Should I use Yandex Metrica?

No. If you are afraid for your data with Google, Yandex is way worse. They are compliant with Russian laws, which privacy is not even a thing.

In all honesty this is probably just me being prejudiced, but I feel like I trust a Russian company with my users' data even less than I trust Google.

Anyway, personally, when I think of alternatives to Google Analytics the first thing that comes to mind are privacy-focused alternatives like Fathom Analytics and Matomo, not stuff like Yandex Metrica.

I have not used Metrica but, in general, I think Yandex has a lot of great services that are often overlooked by Western developers. Not sure why, other than bias... their docs are in English and services are available worldwide. I don't feel they are any more or less evil in their data gathering practices -- they are GDPR compliant.

I use it for all of my pet projects as main analytics tool. But I'm from Russia, though :)

In a very crowded field of tools, is there a strong draw for you to use it? There are a lot of great tools in the web analytics space, many of which have strong features, experience at scale, GDPR compliance, and generous free tiers. Off the top of my head: GA, Mixpanel, Amplitude, Heap...

Those tools are all fully featured and come without a certain sense of geopolitical risk, which I think is the serious matter referred to by other posters when talking about Russia. In addition to being an analytics practitioner, I have an advanced degree in international affairs, so I'll put that hat on for this post.

To put a little more meat on those bones, see this article from the Financial Times, which explains that the Russian government has seized some control of Yandex:
https://www.ft.com/content/dce2e23c-15c5-11ea-8d73-6303645ac406

I think the money quote comes at the end:

Yandex began talks with domestic policy chief Sergei Kirienko, Mr Putin’s point man in charge of controlling the internet. Mr Kirienko backed down from an idea to appoint Gazprom chief executive Alexei Miller and longtime lieutenant Alexander Dyukov, head of Gazprom’s oil subsidiary to Yandex’s board.

But the people selected as the foundation’s eventual nominees had to be agreed with the Kremlin, though Mr Kirienko promised them autonomy, according to two people involved in the talks. “He wanted human buttons,” one of them said. Gazprom and Gazprom Neft declined to comment.

The deal’s main selling point, according to another person who worked on it, is that “it could have been much worse”.

Hours after the new structure was announced, a lawmaker withdrew a Kremlin-backed bill that would limit foreign investors to no more than 20 per cent holdings in “significant information resources.” Yandex’s stock promptly regained nearly all the $1.5bn it lost after a preliminary hearing for the bill in October.

But the Kremlin’s power over its tech sector means Russian companies essentially live at its behest, a person close to Yandex admitted.

“If Mr Macron gets grumpy about the internet in Paris, he can call Mountain View. There are only three people in the world who can make a local phone call — Mr Xi, Mr Trump, and Mr Putin.”

With my political analysis hat on, I suspect that Putin's motives are domestic in nature. This corporate control is consistent with other sectors in Russia's economy. The non-profit Human Rights Watch looks at another move made by the Kremlin toward the internet - the 2019 "sovereign internet" law, namely - as a matter of domestic political control, focused on crushing dissent by blocking messaging services when needed and ensuring that data about Russian customers is held on Russian servers so the data can be accessed by the government as desired:
https://www.hrw.org/news/2020/06/18/russia-growing-internet-isolation-control-censorship

Looking at Yandex Metrica in isolation, this is likely a world-class service built by great engineers who are largely good people, in a political system they may or may not prefer. But, living firmly in the West, why take on the risk that it gets blocked or Yandex begins to have human rights issues?

(Sidebar: matters like these are why I am skeptical of complaints about services like Google Analytics being serious invasions of privacy, when knocked by founders of lightweight services. There are unfree parts of the world in which some data being transmitted can genuinely constitute a risk of one's life. That's not a geopolitical preference for the US, however. American companies such as Palantir or Banjo are equally worrying.)

In sum, I consider what The Economist frequently calls the "splinternet:" the idea that there will be separate internets, namely one US-led and one China-led, each blocking the other. Where does Russia land as that separation happens? How does that impact your measurement for your service a few years down the line?

Yandex is so identified as the Russian search engine I barely even opened this post 🤣
Didn't know they default to English now for the search either... (Probably personalised)

Well at least I think it's around that associating them with specific region and not as a normal open to the wide market thing... And people would probably be wary with related politics not always going well...

I didn't know they have these tools
I'd probably only use it with a plan b system/data if it's critical or consider the data is disposable
Just a weird thing about unbalanced playing field