Lightweight alternatives to Google Analytics

1

Google Analytics

GA is by far the biggest player here: BuiltWith shows that around 86% of the top 100,000 web sites use it. This figure goes down to 64% for the top one-million web sites. These figures have grown steadily for the past 15 years, since Google acquired Urchin and rebranded it as Google Analytics. In addition to privacy concerns, GA is more complex and feature-heavy than some web-site owners need; many of them just want to see how much traffic is going to the pages on their site, and where that traffic is coming from. So it's not surprising that a number of simpler, more open tools have taken off in the past few years.

#Analytics #Web Analytics #Mobile Analytics 36 social mentions

2

GoatCounter

GoatCounter is written in Go, and uses vanilla JavaScript in its UI for some lightweight interactivity. JavaScript frameworks often get in the way of web accessibility, and GoatCounter's prioritization of accessibility (mentioned on its home page) struck a chord with "ctoth", who thanked Tournoij on Hacker News:

#Analytics #Web Analytics #Privacy 2 social mentions

3

Plausible.io

Plausible is another relatively new analytics tool that was launched in early 2019. Soon after launching, it switched to open source, with the code licensed under the permissive MIT license. The company's business model is to charge for the hosting, with pricing aimed at small businesses. In addition to making its source code available, Plausible is one of an increasing number of companies that has a publicly-visible roadmap for better transparency. It also posts informational content for potential customers on its blog.

#Web Analytics #Analytics #Privacy 187 social mentions

4

Simple Analytics

One is the minimalist Simple Analytics product, which is a cloud-based tool created by solo developer Adriaan van Rossum; it has a clean-looking interface with only the few key metrics, similar to Plausible. Another is Fathom, which was open source initially, but the current version is proprietary (although the company hopes to start maintaining the open-source code base again in the future).

#Analytics #Web Analytics #Privacy 24 social mentions

5

Fathom Analytics

#Open Source #Analytics #Privacy 58 social mentions

6

GoAccess

I record people for 7 days on my site, and shove the data into https://goaccess.io/ which sends me the result in a crappy email summary, without IP addresses. So I'm effectively keeping zero in the long term, although I *am* retaining *some* data in the short term.

#Analytics #Web Analytics #Monitoring Tools 52 social mentions

7

Matomo

It would appear two decades around enterprise software has damaged my definition of lightweight ;) Stood next to the typical 342 KiB of script payload on a modern Google search home page, the 23 KiB gzipped Matomo tracker JS might at least still be considered lightweight by some reasonable standard.

#Analytics #Web Analytics #Privacy 82 social mentions