Best Alternatives To Google Analytics will be discussed in this article. There is a significant movement taking place where individuals are attempting to deGoogle their lives rather than just pointing fingers at the bad folks. Additionally, even though Google is a legitimate service provider, it does track a wide range of personal identification measures about its customers and uses those characteristics to deliver relevant adverts. […]
Top 10 Best Alternatives To Google Analytics In 2023
In this article, you can know about Top 10 Best Alternatives To Google Analytics In 2023 here are the details below;
There is a significant movement taking place where individuals are attempting to deGoogle their lives rather than just pointing fingers at the bad folks. Additionally, even though Google is a legitimate service provider, it does track a wide range of personal identification measures about its customers and uses those characteristics to deliver relevant adverts. It is not brand-new.
Webmasters are forced to move because utilizing Google Analytics implies the recorded data is not always correct because many privacy-first web browsers now rigorously restrict Google Analytics scripts as well as AdSense and other similar trackers.
Utilizing analytics systems that respect user privacy is one method to address this problem. Moreover, open-source software platforms. You can host an open-source project yourself if you work on one. and as a result, adhere to legal requirements like the GDPR.
Can You track website analytics without GDPR notice?
Without a doubt, the answer is yes. You can actually fully avoid the requirement to include a “cookie notice” to your website or blog as long as you’re not gathering any personal information about the individuals who are visiting your site.
Is knowing if a user visited your website twice really that crucial? You are not creating a portfolio of your readers if you don’t use cookies for tracking. However, at least you are not required to include intrusive widgets or elaborate privacy policies to describe why you track users’ data.
And if you choose the self-hosted path, this is very crucial. In that instance, you won’t be keeping any user data anyplace yourself and are therefore immune from liability.
Does Open-Source mean it is free?
All of the analytics solutions included in this post are free if self-hosted, however since many of the platforms on this list do have a premium plan available, I have nonetheless added pricing information for each one.
While open-source does imply that the codebase is “free” to use, in practice, that doesn’t always mean so. For instance, managing and self-hosting an open-source analytics solution can be quite time- and labor-intensive.
Having to:
- Pay for the server expenses, including server management.
- Update the project to the most recent state.
- Know some of the fundamental security measures.
Therefore, it is frequently simpler to pay a tiny monthly charge. I believe that the project author(s) should receive some compensation for their outstanding efforts in maintaining the project’s viability. But that’s exactly what I believe.
1. Plausible
Plausible complies with laws like the GDPR, CCPA, and PECR, which is one of its best qualities. Plausible does not utilize any cookies or gather any personally identifying data as a web analytics tool. You can also be confident that your data is safeguarded by some of the strictest privacy rules in the world because it is housed in the EU and powered by European cloud infrastructure.
Plausible is a great option for website owners who have no prior experience using web analytics tools because it is simple to use and comprehend. It integrates quickly and easily with well-known applications including WordPress, Ghost, Squarespace, Wix, and Weebly.
Privacy-first mindset
You own and control your data with Plausible, which is another fantastic benefit. Your site’s data will never be sold to or shared with any third parties, nor will it ever be monetized or mined for demographic or behavioural data. This represents a welcome departure from the majority of other web analytics tools, which frequently gather and sell user data to outside companies.
In conclusion, Plausible is a great option for website owners looking for a compact, privacy-friendly, and user-friendly web analytics tool. It’s an excellent alternative for people who want to assess their site traffic and marketing efforts without sacrificing user privacy thanks to its customized dashboard, strong API, and interaction with well-known tools.
Pricing: If you self-host Plausible, it’s free. The Pro plan also begins at $9 per month for 10,000 pageviews. The platform is available for a free 30-day trial.
2. Matomo
Matomo, formerly known as Piwik, is the star of the show here. It is what might be referred to as a full analytics solution. And the closest thing to GA competition that respects privacy. You have the choice to use Matomo through their cloud platform or self-host it using their stable release.
The back-end of Matomo is built on PHP and MySQL, making it simple to incorporate Matomo with conventional systems like WordPress. Additionally, Matomo has the capacity to gather and present some incredibly intriguing statistics and use cases. For instance:
- Check which quest engines send you the most visitors as well as the keywords that they use.
- Make intricate User Flow graphs with an infinite number of steps.
- Keep tabs on product purchases and overall development.
Regarding remaining GDPR compliant, Matomo offers all the tools required to guarantee total transparency. Almost all user data elements that pertain to visitors to your website can be anonymized.
To make sure you constantly adhere to the rules and regulations, you can utilize a specially created GDPR Manager. This largely depends on the characteristics you choose to utilize and the kind of data you want to examine.
Pricing: As long as you host Matomo yourself, it is free. Starting at $19 per month for up to 50,000 hits, their cloud offering. Data is kept on European soil.
Independent Analytics (WordPress)
WordPress users can utilize Independent Analytics, a straightforward analytics solution that complies with GDPR. The ease with which this plugin may be set up is what makes it so fantastic. You may start tracking website visitors right now by simply downloading the plugin from the WordPress repository.
Since Independent Analytics was created with the idea of putting privacy first, there are no additional options to adjust or optimize. Views and referrers are the two elements that make up tracking. Referrers will show which websites or search engines are driving the most traffic, and Views will monitor which pages receive outside visitors. This is another Alternatives To Google Analytics. Also check ADP Payroll Alternatives
The ability to apply filters was a feature that I considered to be rather special to this plugin. You can set up specific filters to limit the statistics of your visitors to a particular URL and a timeframe.
The cost of this plugin is zero dollars for WordPress users. There don’t appear to be any paid features at the moment, but if that changes, I’ll update this post.
3. PostHog
With a focus on product analytics, PostHog attempts to address the issue of having to share event data with outside parties. In other words, it is a total internal solution for figuring out how users interact with your websites or apps.
You have the choice to host PostHog yourself, providing you total control over the data processing and storage processes. They have also worked hard to make PostHog simple to deploy in certain situations. The majority of these use cases are provided by ready-to-use libraries, whether you work with Ruby, React, or Android.
Product-first approach
The unique feature of PostHog is the abundance of tools it offers to analyze app activity. In reality, PostHog is able to compete on equal footing with industry giants like Google, Mixpanel, Heap, and others because to a strong open-source community and financial backing.
Want to gradually introduce new product features? PostHog offers a complete Feature Flags solution to ensure that you can always roll back. In addition, new features can be sent out to a selected group of users using feature flags.
Price: If you don’t mind taking care of it yourself, open-source software is entirely free. Up to 1,000,000 events are provided without charge in their premium (Cloud) model.
4. Pirsch
Pirsch is a simple, cookie-free analytics tool that you can integrate right into the back end of any website or application. The project is developed in Go and makes use of a fingerprinting method to guarantee that incoming user data is anonymous. This is another Alternatives To Google Analytics.
Each visitor receives a distinct fingerprint from Pirsch. The visitor’s IP, User-Agent, date, and salt are hashed together to create the fingerprint. The date ensures that the data is divided by day, allowing for a maximum one-day tracking of visits.
Of course, the finest aspect is that Pirsch can track users of your platform even if an ad blocker is activated. According to some statistics, ad blocks and other script-blocking browser extensions can lead brands to lose up to 30% of the accuracy of their overall analytics.
Regarding the information provided, Pirsch offers a number of statistics you can follow. Most importantly, specific conversion goals, occasions, and keywords that visitors used to find your pages on Google. They offer data export capabilities, APIs, and SDKs as part of their subscription strategy. Pirsch announced a recent addition to their platform: the option to import your current Google Universal Analytics data.
Pricing: Pirsch is free to try out for 30 days. The monthly premium rate for 10,000 pageviews is $5 (paid annually).
5. Umami
Umami is a swiftly deployable analytics library that is solely self-hosted. Simple prerequisites include using Node.js for the backend and MySQL or PostgreSQL for the database. It is simple to deploy on a budget-friendly DigitalOcean droplet or a comparable VPS provider. This is another Alternatives To Google Analytics.
The project’s construction was post-mortemed by the author. He actually makes a lot of the products we’ve already seen mentions, but he claims that most of them are paid tools. Umami must always be self-hosted in contrast. Unsurprisingly, this strategy has elevated Umami to the status of one of the most popular GitHub packages for open-source analytics.
Umami’s Profiles feature is intriguing. You can make personalized accounts and give them to your friends or customers so they can utilize this service on their own websites. A completely unique dashboard and reporting are available for each profile.
Pricing: A free 30-day trial of Pirsch’s premium plan is available. The following month, the cost is $5 (paid annually) for 10,000 pageviews. Hosting yourself is free.
6. GoatCounter
Medium-sized organizations can get seamless tracking solutions from GoatCounter. The creator, Martin Tournoij, is committed to making it simple to track website metrics while maintaining privacy. This is accomplished by removing any potential tracking identifiers and allowing you to select the data points that you want to track.
The technological side of GoatCounter is fairly versatile, despite the appearance sometimes appearing a little archaic in comparison to contemporary front-end options. With a subscription plan for websites that require more resources, it is also free for non-commercial enterprises. Also check Mockit Alternatives
Naturally, installing the library yourself is free. Users of WordPress and Gatsby can benefit from pre-built connectors, allowing you to begin tracking straight away. GoatCounter.com is currently accessible to the general public for no charge. It’s okay to run your own website or a small to medium-sized business on it, but it’s not okay to send millions of pageviews every day.
7. Ackee
You may easily install the analytics script Ackee written in Node.js. Docker is easy to use, and you can deploy it using cloud services like Heroku, Vercel, or Netlify. It is fully connected with the GraphQL API, and the analytics dashboard itself uses UI components that the API offers. As a result, you can create unique queries and parameters to gather data specifically for your project’s requirements. This is another Alternatives To Google Analytics.
You can enable Detailed mode, which will monitor a little bit more information, but Ackee advises that you only use it in conjunction with a privacy notice. Personal data includes things like system operating system and browser type. Ackee is free; the only way to pay is to get the GitHub repository and host it on your own server.
8. Counter
The world of analytics that respects privacy has recently welcomed Counter. Counter was created by a team of three and uses a pay-what-you-want model to draw customers. As of the time of writing, they are also seeking an investor that has a strong desire to advance the development and upkeep of Counter.
Go (Server, Static files) & Redis for data storage are the technologies used in Counter. Overall, there is some interest in the project on GitHub, so it will be fascinating to see if the authors are successful. Genuine privacy-based schemes that respect the user & their data, in my opinion, have plenty of room.
Pricing: In addition to being Open-Source, Counter does not have a predetermined price for its cloud service; instead, you are free to choose your own price.
9. Fugu
The second analytics option for the products on this list is Fugu. Although it is undoubtedly much simpler. For programmers and other designers who desire a clearer picture of how their software is being utilized in the present, it is the ideal solution. Their own words are An event-based tracking system is used by Fugu. You must use your app to call the Fugu API each time you wish to track an event. You must include an event name in your request, and you may also include event attributes.
Pricing: You may host it yourself for free, and their SaaS pricing is a reasonable $9 per month.
10. Offen
Offen is a Google Analytics substitute that prioritizes offering users complete control over how their data is gathered and maintained. This project incorporates some intriguing ideas and is entirely self-hosted (it was developed in Go and JavaScript). This is another Alternatives To Google Analytics.
One of those ideas is letting visitors see the information you have about them. In other words, site users can view their number of sessions on the site as well as the pages they have visited. However, unless the website visitor has granted approval, this is not feasible. And one of the guiding ideas on which Offen analytics is based is permission.
Furthermore, no sensitive data (IP addresses, user agents, etc.) are being gathered even if a visitor chooses to give their consent. In actuality, End-To-End encryption is used for practically all of the analytics data.
Google Analytics Alternatives: A Summary
There are several developments involving Google Analytics at the moment. Particularly, it has encountered resistance (legal difficulties? )from various EU nations that have declared the platform to be in violation of GDPR laws. Additionally, AdBlockers intentionally block tracking scripts, which leads to unreliable visitor data, as is fairly well known.
When it comes to self-hosting, I’ve actually prepared an article about well-known hosting services that provide generous free plans if server costs are a concern. You can self-host the analytics solutions suggested in this article on many of the platforms specified in that piece. In fact, a lot of them allow you to instantly pull a GitHub repository and handle all the laborious tasks on your behalf.
Questions and Answers
How do other analytics tools stack up against Google Analytics in terms of features & functionality?
While the features and functionality of alternative analytics platforms vary, they typically provide the same essential functions as Google Analytics, including monitoring website traffic & user behavior, generating reports, & setting up objectives and conversions.
In terms of features and functionality, the following alternative analytics tools can be compared to Google Analytics:
Real-time data: Unlike Google Analytics, which normally delays data by a few hours, certain alternative services may allow you to view website activity as it occurs.
bespoke dashboards: Unlike Google Analytics, which includes a collection of pre-built dashboards you can adjust, other analytics tools may allow you to construct bespoke dashboards with the metrics and data that are most pertinent to your business or website.
E-commerce monitoring: While Google Analytics takes additional configuration to collect e-commerce data, some alternative systems include built-in e-commerce tracking tools that make tracking online sales and revenue easier.
Funnel analysis: Unlike some alternative platforms, Google Analytics includes limited funnel analysis capabilities. These features let you follow user activity across a certain sequence of pages or actions on your website.
Heat maps: You may view where users click on your website & how they interact with particular page elements by using the heat map capability that some alternative analytics packages may offer.
Replay of individual user sessions is a feature offered by some alternative platforms that lets you examine how particular users engaged with your website.
Data ownership and privacy: While Google Analytics keeps data on Google’s servers and has its own data privacy standards, some alternative systems provide you more control over data ownership and privacy by allowing you to encrypt data or store it on your own servers.
Because no two analytics systems are precisely comparable, it’s important to consider your unique requirements and compare features before choosing the best one for you.
