If you're looking for web analytics, I love and can recommend Plausible (https://plausible.io/). It's both simple and privacy-friendly.
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.
It's good, but it doesn't replace Google Analytics at all. It tracks visits and events, but not navigation and user flow. It's severely lacking in detail compared to Analytics. It's a compromise, not a drop-in replacement.
However, it's excellent as a simple tracker for average website admins. I'm very happy with it. The maintainers have been nothing short of stellar with their support and transparency.
I too wanted to preserve privacy and avoid a cookie banner for my blog. I ended up rolling a privacy preserving proxy via Cloudflare workers that forwards `pageview` events to Google Analytics. It's a single HTML tag to drop in and preserves the navigation and user flow reports on the GA side.
I would not recommend Plausible (well, their commercial offering anyway). I had a bad run-in with them recently. Their site would not log data from my web site at all (their Javascript just threw an error in the console and would not execute). I filed a ticket. They brushed it off and said they'd had a brief look and couldn't figure it out, and basically tough shit, and told me to just download their open source version and install it locally.
What annoyed me was that if it's not logging on my site, how many other sites is it under-reporting for? YOU DON'T KNOW WHAT YOU DON'T KNOW. And the fact they weren't willing to give it any serious thought at all. This is bad for an analytics company.
I tried (begrudgingly) and put Google Analytics behemoth of Javascript on my site and it worked perfectly, so I knew it was a bug in their system, not mine.
At that point I decided to try and figure it out so I fired up a proxy and sat there for a couple of hours going back and forth until I did figure it out myself. The bug is in their web server configuration really, not in the actually logging Javascript. Now, it might have been unethical of me, I don't know, but I felt since I'd spent a ton of my time to figure out a serious bug in their product it would be nice if they would throw me a year's free subscription. I felt that was fair compensation. They said no way, don't worry about, basically "I'm sure we'll figure it out ourselves in the future one day, don't call us."
So at that point I decided screw it, I can see they don't care about their customers and product, so I'm looking for alternatives that aren't GA.
That's my 2 cents. Your mileage may vary.
tl;dr: Be aware their product has a bug which causes it to not log data in certain circumstances (the script won't execute) and therefore if you are using their commercial product you might not be seeing all your visitors.
That sucks that you had a bad experience with Plausible.
I've never had any problems, and interactions with them on Twitter have always been very friendly and helpful.
Now, of course, products have bugs and once you have thousands of users there will be edge cases if it not working. Obviously, they should have handled the interaction with you differently.
Out of interest, can you expand more on when the bug occurs? Btw, if you have a fix for it, you can also create a PR.
Why would that user create a PR to help a for-profit company they don't have a good relationship with? Why would anyone what to help a group that disrespected you?
And I would have happily created a PR for their open source version that they generously give away for free, but the bug is in their web server configuration for their hosted product, so they need to put the fix in.
I didn't feel I was being unreasonable asking for free use of their product for a year (after which I would obviously have to pay), for a web app I am writing which currently has practically zero traffic. As bug bounties go, it wasn't a bad deal I thought.
I can't create a PR as the bug is with their server configuration. I don't think there is anything wrong with their code, per se. I think if I installed it locally it would work fine.
It is a real shame. I went to Plausible because they had posted on here, and I'm all for supporting people that show up on HN and seem to be decent human beings. They did not reply to my Tweet to them, I only got support through e-mail, which they weren't that quick about. I'm bummed because the software seemed to be what I wanted, but they've lost my trust now.
What's weird is that your comment here caused some sort of weird bug in HN that I've not seen before (no reply button):
https://kingcharles.one/weird-hn-bug.png
@dang - any ideas on this one?
The issue with Plausible's server: I didn't want to put it out there because then they get the fix for their commercial product for free after I spent the time doing all the work for them, but I feel like the same bug might actually exist all over the Web, so I'm going to write it up and post it online.
> The issue with Plausible's server: I didn't want to put it out there because then they get the fix for their commercial product for free after I spent the time doing all the work for them, but I feel like the same bug might actually exist all over the Web, so I'm going to write it up and post it online.
Yeah, no. So far, you only say there's a bug in their server configuration that prevents logging in some cases. I self host plausible and I'd be very much interested in what misconfiguration I could have triggered.
Is it a TCP pool connection problem ? A pre-flight request thing ? Wrong CORS headers ?
On one hand you could be doing FUD, on the other there is a gunfoot problem that could impact self hosters but the knowledge doesn't come out.
I suppose it's a problem that can be pinpoint from the outside, without knowing the proxy stack running at plausible so it should be observable with HTTP sniffer/wireshark.
I think HN somehow limit the pace of answers in fast threads to let people the time to think before they post (so the reply button appears with a bit of delay)
Does Fugu have a free trial period? I would need to test it actually works at all before I start paying for it. Plausible, fortunately, has a free trial on their commercial product, so I could figure out instantly that their system is broken. I would have hated to pay money only to find it had a terminal bug and they wouldn't fix it.
Basically, I'd like a couple of days grace before having to pay for it, so I could install it on my app and see if it even works.
The reason I wouldn't install Fugu locally (or Plausible locally) is that I don't want a whole different deployment channel to support. Likely your code needs a different web server or framework than the rest of my stuff, and that is a lot of setup, installation and support. But I do like that the option exists and that I can see the code.
Yes it does have an infinite free trial period :-) You can track events in test mode without having a subscription. Test mode events are auto-deleted after 14 days. Creating an accounting doesn't require a credit card.
OK. PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE put that at the very top of your site somewhere. It doesn't say that anywhere that I can see. It just tells me I can self-host for free, or pay $9/month. I clicked off the site because of that, even though the product looked cool.
Let people clearly know they can test drive it for free to see if it works.
EDIT: OK, I see it says that once I click GET STARTED, but that's too late, because I never clicked that button because I didn't want to pay $9 to find out if it worked. You need to make it really clear on the front page.
Also, put a "Sign-up" button next to Sign-In in the top-right corner. That was the first place I looked to try to create an account - I didn't go straight for the GET STARTED button.
I second Plausible but to everyone looking to self-host it, be aware: It’s AGPL licensed! From what I have seen it seems that they only want to discourage direct competitors but an APGL license is an APGL license and that’s a deal breaker for many commercial projects. Older version were licensed under the MIT license iirc so might be an option for some.
Ofc you can always support them and use their cloud hosting solution without any of these problems. I just wish they their pricing was fairer.. Their plans start at 6€ for 10k monthly page views - for that price you could run your own VPS capable of handling literally millions of requests.
I second Plausible. Have been using it close to a year now. Very happy about it. It is probably not as feature rich as GA, but who needs those features, right. On the other hand they are adding new things everyday, but they focus on what users want.
Analytics solution that support to Mobile platforms(Android, iOS) too? There is Matomo as I know, what else out there?
Aggregating things over platform is hassle when using different services for different platforms.
If you use Fugu, it's simple to unify since you track your events by calling the Fugu API. Of course, it takes a bit (not too much) longer to set it up than just slapping a script in there, but it enables you more granular control of what you're tracking.
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.
We use matomo. Takes some getting used to if you are coming from GA (for instance, can take a while to generate segments) but is nice and privacy friendly.
We wanted to see who was visiting, but not because of paid advertising. Once I defined the query using the visual builder, it took a while to build up that segment. How long? I dunno, but longer than a few minutes, so I went off to do something else and checked it a few days later.
Thanks for pointing this out. It's the first free analytics service for personal blogs, websites I've seen recently. The rest is subscription based and useful for revenue-generating businesses.
Our approach is to be free and sustainable by radically cutting down hosting costs. Most technical solutions are mentioned in the Github page. Apart from this honestly the product is well polished and easy to use. Check it out :-)
Potentially controversial opinion on HN: don't track visits to your website in any way. Or alternately track only statistics about which URLs were requested per day.
I'm currently using Cloudflare and their SDK+API to pull logs, which I then push into Loki. I then use Grafana to render the dashboards I want.
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.
I switched to Fathom at the start of the month and I'm really happy with it. There is a trade off when you opt for a privacy focused product but I think it's more than worth it.
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?
I was running selfhosted fathom for several years. A few months ago, I decided I wanted to just defer that maintenance to a SaaS. I felt that fathom was just so expensive for any small use case… I couldn’t justify the cost. Ended up switching to a paid version of Plausible and I couldn’t be happier.
I prefer goaccess(1) over any other tool that uses client side Javascript.
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.
If you want total accuracy, then the only solution is to analyze your HTTP logs like this. You won't get much in the way of knowing your clients, except what comes through in the HTTP requests, e.g. URI, IP address, browser and platform, but you'll also know you're not missing any requests.
Most people running sites care less about exactly counting the number of requests than knowing details about their visitors and behavior.
If I try to process my server logs directly I either need to manually filter out bots, which are the majority of traffic, or I need to use some sort of collaboratively maintained bot identification system. Alternatively, I can use any of the services people are mentioning here and they will do that for me.
I think it depends a lot in what you are after. Accurate results through the logs, including bots.
Or inaccurate results via JS. Bunch of services folks are using out there that blocks them.
I use Goaccess too for simple things, but I've found that it's not really suitable if you want to compare stats of different months or years, or look into specific week.
This is because goaccess aggregates reports to single HTML file. If you give it a year of logs, it compresses whole year in one graph. It didn't seem to have interactive way to explore whole year.
Most people don't care and just generate monthly HTML report file, but that has same flaws as yearly file.
A couple of friends of mine are building Firstparty - https://firstpartyhq.com - the idea is to serve the analytics code/cookie from your own domain (hence, first party). I've been using them for some of my websites and mobile apps. The reporting is nascent at the moment, but it is being built at a fast pace.
CTO and cofounder of Firstparty here, just wanted to mention our trial comes with 1,000,000 events free so if anyone wants to kick the tires it should be free for a long time for projects that don’t do a ton of web traffic, and we would love your feedback.
I know that Mixpanel is very event focused, and it seems like the question is more on page tracking, but surprised that no one has mentioned it. Has mixpanel fallen out of favor or is the lack of mention because it's a bit out of scope for the OP?
was wondering the same, in terms of features (retention grid, user centric tracking, funnels, advanced queries) and ui few things come close but its probably pretty costly compared to ga
I think this a really good approach. We've done something similar by exposing an endpoint and just PUT data to it from the client when something interesting happens. This works really well and the server is free to do whatever with it.
I'm actually interesting in this as well. I've noticed watching the HTTP logs for my small site, I have traffic on it (it auto-polls my server every 60 seconds to report updated status), but none of those show up as "active" users in Google Analytics. I'm guessing uBlock Origin blocking GA by default is a likely cause.
I second Matomo. Easy to set-up and update and has an optional no-cookies (and thus no cookie banners) mode. I’m using it for my private sites, but have also used it professionally in the past.
I had a same problem, but GA is only the tip of the iceberg. A lot of apps with analytics capabilities have usability problem. In some, metrics are hidden too deep and it's hard to navigate. Others lack simple features and do not let you change things like timezone or displayed currency. But the biggest pain point for me was integration with data from other apps.
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.
Yeah, I agree with that. A lot of these tools have usability issues. I kinda like Search Console but Google Analytics or Facebook Business gave me some terrible data analysis experiences.
I checked out your tool. Looks perfect for my needs but I need do dive a bit deeper to say more. I assume you plan to add more integrations in the future. Have you thought about adding an integration with LinkedIn? That’d be helpful for me.
I agree, Facebook Business is the worst. And it crashes in Safari.
Our plan is to create integrations for social media platforms next (Facebook, Instagram, Twitter). I do not have experience with LinkedIn, but we'll definitely add it too, if there is data to analyze.
Feel free to explore the app and leave us a feedback if you want.
We're using Simple Analytics mainly for privacy reasons. I did a bit of research beforehand as we're in a quite 'sensitive' industry. So if you care about privacy Simple Analytics is the private one. They are the only ones that never track IP-address. Plausible and fathom do (only for a day or so, but still do). https://simpleanalytics.com/
Cloudflare Analytics or something on server with GoAccess.
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.
* businesses are visiting your documentation pages.
* locales they are coming from (geolocation data in aggregate).
* pages are most frequently visited.
One thing I am incredibly cognizant of is the balkanization of the web. Different territories and privacy regimes will dictate various compliance steps... navigating this will be difficult. As a site operator I plan on collecting analytics accordingly, with a polymorphic payload that knows whats allowed to be collected where possible...
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.
I take you are using Google Analytics 4. You should still be able to use the older version (Universal Analytics) where you shouldn't have any problems with displaying full URL (including hostname). It's usually a setting/filter that removes the hostname from the URL.
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!
I’m a big fan of PanelBear.com and I recently implemented it on Crontab.guru (500k monthly visits).
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.
Always surprised more people don’t use countly. Runs nice in docker or digital ocean. https://count.ly. Been self hosting it for years with few issues.
I used a self hosted Matomo (free and open source) for websites and apps, and it was simpler and (because of that) more flexible than Google Analytics.
My needs are pretty simple, but I just do server-side logging in a Django Middleware. I wanted to use a tracking cookie to track a user across the site, but I had a hell of a time trying to figure out whether that violated the GDPR, so I just log the user agent instead.
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?
Woah this thread is packed. Most of these companies didn’t exist when we started Fathom back in 2018, so it’s great to see how the privacy-first analytics space is thriving.
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 :)
I’m a big fan of Fathom. I switched from GA to Plausible and then to Fathom. Fathom is the only one that has reliably been able to log page views in Firefox and bypass ad blockers. Also, they’re great people and I value their stance on privacy.
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.
0: https://github.com/shafy/fugu