[HN Gopher] Ask HN: Best alternatives to Google Analytics in 2021?
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Ask HN: Best alternatives to Google Analytics in 2021?
I don't like the new GA interface. It's hard to do simple things
like display full-urls when you serve multiple subdomains. What
alternatives do you like and why?
Author : nyellin
Score : 141 points
Date : 2021-12-23 15:39 UTC (7 hours ago)
| zimmerx wrote:
| https://umami.is/ discovered this, some of my friends use it and
| it's pretty decent.
| metasyn wrote:
| i've been using this for a few months now. super easy to get
| set up and run yourself!
| yla92 wrote:
| +1 for Umami. Pretty straightforward to setup and run.
| kekebo wrote:
| I just switched from GA to Matomo[0] and have a good impression
| so far.
|
| Seems similar to Pirsch in terms of cookie less tracking, GDPR /
| DSGVO compliance, being open source, self-hostable, having a
| decent UI and API.
|
| [0] https://matomo.org/matomo-on-premise/
| x3ro wrote:
| I second Matomo. Easy to set-up and update and has an optional
| no-cookies (and thus no cookie banners) mode. I'm using it for
| my private sites, but have also used it professionally in the
| past.
| tetek wrote:
| GA is awful, always was. I got tired of it and started using
| splitbee.io
| sam_goody wrote:
| https://matomo.org
|
| That's the only full featured open source competitor I am aware
| of, so it should be mentioned.
|
| https://snowplowanalytics.com/
|
| Somewhat FOSS. There was a story there, but I don't remember the
| details.
|
| If you don't need much, plausible.io is decent but very low on
| details.
|
| Cloudflare seems to offer the same amount of data as Plausible,
| unblockable, and with no JS to load [especially if you pay $20
| for the better analytics], but I don't know what data they lose
| by browsers that cache dns queries etc.
| mooreds wrote:
| We use matomo. Takes some getting used to if you are coming
| from GA (for instance, can take a while to generate segments)
| but is nice and privacy friendly.
| nyellin wrote:
| Can you elaborate on the segments?
| sillysaurusx wrote:
| Matomo is pretty great. Just wanted to chime in to encourage
| others to self-host it. It was fast, free, and configurable.
| fourseventy wrote:
| If you run an e-commerce store this is a list of good
| alternatives that are specifically focused on e-com analytics
| https://thoughtmetric.io/topics/google-analytics-alternative...
| aaronsdevera wrote:
| One thing I am incredibly cognizant of is the balkanization of
| the web. Different territories and privacy regimes will dictate
| various compliance steps... navigating this will be difficult. As
| a site operator I plan on collecting analytics accordingly, with
| a polymorphic payload that knows whats allowed to be collected
| where possible...
| go_blue_13 wrote:
| If you're looking for an enterprise-grade solution, check out
| Rockerbox.com
| gompertz wrote:
| I use clicky.com, it's ultra lite weight and has tons of
| features.
| raimille1 wrote:
| I love splitbee.io, been using it for a year now in all my
| projects.
| nerdawson wrote:
| I switched to Fathom at the start of the month and I'm really
| happy with it. There is a trade off when you opt for a privacy
| focused product but I think it's more than worth it.
|
| Plus, I think the vast majority of companies overestimate the
| importance of the data they collect. Maybe there's some
| interesting insights buried in GA but if you aren't actually
| using them what difference does it make.
|
| I respect my site's visitors so I use a monitoring system that I
| personally have no problem being tracked by. I block GA in
| Firefox so why should I subject my visitors to it?
| jmondi wrote:
| I was running selfhosted fathom for several years. A few months
| ago, I decided I wanted to just defer that maintenance to a
| SaaS. I felt that fathom was just so expensive for any small
| use case... I couldn't justify the cost. Ended up switching to
| a paid version of Plausible and I couldn't be happier.
| andreidd wrote:
| posthog
|
| * it's open source
|
| * you can self host as a docker container
|
| * you can log from the client side or from the server side
|
| * awesome founders with HN accounts :P
| nyellin wrote:
| I thought Posthog was more of a Mixpanel competitor. Is it
| appropriate for aggregate data about anonymous users and
| referral/flow analysis too?
| anderspitman wrote:
| I compared[0] a few of the popular options a while back. TLDR;
| GoatCounter.
|
| [0]: https://apitman.com/20/#get-off-google-analytics
| beauHD wrote:
| https://www.goatcounter.com/
| csbartus wrote:
| Thanks for pointing this out. It's the first free analytics
| service for personal blogs, websites I've seen recently. The
| rest is subscription based and useful for revenue-generating
| businesses.
|
| The author seems to have the same itch when went to create this
| product: https://www.goatcounter.com/why
| csbartus wrote:
| I found this 'pay what you want' alternative in my bookmarks:
| https://counter.dev/
| jaggirs wrote:
| Goatcounter is exactly what I need, nothing more, nothing less.
| gherkinnn wrote:
| Fathom is a simple analytics product.
|
| It can track page views and events, the script is fairly small,
| is GDPR compliant, and gets out of your way.
|
| https://usefathom.com
| soperj wrote:
| Why do it client side instead of just logging it server side?
| Preferably async.
| crispyalmond wrote:
| I think this a really good approach. We've done something
| similar by exposing an endpoint and just PUT data to it from
| the client when something interesting happens. This works
| really well and the server is free to do whatever with it.
| paulcole wrote:
| I use the Query Explorer exclusively in place of the GA
| interface:
|
| https://ga-dev-tools.web.app/query-explorer/
|
| Dead simple to create the queries I want and then copy/paste into
| a spreadsheet.
|
| You can also use the query URLs with the access token to easily
| get data into Jupyter Notebooks or whatever else you want to use
| for deeper analysis.
| kyrra wrote:
| I'm actually interesting in this as well. I've noticed watching
| the HTTP logs for my small site, I have traffic on it (it auto-
| polls my server every 60 seconds to report updated status), but
| none of those show up as "active" users in Google Analytics. I'm
| guessing uBlock Origin blocking GA by default is a likely cause.
| jefftk wrote:
| What do the user agent strings look like? It is possible you
| are seeing bots.
| marvinblum wrote:
| > I'm guessing uBlock Origin blocking GA by default is a likely
| cause.
|
| Yep, GA being blocked is a major issue. You can use server-side
| analytics [0] to prevent any JS from being blocked.
|
| [0] https://docs.pirsch.io/get-started/backend-integration/
| (I'm the co-founder of it)
| ncake wrote:
| I use a script I wrote in an hour, which parses nginx access.log
| and prints last visitors to a "_stats.txt" file.
|
| It's 90% requests made by bots, so I didn't bother making a UI.
| vieclamdmpt wrote:
| https://viclmbcninhbcgiangdmpt.fwscart.com/
| jazzychad wrote:
| A couple of friends of mine are building Firstparty -
| https://firstpartyhq.com - the idea is to serve the analytics
| code/cookie from your own domain (hence, first party). I've been
| using them for some of my websites and mobile apps. The reporting
| is nascent at the moment, but it is being built at a fast pace.
| 58x14 wrote:
| Surprised to not see Simple Analytics here, which I always try
| and plug (no affiliation, just a happy user):
| https://simpleanalytics.com/
| encoderer wrote:
| I'm a big fan of PanelBear.com and I recently implemented it on
| Crontab.guru (500k monthly visits).
|
| It was painless, the ux is clean and polished, and I can see
| panelbear tracking 5% greater visits over the same time period as
| GA due likely to people who had adblocked GA.
| superasn wrote:
| I prefer goaccess(1) over any other tool that uses client side
| Javascript.
|
| It's basically a real time website log analyser which gives you
| enough information to know whats happening on your website but
| doesn't require any pesky Javascript etc to do it.
|
| Also since it is works by analysing your log files it can never
| be blocked.
|
| (1) https://rt.goaccess.io/?20210826211303
| kingcharles wrote:
| If you want total accuracy, then the only solution is to
| analyze your HTTP logs like this. You won't get much in the way
| of knowing your clients, except what comes through in the HTTP
| requests, e.g. URI, IP address, browser and platform, but
| you'll also know you're not missing any requests.
| jefftk wrote:
| Most people running sites care less about exactly counting
| the number of requests than knowing details about their
| visitors and behavior.
|
| If I try to process my server logs directly I either need to
| manually filter out bots, which are the majority of traffic,
| or I need to use some sort of collaboratively maintained bot
| identification system. Alternatively, I can use any of the
| services people are mentioning here and they will do that for
| me.
| Ciantic wrote:
| I use Goaccess too for simple things, but I've found that it's
| not really suitable if you want to compare stats of different
| months or years, or look into specific week.
|
| This is because goaccess aggregates reports to single HTML
| file. If you give it a year of logs, it compresses whole year
| in one graph. It didn't seem to have interactive way to explore
| whole year.
|
| Most people don't care and just generate monthly HTML report
| file, but that has same flaws as yearly file.
| antidnan wrote:
| https://plausible.io/
|
| No cookies, GDPR compliant, simple interface
| kingcharles wrote:
| See my post above about Plausible:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29664684
| jdorfman wrote:
| Documentation Insights by Scarf
|
| * Simple dashboard
|
| * Displays which: * businesses are visiting your
| documentation pages. * locales they are coming from
| (geolocation data in aggregate). * pages are most
| frequently visited.
|
| https://about.scarf.sh/documentation-insights
|
| Edit: formatting
| urcoilbisurco wrote:
| I created https://metrical.xyz
|
| No cookies and banners to setup, custom domains, simple UI, share
| monitors with others, basic custom events support. Just the
| things that I needed, nothing more. Hope will come useful to
| somebody else!
| ksec wrote:
| Cloudflare Analytics or something on server with GoAccess.
|
| SimpleAnalytics, Fathom, Pirsch and Plausible. They are all very
| similar from pricing, to display layout. The problem is they dont
| track returning visitors. Some argue that is against privacy,
| some think it is acceptable for 30 days period. I remember there
| was one Analytics from EUR that offer returning visitors stats
| but again.. Bookmarks on browser is practically useless. So I
| cant find it anymore.
| marvinblum wrote:
| Pirsch does track returning visitors. As long as no PII is
| stored, it's fine.
| weinzierl wrote:
| I run my own Matomo. Boring and old-school, but serves me well.
| marvinblum wrote:
| Clearly Pirsch Analytics!
|
| https://pirsch.io/
|
| No cookies, open-source core, GDPR compliant, nice UI, and an
| extensive API.
| colbyhub wrote:
| Wow Pirsch looks incredible, will definitely use them for my
| blog and projects.
| gsa wrote:
| Promoting my own side project: https://nocookieanalytics.com/.
|
| Cookie free, API first and open source with a focus on speed.
| It's not as featured as some of the other well known projects in
| this area, but it's a work in progress.
| JaumeRF wrote:
| At ekademy.eu we use plausible.
| Taywee wrote:
| My needs are pretty simple, but I just do server-side logging in
| a Django Middleware. I wanted to use a tracking cookie to track a
| user across the site, but I had a hell of a time trying to figure
| out whether that violated the GDPR, so I just log the user agent
| instead.
|
| What really is the major gain to a big third party analytics
| platform when you really just need to know how somebody moves
| through your site, what the hot and cold paths are, and what
| influences retention and revisits?
| Jaume_RF wrote:
| barrystaes wrote:
| I used a self hosted Matomo (free and open source) for websites
| and apps, and it was simpler and (because of that) more flexible
| than Google Analytics.
|
| Less UI clutter is nice also for colleagues.
| KingOfCoders wrote:
| Depending on your needs Simple Analytics or none.
| buro9 wrote:
| I'm currently using Cloudflare and their SDK+API to pull logs,
| which I then push into Loki. I then use Grafana to render the
| dashboards I want.
|
| This isn't for everyone, I'm super comfortable doing this because
| of familiarity with all the components. But there's no out of the
| box dashboard for this so you have to replicate the UI parts you
| value. At least with Grafana once done you're in control of it
| and you own it.
|
| I prefer server logs from the edge for their completeness. There
| are things missing... I.e. client side knowledge of screen sizes
| and device types. But server logs are so much more complete than
| client side JavaScript from third parties that are frequently
| adblocked.
| nyellin wrote:
| Unfortunately this won't work as I have an SPA
| treelovinhippie wrote:
| Kovah wrote:
| Is there some blog article on how to do that? Would be
| interested in trying it out.
| immnn wrote:
| Try etracker: https://www.etracker.com/
|
| It is cookie-less, so no opt in is required in EU.
|
| And off course you could have a look at goaccess. It's parsing
| your access-logs and generates some nice metrics-dashboard.
| https://goaccess.io/
| obmelvin wrote:
| I know that Mixpanel is very event focused, and it seems like the
| question is more on page tracking, but surprised that no one has
| mentioned it. Has mixpanel fallen out of favor or is the lack of
| mention because it's a bit out of scope for the OP?
| jFriedensreich wrote:
| was wondering the same, in terms of features (retention grid,
| user centric tracking, funnels, advanced queries) and ui few
| things come close but its probably pretty costly compared to ga
| nyellin wrote:
| OP here. I'm going to give Mixpanel a try. I'm essentially
| looking for two things:
|
| 1. Product analytics on logged in users in a SaaS platform
|
| 2. Aggregate analytics on anonymous users with funnel
| analysis, referral analysis, etc.
| shafyy wrote:
| If you're looking for web analytics, I love and can recommend
| Plausible (https://plausible.io/). It's both simple and privacy-
| friendly.
|
| Inspired by Plausible, I recently launched Fugu
| (https://fugu.lol). Fugu is a simple and privacy-friendly product
| analytics tool. It offers only event-based tracking, so it's
| better suited for web or mobile apps and not web sites (go for
| Plausible for websites). Fugu doesn't track unique users or any
| personally identifiable information. It's pretty basic for now,
| but I'm working on adding conversion funnels next (I work on it
| in my free time).
|
| Fugu is open-source[0] and self-hostable. I make money by
| providing a managed version for $9/month.
|
| 0: https://github.com/shafy/fugu
| kingcharles wrote:
| I would not recommend Plausible (well, their commercial
| offering anyway). I had a bad run-in with them recently. Their
| site would not log data from my web site at all (their
| Javascript just threw an error in the console and would not
| execute). I filed a ticket. They brushed it off and said they'd
| had a brief look and couldn't figure it out, and basically
| tough shit, and told me to just download their open source
| version and install it locally.
|
| What annoyed me was that if it's not logging on my site, how
| many other sites is it under-reporting for? YOU DON'T KNOW WHAT
| YOU DON'T KNOW. And the fact they weren't willing to give it
| any serious thought at all. This is bad for an analytics
| company.
|
| I tried (begrudgingly) and put Google Analytics behemoth of
| Javascript on my site and it worked perfectly, so I knew it was
| a bug in their system, not mine.
|
| At that point I decided to try and figure it out so I fired up
| a proxy and sat there for a couple of hours going back and
| forth until I did figure it out myself. The bug is in their web
| server configuration really, not in the actually logging
| Javascript. Now, it might have been unethical of me, I don't
| know, but I felt since I'd spent a ton of my time to figure out
| a serious bug in their product it would be nice if they would
| throw me a year's free subscription. I felt that was fair
| compensation. They said no way, don't worry about, basically
| "I'm sure we'll figure it out ourselves in the future one day,
| don't call us."
|
| So at that point I decided screw it, I can see they don't care
| about their customers and product, so I'm looking for
| alternatives that aren't GA.
|
| That's my 2 cents. Your mileage may vary.
|
| tl;dr: Be aware their product has a bug which causes it to not
| log data in certain circumstances (the script won't execute)
| and therefore if you are using their commercial product you
| might not be seeing all your visitors.
| shafyy wrote:
| That sucks that you had a bad experience with Plausible. I've
| never had any problems, and interactions with them on Twitter
| have always been very friendly and helpful.
|
| Now, of course, products have bugs and once you have
| thousands of users there will be edge cases if it not
| working. Obviously, they should have handled the interaction
| with you differently.
|
| Out of interest, can you expand more on when the bug occurs?
| Btw, if you have a fix for it, you can also create a PR.
| kingcharles wrote:
| I can't create a PR as the bug is with their server
| configuration. I don't think there is anything wrong with
| their code, per se. I think if I installed it locally it
| would work fine.
|
| It is a real shame. I went to Plausible because they had
| posted on here, and I'm all for supporting people that show
| up on HN and seem to be decent human beings. They did not
| reply to my Tweet to them, I only got support through
| e-mail, which they weren't that quick about. I'm bummed
| because the software seemed to be what I wanted, but
| they've lost my trust now.
| cuu508 wrote:
| Curious - so what was the problem with their server
| configuration?
| kingcharles wrote:
| What's weird is that your comment here caused some sort
| of weird bug in HN that I've not seen before (no reply
| button): https://kingcharles.one/weird-hn-bug.png
|
| @dang - any ideas on this one?
|
| The issue with Plausible's server: I didn't want to put
| it out there because then they get the fix for their
| commercial product for free after I spent the time doing
| all the work for them, but I feel like the same bug might
| actually exist all over the Web, so I'm going to write it
| up and post it online.
| forty wrote:
| I think HN somehow limit the pace of answers in fast
| threads to let people the time to think before they post
| (so the reply button appears with a bit of delay)
| sokoloff wrote:
| If you really must blow through the delay, click on the
| timestamp of the post you want to reply to and the reply
| box will show there.
| shafyy wrote:
| Oh I see. Again, I'm sorry that you had this experience.
| Hopefully they read this and can make it up to you
| somehow.
| edoceo wrote:
| Why would that user create a PR to help a for-profit
| company they don't have a good relationship with? Why would
| anyone what to help a group that disrespected you?
| kingcharles wrote:
| And I would have happily created a PR for their open
| source version that they generously give away for free,
| but the bug is in their web server configuration for
| their hosted product, so they need to put the fix in.
|
| I didn't feel I was being unreasonable asking for free
| use of their product for a year (after which I would
| obviously have to pay), for a web app I am writing which
| currently has practically zero traffic. As bug bounties
| go, it wasn't a bad deal I thought.
| falafelite wrote:
| This is a really cool thing to work on in your free time!
| Thanks for sharing. Also, +1 to plausible for simple website
| analytics.
| shafyy wrote:
| Thanks :-)
| rasulkireev wrote:
| I second Plausible. Have been using it close to a year now.
| Very happy about it. It is probably not as feature rich as GA,
| but who needs those features, right. On the other hand they are
| adding new things everyday, but they focus on what users want.
| nicbou wrote:
| I use Plausible on https://allaboutberlin.com, mainly for
| privacy and UX reasons (no cookie notice).
|
| It's good, but it doesn't replace Google Analytics at all. It
| tracks visits and events, but not navigation and user flow.
| It's severely lacking in detail compared to Analytics. It's a
| compromise, not a drop-in replacement.
|
| However, it's excellent as a simple tracker for average website
| admins. I'm very happy with it. The maintainers have been
| nothing short of stellar with their support and transparency.
| shafyy wrote:
| Cool! Your website looks great. I also live in Berlin! Give
| Fugu a spin if you want to track conversion funnels (coming
| soon) and event properties.
| mousetree wrote:
| Wow, amazing site! Wish I knew about it earlier!
| rPlayer6554 wrote:
| Wow, this is a fantastic site. I definitely plan on visiting
| Berlin at some point and I'll use it.
| rraval wrote:
| I too wanted to preserve privacy and avoid a cookie banner
| for my blog. I ended up rolling a privacy preserving proxy
| via Cloudflare workers that forwards `pageview` events to
| Google Analytics. It's a single HTML tag to drop in and
| preserves the navigation and user flow reports on the GA
| side.
|
| See https://github.com/rraval/zeroindexed/tree/master/package
| s/t...
|
| The blog explains expanded motivation:
| https://zeroindexed.com/privacy
| kingcharles wrote:
| Does Fugu have a free trial period? I would need to test it
| actually works at all before I start paying for it. Plausible,
| fortunately, has a free trial on their commercial product, so I
| could figure out instantly that their system is broken. I would
| have hated to pay money only to find it had a terminal bug and
| they wouldn't fix it.
|
| Basically, I'd like a couple of days grace before having to pay
| for it, so I could install it on my app and see if it even
| works.
|
| The reason I wouldn't install Fugu locally (or Plausible
| locally) is that I don't want a whole different deployment
| channel to support. Likely your code needs a different web
| server or framework than the rest of my stuff, and that is a
| lot of setup, installation and support. But I do like that the
| option exists and that I can see the code.
| shafyy wrote:
| Yes it does have an infinite free trial period :-) You can
| track events in test mode without having a subscription. Test
| mode events are auto-deleted after 14 days. Creating an
| accounting doesn't require a credit card.
| kingcharles wrote:
| OK. PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE put that at the very top of your
| site somewhere. It doesn't say that anywhere that I can
| see. It just tells me I can self-host for free, or pay
| $9/month. I clicked off the site because of that, even
| though the product looked cool.
|
| Let people clearly know they can test drive it for free to
| see if it works.
|
| EDIT: OK, I see it says that once I click GET STARTED, but
| that's too late, because I never clicked that button
| because I didn't want to pay $9 to find out if it worked.
| You need to make it really clear on the front page.
|
| Also, put a "Sign-up" button next to Sign-In in the top-
| right corner. That was the first place I looked to try to
| create an account - I didn't go straight for the GET
| STARTED button.
| shafyy wrote:
| Thanks for the feedback! Makes sense, will update it!
| jkbl wrote:
| I had a same problem, but GA is only the tip of the iceberg. A
| lot of apps with analytics capabilities have usability problem.
| In some, metrics are hidden too deep and it's hard to navigate.
| Others lack simple features and do not let you change things like
| timezone or displayed currency. But the biggest pain point for me
| was integration with data from other apps.
|
| To simplify things I am building Raport[1]. Raport integrates
| metrics from multiple sources (GA, Search Console, Stripe,
| Adsense) and displays them in clear and simple to use dashboard.
| It is not an alternative to GA and other tools, but rather works
| alongside them as an additional interface, where you can view all
| your data. For me personally Raport saved me a lot of time I
| spent in GA and Search Console.
|
| [1] https://raport.pro
| tommy_ford wrote:
| Yeah, I agree with that. A lot of these tools have usability
| issues. I kinda like Search Console but Google Analytics or
| Facebook Business gave me some terrible data analysis
| experiences.
|
| I checked out your tool. Looks perfect for my needs but I need
| do dive a bit deeper to say more. I assume you plan to add more
| integrations in the future. Have you thought about adding an
| integration with LinkedIn? That'd be helpful for me.
| jkbl wrote:
| I agree, Facebook Business is the worst. And it crashes in
| Safari.
|
| Our plan is to create integrations for social media platforms
| next (Facebook, Instagram, Twitter). I do not have experience
| with LinkedIn, but we'll definitely add it too, if there is
| data to analyze.
|
| Feel free to explore the app and leave us a feedback if you
| want.
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(page generated 2021-12-23 23:01 UTC)