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67 Comments

What are some alternatives to Google Analytics?

Hi all,

Google analytics is the default analytics tool for most people building and launching a new website or online business.

What are some alternatives that give reliable audience insights and metrics?

I believe I saw some Indie Hackers working on some analytics tools recently too.

  1. 7

    I use Matomo on my site. You can self-host it and has a lot of the options GA also offers.

    1. 3

      For those that are not aware, Matomo is the new name/branding of "Piwik" which is a decade old and solid open-source product.

      1. 1

        Thanks for sharing. I did not know that. Started using Matomo recently and like what i see.

    2. 1

      Matomo looks great on paper, but checking their dashboard the UI looks pretty slow/outdated: https://demo.matomo.org/index.php?module=CoreHome&action=index&idSite=62&period=day&date=yesterday

      Still, its' the closest thing you can get to Google Analytics.

      1. 1

        It doesn't look bad to me :) If it's better than GA why not?

        1. 1

          It is better than GA in terms of privacy.

          Personally I couldn't use it, every page takes 10s to load and content jumps a lot while loading, I would find it annoying to use it everyday i think.

          1. 1

            I wonder how is that even possible for them to survive if the loading time is so huge. And agree, it's much more serious problem than an outdated design.

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              Maybe the server they are hosting the demo on is bad, but that would be a strange decision. I think more than the slowness is the fact that the UI jumps around while it's loading, which makes it even more confusing.

    3. 1

      Thanks for this suggestion @frankmeeuwsen. I shall take a look at it.

  2. 7

    Hi @gordon!
    I'm working on splitbee.io, an analytics & A/B testing tool. It focuses more on product analytics & user insights but also provides you with basic analytics data.

    There are some other amazing privacy-focused analytics tools out there:

    1. 3

      Personally using fathom - love their product :)

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      +1 on fathom... but, i'm not using it currently.

    3. 2

      Hey @tobiaslins, thanks very much for these. I will check them out.

  3. 5

    I recently made [https://shanc.app] which is not an alternative but an integration to your Google Analytics. 😊

    We are planning to launch v2 soon with more features.

    1. 1

      Looks great @utkarshbhimte. Thanks for the suggestion.

  4. 4

    Just want to offer a slightly contrarian perspective. For https://www.logology.co we initially decided to use fathom. Their vision is very cool and we resonated with their mission of respecting user privacy.
    The thing is, our app is pretty complex and has a lot of interaction points. When we started needing to know where and how people drop out, fathom didn't have any feature to support that (except for basic goal tracking).
    So we reverted back to using google analytics as a baseline. We also added amplitude on top, as it lets you do precise event tracking and is free up to a lot of users.
    I really wish there existed a privacy focused service that ALSO focused on doing conversion tracking well. I just don't think it's been made yet.
    For your particular use case, it depends on your product. If you have a content based website, where you just need to know where people come from and the top pages they look at, I would recommend fathom.
    On the other hand if you have more of a "web app" type website, with lots of interaction points, then I would stick with GA / Amplitude / Mixpanel or similar.

    1. 2

      Thanks for sharing this insight @dagorenouf. That is good to keep in mind for web apps with lots of interactions. Cheers!

    2. 1

      You can check out the tool I'm working on userTrack.net , it is self-hosted but focused on conversion rates improvement. It still has a few features missing, but they are coming out soon!

  5. 4

    I've just started using https://usefathom.com/ and love it. Does the job, not complicated like GA and customer support is on point

    1. 2

      Thanks @isaacjoy. Fathom has been suggested a few times so I'll take a look!

  6. 3

    For product metrics
    Mixpanel and Heap are the best!
    https://mixpanel.com/
    https://heapanalytics.com/

    1. 1

      Thanks for these suggestions @NoFunnyMan

      1. 2

        Sure! Although they have free tiers, they are a bit expensive afterwards. If you'd need to upgrade or you need more stack than their free tiers. I don't know any better alternative than Google Analytics

        1. 2

          Cheers, I'll keep that in mind!

  7. 3

    Plausible is absolutely amazing.

    Here you can see the public Plausible stats for my product (Dogger): https://plausible.io/dogger.io

    1. 2

      Cheers @ffMathy. I will take a look!

  8. 3

    We're working on pmfit.ai: analytics in terms of personas & tasks, not data points & KPIs.

    In tools like GA, Amplitude, Heap you can do really cool analyses but it's hard to understand what's really happening "on page".

    In tools like Hotjar/FullStory you can get incredible depth of understanding but it doesn't scale. It's O(n), 1000 users = 1000 hours of video.

    We try to bridge the best of both worlds:

    • AI handles watching millions of hours of user behavior so it's in-depth.
    • Data is summarized in terms of personas & tasks so it's easy to understand at scale.

    With this you can see:

    • How much revenue each persona generates.
    • How engaged each persona is over time.
    • How tasks within each persona correlate with engagement.
    • Which features are most important to accomplish specific tasks.
    • How A/B tests affect personas, tasks, & business metrics.

    We also have a free program for businesses than make less than $5,000 a month:
    https://philippcannons.com/free-data-science-team-for-your-project/

    1. 2

      Wow thanks for all this @philipp_cannons. I will take a look into it soon!

    2. 1

      This sounds really interesting. Is this product still live?

  9. 2

    I did Simple Web Analytics . It's Free of charge and Simple. Questions ? :-)

  10. 2

    Piwik PRO, is an alternative to Google Analytics with focus on user privacy and data security. Our team helps with the implementation and provide ongoing consultancy to get you the best results.
    Check out our Piwik PRO vs Google Analytics comparison

  11. 2

    Yes, they are quite many now!

    I just published Privacy-oriented alternatives to Google Analytics on my blog in both self-hosted and hosted categories.

    As mentioned in the blog post I would personally looked more into Plausible now, although I am now a customer of Fathom Analytics, which just added uptime monitoring at no additional costs.

    Also, if you are hosting things yourself, feel free to also look into log analyzers such as GoAccess.

    1. 1

      Thanks for sharing this @strzibnyj. Much appreciated. Some interesting options in your article!

  12. 2

    Do you know https://www.crazyegg.com/?

    It's not pure quantitative analytics but it help you understand the behaviour of your visitors recording their interaction within the webpage

    1. 1

      If you want both quantiative and qualitative data you can check out my tool, userTrack.net. I am trying to make it easy to switch between having on overview of how your site is doing getting really in-depth qualitative data.

    2. 1

      I did not know of Crazy egg @asiergonio. Thanks for sharing.

  13. 2

    I see nobody mentioned smartlook.com. I use if for my sites, to really see what my visitors see and how they react. If you don't have thousands of visitors, this is really a great tool. The free plan is more than enough.

    1. 1

      Thanks for sharing this @Jp84nl!

  14. 2

    Plausible or Netlify if you run on it.

  15. 2

    For event based analytics I cannot recommend https://amplitude.com/ highly enough!

    I've used it for anything funnel related for a few years. Their free tier gives you 1m events per month.

    1. 1

      Thanks for sharing @Hedley. Much appreciated.

  16. 2

    Try us out - https://www.foxmetrics.com/, let me know if you have any questions or would like a demo. I'll be more than happy to hook you up. We also offer free plans for startups, minority-owned, education, and non-profits businesses.

    1. 1

      Thanks for this @subzero. Appreciate it. Looks great, one quick thing on your pricing page, I think "fare" in "The most fare pricing plans ever" should be spelled "fair".

      1. 2

        Thanks, @gordon, play on those words can get confusing, we've made adjustments. Thanks once again.

        1. 1

          Ah yes, I was wondering if it was intentional or not... perhaps its not worth running the risk of the customer thinking your grammar is not up to par haha.

    1. 1

      Thanks for the suggestion @jailandrade

  17. 2

    I am working on usertrack.net, a self-hosted analytics platform, similar to Matomo.
    Main features: Visitor Stats, User Segments, Session Recordings, Heatmaps, A/B tests.

    My plan is to make userTrack the best analytics tool to use for improving conversion rates, while focusing on privacy, performance and UX.

    You can check out the demo here, I'm still improving the UI.
    I am happy to answer to any questions!

  18. 1

    If you're looking for an analytics and a landing page tool you can use https://versoly.com/

    It has world class support, me :)

    We collect 25-60% more data than Google Analytics and you can set that up in one click.

    For the same price as most of the other analytics platforms you get a landing page, blog, forms and much more coming soon.

    If you already have a website the other options are great and simple.

    1. 1

      Thanks very much @volkandkaya my man. Versoly looks like a great solution for a two in one landing page and analytics solution.

  19. 2

    This comment was deleted 3 years ago.

    1. 1

      Looks like an interesting project @confact. Thanks for sharing and best of luck with it.

  20. 2

    This comment was deleted 4 years ago.

    1. 1

      Thanks for this @woutr. Appreciate the suggestion.

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    This comment was deleted a year ago.

    1. 2

      Thanks for this suggestion @Primer

    2. 1

      No free plans available though

      1. 1

        Unlike Google Analytics, Plausible Analytics Cloud is not free as in beer because our business model is subscriptions rather than selling the data of your visitors. We're bootstrapped without any external funding so the subscription fees help us cover our costs and time spent on development etc.

        We do offer the Plausible Analytics Self-Hosted which is free as in beer as you have to run and manage it yourself.

      2. 1

        It's Open Source though!

        Among the viable [alternatives](Privacy-oriented alternatives to Google Analytics) only GoatCounter features a free plan (for non-commercial use). Alternatively Metrical is free now while in Beta.

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