Privacy-first analytics - what do you use & do you get the data you need?

I switched to Plausible more than a year ago and I love it, it provides me with anything I need. I wrote this about privacy-conscious alternatives:

https://rocketvalidator.com/blog/privacy-conscious

Shynet, a self hosted stats app using Django framework.

I put together a good list of options:
https://nts.strzibny.name/privacy-oriented-alternatives-to-google-analytics/

I use Plausible but some new ones look good too.

I was just in the process of writing a blog post about this when I saw your question (https://andypi.co.uk/2022/12/18/best-privacy-first-wordpress-analytics-gdpr/). I use both Matomo and Countly. As far as I can work out, apart from Offen.dev, these are the only (self-hosted) analytics solutions that allow you to track Personally Identifiable Information etc in a GPPR compliant way. One of my clients wants to track rentention & returning visits as an organisational objective, and so I use Matomo for them since it is has a fuller set of features that include this - of course this requires consent inside the EU and other locations too. If you are looking for anonymous (and without using consent popups), then I've tried https://counter.dev/, it's ok but would not recommend as its feature set is too limited. I'm also looking for an anonymous analytics software without needing consent, so I'm going to checkout plausible.io as other commenters have mentioned. I think simpleanalytics.com is similar as well.

I also vote Plausible! Two things worth noting: 1) Can't track retention (see https://plausible.io/data-policy) and 2) Ad blockers will block it even though it's one of the "privacy-focused" analytics tools. Still love the tool though :)

I tried Posthog but wasn't a fan personally, because the dashboard was a bit cluttered and the analytics out of the box was wrong for my project (more DAUs than WAUs somehow).

I haven't tried it, but https://pirsch.io/ also seems interesting. Much cheaper than Plausible's cloud-hosted offering, and the UI looks clean.

I mainly use a self-hosted plausible.io setup. It's almost free and I like that. It's doesn't store data that can be considered identifying information so that's really good privacy-wise. You can signup for a subscription via GitHub sponsors and get customer support like a normal paying customer while still using the self-hosted version.

One main thing to know, your analytics will almost certainly be blocked by ad blockers so your analytics are always going to be wrong.

The downside of plausible is that it's by design very simple. So you're goal conversion data is rather simple. They are working on adding funnel stuff which is cool. If you're self hosted your geo data is limited by what version of the data library you're willing to get. The free is good enough. But considering all I really care about is, what page did they enter from, what pages did they exit from and what are the referrers the data is good enough.

I use https://umami.is/ free and privacy focus, easy to start with and I can host on a myriad of platforms.

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Hi Steve,

I'd like you to have a look at my product https://usermaven.com. There's a generous free plan (upto 1 million monthly events) so you can test-drive it by yourself.

I am confident, you'd love the simplicity and ease of use because we autocapture events so you don't need to write code everytime you want to track something.

And, it's far more advanced in powers than Plausible, Pirsch or any other privacy-friednly analytics out in the market.

Looking forward to hearing from you!

• Waqar