applications, as well as its open source nature so as to offer the client all the transparency and possibility of adaptation to different projects, businesses and ideas.

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