What alternatives do you like and why?
Inspired by Plausible, I recently launched Fugu (https://fugu.lol). Fugu is a simple and privacy-friendly product analytics tool. It offers only event-based tracking, so it's better suited for web or mobile apps and not web sites (go for Plausible for websites). Fugu doesn't track unique users or any personally identifiable information. It's pretty basic for now, but I'm working on adding conversion funnels next (I work on it in my free time).
Fugu is open-source[0] and self-hostable. I make money by providing a managed version for $9/month.
That's the only full featured open source competitor I am aware of, so it should be mentioned.
https://snowplowanalytics.com/
Somewhat FOSS. There was a story there, but I don't remember the details.
If you don't need much, plausible.io is decent but very low on details.
Cloudflare seems to offer the same amount of data as Plausible, unblockable, and with no JS to load [especially if you pay $20 for the better analytics], but I don't know what data they lose by browsers that cache dns queries etc.
This isn't for everyone, I'm super comfortable doing this because of familiarity with all the components. But there's no out of the box dashboard for this so you have to replicate the UI parts you value. At least with Grafana once done you're in control of it and you own it.
I prefer server logs from the edge for their completeness. There are things missing... I.e. client side knowledge of screen sizes and device types. But server logs are so much more complete than client side JavaScript from third parties that are frequently adblocked.
Plus, I think the vast majority of companies overestimate the importance of the data they collect. Maybe there's some interesting insights buried in GA but if you aren't actually using them what difference does it make.
I respect my site's visitors so I use a monitoring system that I personally have no problem being tracked by. I block GA in Firefox so why should I subject my visitors to it?
* it's open source
* you can self host as a docker container
* you can log from the client side or from the server side
* awesome founders with HN accounts :P
It's basically a real time website log analyser which gives you enough information to know whats happening on your website but doesn't require any pesky Javascript etc to do it.
Also since it is works by analysing your log files it can never be blocked.
Seems similar to Pirsch in terms of cookie less tracking, GDPR / DSGVO compliance, being open source, self-hostable, having a decent UI and API.
To simplify things I am building Raport[1]. Raport integrates metrics from multiple sources (GA, Search Console, Stripe, Adsense) and displays them in clear and simple to use dashboard. It is not an alternative to GA and other tools, but rather works alongside them as an additional interface, where you can view all your data. For me personally Raport saved me a lot of time I spent in GA and Search Console.
It can track page views and events, the script is fairly small, is GDPR compliant, and gets out of your way.
I also switched from Google Analytics this year and happy I did.
It's 90% requests made by bots, so I didn't bother making a UI.
SimpleAnalytics, Fathom, Pirsch and Plausible. They are all very similar from pricing, to display layout. The problem is they dont track returning visitors. Some argue that is against privacy, some think it is acceptable for 30 days period. I remember there was one Analytics from EUR that offer returning visitors stats but again.. Bookmarks on browser is practically useless. So I cant find it anymore.
https://ga-dev-tools.web.app/query-explorer/
Dead simple to create the queries I want and then copy/paste into a spreadsheet.
You can also use the query URLs with the access token to easily get data into Jupyter Notebooks or whatever else you want to use for deeper analysis.
* Simple dashboard
* Displays which:
* businesses are visiting your documentation pages.
* locales they are coming from (geolocation data in aggregate).
* pages are most frequently visited.
Edit: formatting
What do you actually get out of counters like plausible compared to real analytical services?
I consider counters nothing but seeing how many visited and there's pretty much no action to do based on the numbers but stare at it.
Cookie free, API first and open source with a focus on speed. It's not as featured as some of the other well known projects in this area, but it's a work in progress.
No cookies and banners to setup, custom domains, simple UI, share monitors with others, basic custom events support. Just the things that I needed, nothing more. Hope will come useful to somebody else!
It was painless, the ux is clean and polished, and I can see panelbear tracking 5% greater visits over the same time period as GA due likely to people who had adblocked GA.
Less UI clutter is nice also for colleagues.
No cookies, GDPR compliant, simple interface
It is cookie-less, so no opt in is required in EU.
And off course you could have a look at goaccess. It’s parsing your access-logs and generates some nice metrics-dashboard. https://goaccess.io/
No cookies, open-source core, GDPR compliant, nice UI, and an extensive API.
What really is the major gain to a big third party analytics platform when you really just need to know how somebody moves through your site, what the hot and cold paths are, and what influences retention and revisits?
I’m Jack Ellis, the cofounder of https://usefathom.com. We’re a two person, self-funded company from Canada. Our software is used in projects by companies like IBM, GitHub, Tuple, Tailwind and lots of other awesome companies.
You shouldn’t use Fathom if you flinch at $14/m for a highly available service. We’re self-funded, priced to be sustainable long term, and we don’t guess on privacy law.
Recently, we launched a feature called EU Isolation following the Schrems II ruling (where Max Schrems sued Facebook). Long story short, if you’re using analytics and are passing your EU website visitors personal data (IP & User agent) to US-controlled cloud servers (even if they’re located in the EU), you’re violating the GDPR. Well with Fathom, we use both EU infrastructure and US infrastructure, but we automatically route all your EU visitors through German-owned infrastructure, and hash all personal data there, meaning your EU website visitors personal data will NEVER touch our core US infrastructure. This approach was put together with our Canadian and EU lawyers, and hasn’t been seen before in the analytics space. Lots of companies run on “EU servers”, but they’re controlled by US cloud providers and subject to FISA. This means they’re not GDPR compliant.
We don’t guess on legal matters, and we don’t cheap out on infrastructure. The lawyers we invest in work with some of the world’s largest companies, and they’re a big budget item for us. We run our infrastructure across multiple availability zones and invest heavily in serverless infrastructure. If you compare Fathom against most privacy-first analytics providers, you’ll see our uptime is uncontested. It costs us more, yes, but keeping our customers’ analytics reliable is of crucial importance to us. We run only on managed services, as we want experts (like some of the DevOps folk on here) maintaining it for us, and we stick to our strength (building our application).
With our custom domain solution (to bypass adblockers), we handle automatic SSL for you and serve your website visitors from a CDN, keeping things really fast.
We’ve also recently launched multi-domain, which is super powerful for holding multiple domains under a single dashboard (something the OP was speaking about). Especially since you can also then utilize our API to generate custom reports.
We’re going from strength to strength, and we’re the best option for folks who need GDPR compliance. We are also based in Canada, so we have adequacy ruling under the GDPR.
Hope this post is helpful for anyone who is already wondering about Fathom :)