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You should default to Google Analytics for new projects.
by
Drew Bredvick
https://twitter.com/dbredvick/status/1358077192295624706?s=21
I voted "No" because a few years back, GA was the only major player in the market and the pros vastly outweighed the cons but in the modern era, I find myself to require GA features less and less as time passes by; There are plenty of privacy-friendly analytics solutions that have reasonable (or even free!) plans that get the job done very well 💯.
Of course, there are always exceptions e.g. if I were running an SEO and digital agency, I might like to fully utilize Google Tag Manager and Google Analytics for proper marketing or even for any product/service that is marketed heavily on Social Media, GTM and GA would be my go-to for such situations. As a personal example, I run a "seasonal" e-commerce website for a specific niche and I heavily use Google Analytics to track conversions and fire events (though it is pertinent to mention that other players have also started offering these features now so if I were to start afresh, I'd use Matomo or something else).
Personally, I find that an installation of Matomo more than covers all my use-cases but if not that, then Plausible Analytics, Fathom Analytics, Simple Analytics, umami, Ackee, Splitbee, etc. (the list just goes on and on and on) are amazing 👍.
Finally, putting aside the "privacy" factor, most of these other solutions have lighter footprints which results in (usually) faster loading times and they have the core features an average website needs.
TL;DR: No need for GA unless you need targeted marketing via GTM.
I wanted to comment, but you've covered everything I wanted to say. I use Plausible because I care about my users' online privacy as much as I care about my own.
Ah yes I didn't highlight that point in detail but yeah, "caring about customer privacy in the first place" is also a great point for non-GA solutions - well said.
Very well put @xmok! With my latest project I went with Plausible Analytics and so far it is great, enough for what I need to track and privacy first.
Plausible Analytics has really taken off (and for good reason!) which is awesome and I sincerely applaud the team for their efforts 👏. The major reason I stick with Matomo instead of Plausible and similar solutions is because of the aforementioned "event tracking" and so on - but in your experience so far, how robust is Plausible's event-tracking and goal conversion? I know they support it now, but have you tried it out 🤔?
I do not have an answer yet, I only implemented the page tracking so far, but I do want to track the events within the product. Once I will dive into it I will let you know. :)
Matomo at first glance seems to be more feature complete, but every other product you listed is missing at least one major feature.
If you read my article, I have a few clear exceptions about when it’s okay to use other privacy friendly options. (I use umami & have used fathom in the past)
I think it depends a lot on what you’re building. There are zero analytics tools for ecom as good as GA ecom that are free.
Hi Drew,
Yes I definitely did read the thread and I'm agreeing with what you said therein that, at the end of day, it really does depend. But that's why I've written "...they have the core features an average website needs" by which I specifically mean that most users only want page views and maybe UTM tags - at the most advanced, event tracking, and for that majority of users, going with another analytics solution is probably the better option.
I mean at the end of the day most options in tech are not black and white but quite circumstantial and preference-dependent, which is why I had to pick a "Yes" or "No" option in the poll.
But to conclude, I definitely agree that GA offers the most features for the least (financially) which is why in my own example I mention using it for ecommerce😀.
P.S.: side-note: I recently also deployed umami on my personal website using Heroku but I found the experience a bit quirky, how is your Vercel and Supabase setup working?
Completely wrong.