19
28 Comments

The Best Alternatives to Google Analytics according to the IH Community

Last week I asked the IH community for some alternatives to Google Analytics. If I am honest, I am not an expert in analytics by any means, but I was thinking that there had to be some good alternatives other than big G.

Here are some of the best alternatives as curated by the community:

  1. Plausible.io from Indie Hacker's own @markosaric
  2. Matamo
  3. Splitbee
  4. Fathom
  5. Simple Analytics
  6. Mixpanel for product metrics

Some more analytics tools being built by Indie Hackers:

  1. 7

    I can +1 Plausable.

    I started using it a week ago on FilmFed.com and it works great. It gives me what I need in a light weight privacy first package. 👍

    1. 1

      Plausible does seem pretty awesome. I just really wish it was freemium.

      When I start a project, I get analytics set up. But at that point in time I'm not ready to invest money in it. I want to see traction first. Once I see traction I'm willing too pay for analytics. But at that point I probably don't want to switch over to something new instead.

      So I'm thinking Splitbee makes sense for me since it seems pretty good and is freemium. If Plausible was freemium I'd use it over Splitbee though. cc @markosaric

      (I don't mean to be entitled or anything. I know people need to be paid and $9/month isn't actually a lot of money. Just figured that sharing my thought process would be helpful. It is n=1 but I also suspect a lot of others feel similarly.)

      1. 1

        Plausible is open source. If you want to use it for free, just self host it. I have been extremely happy with Plausible for 2 years now. It is worth the minimal cost in my eyes just to support the growth of the platform.

        https://plausible.io/docs/self-hosting

        1. 1

          Thanks for the feedback Adam, appreciate it! And great to hear you're still enjoying Plausible, Chris!

          We don't have any plans to introduce free plans. We're not monetizing the data we collect so we're funded by the fees our subscribers pay us. Free tier would add a lot of extra cost in server infrastructure and customer support so it's not that simple to introduce it.

          We've tried to make our plans as fair and as affordable as possible. If you choose to subscribe to the full year, we give you 2 months free. You can add multiple websites to the same account too. Thanks for understanding!

    2. 4

      This comment was deleted a year ago.

      1. 2

        Glad to hear this! Thank you both for supporting Plausible!

  2. 4

    Happy Fathom customer here!

  3. 3

    I've been using Fathom for 1.5 years on Packetriot and it works great. Would use it for other projects. I self-host it but they provide hosting solutions that might be worth considering.

    I've used Fathom in parallel with GA for a short time and found that they measure activity almost identically.

    GA quick to setup, Fathom may require more work upfront but the GA dashboard is so complicated now and Fathom provides my metrics simply and effectively.

    1. 1

      Thanks for the insight @jborak

    1. 2

      Unrelated, but I love the artwork on your landing page. Giving me beautiful claymation vibes.

  4. 2

    Thanks, @gordon for listing FoxMetrics, however, the link is incorrect, it should be https://www.foxmetrics.com

    1. 1

      Thanks for catching that @subzero. I have updated it now. Cheers!

  5. 2

    I have looked at a lot of alternatives, and I always come back to GA because the alternatives seem to only offer vanity metrics and are missing the key features required for ecomm/SaaS.

    Tracking page views and referral sources in isolation is a useless metric (unless you're running a blog).

    The real value in analytics comes from setting up goals and funnels and being able to slice 'n dice data across multiple dimensions and filter by source, campaign, demographic etc.

    I need to understand where my conversions are coming from and which channels are performing the best.

    If there is one of these alternatives that offers these features then I'd love to give it a try, I dislike Google and would rather pay for a great analytics service with a better UI and email reports.

    1. 1

      This is a good point @kylegawley. Thanks for sharing. It can be hard to match all of the features and functionality of GA with another tool.

  6. 2

    I compiled a GA alternative list on my blog. First 6 being open-source. Depending on your programming background you can pick one made in Elixir, Go, PHP, and Crystal.

    I also put Plausible as a first one, because of the open-source nature, Elixir backend (valuable to me if I want self-host or contribute) and fair pricing. I use Fathom now though and testing Netlify analytics (will hopefully report on it soon).

    1. 1

      Thanks Josef for featuring Plausible!

  7. 2

    I’ve been a happy Matomo customer for two months and can confirm it’s a solid alternative to GA. It was worth the switch!

  8. 2

    Anybody using Netlify Analytics (if you host your site on Netlify)? I like the idea of not relying on client-side javascript and tracking pixels. It captures all the info server-side.

    But it does seem a little expensive ($9 per site) for what little it offers compared to some of these other ones.

    1. 1

      I spent a few hours researching this stuff today so I am by no means an expert, but I have a few thoughts here. I considered Netlify Analytics as well. I use Netlify to host a variety of sites and have liked it so far, so I was excited about their analytics tool. However, I decided against it.

      1. After coming across Client side vs server side analytics: What's the gap in data?, it seems that server-side analytics solutions do a pretty bad job of handling bots and the data could be off by something like 10-100x.
      2. Netlify Analytics doesn't mention any of that! The fact that they don't mention it makes me feel like they are dishonest about their product, which makes it hard for me to trust them. I'm not sure how much trust really matters here though.
      3. There is no free tier. I'm not one to shy away from buying instead of building. However, I at least like to get analytics set up right away on my projects. But this is before the point where I know how much traction I have, and at this point I don't feel like paying for something.
    2. 1

      How is it for handling bots?

  9. 2

    If you're looking to do even more with data check out our free program to grow sign ups/conversions/monetization/retention with data science. We are still looking for 5 more people to work with.

Trending on Indie Hackers
How I grew a side project to 100k Unique Visitors in 7 days with 0 audience 49 comments Competing with Product Hunt: a month later 33 comments Why do you hate marketing? 28 comments My Top 20 Free Tools That I Use Everyday as an Indie Hacker 14 comments $15k revenues in <4 months as a solopreneur 14 comments Use Your Product 13 comments