The holidays are behind us again, so it’s time to take a look at how your website has performed over the past month. Chances are you’ll be diving into the latest Google Analytics reports to do that.
Google Analytics has been the standard tool for web analytics for years. Because Google offers the tool for free to most people, it has become deeply rooted in the web. Around 83% of websites that track statistics do so with Google Analytics (that’s almost 48% of all websites). An incredible market share, then.
What many people (apparently) don’t realise is that by installing Google Analytics on their website, they’re handing their visitors’ browsing data to Google on a silver platter. And although you can strip down the tracker considerably so that it sends as little personal data as possible (which keeps you just within the GDPR rules, without having to ask for consent), you’re still giving Google a huge advantage in learning as much as possible about visitors and their behaviour.
So it’s time to break that monopoly and get started with the alternatives.
Open source alternatives
But where to begin? Because there are plenty of alternatives to Google Analytics. The European Alternatives website alone lists more than 30 alternative analytics tools, and OpenAlternative.co also has a list of 17 open source alternatives. That’s why we at PublicSpaces have put together a small selection, all open source and mostly from the EU.
Matomo
A widely used alternative for web analytics is Matomo. Within the PublicSpaces network, too, several partners have opted for Matomo. Matomo has been in development for almost 20 years, especially if you count its predecessor Piwik. In that time, the open source community that has grown up around the project has made a large number of contributions. A marketplace has also emerged where you can buy commercial extensions, and there are various external providers that can host or maintain the package for you. So it’s a truly mature product with a large ecosystem, and one you can definitely count on to be stable.
Matomo comes in different flavours. You can use Matomo Cloud if you want to be completely unburdened and have nothing to do with hosting yourself, or you can run it on your own server. For the latter option, various packages are available that provide certain functionality (for funnels, keywords or measuring advertising campaigns, among other things) and support. The community version is free to use, but only has basic functionality.
Read more about others’ experiences with Matomo (in Dutch):
- How do you switch from Google Analytics to privacy-proof Matomo? The KB led the way! (2024)
- Looking for alternatives to Google Analytics (2022)
For a simple visitor counter, Matomo will feel a bit heavy. It scales well, but requires robust servers. It works well for organisations that really want to dig deep. If your needs are more modest, there may be more practical solutions:
Plausible
At the very other end of the spectrum, we find Plausible, made in Estonia. Plausible presents itself as a lightweight, privacy-friendly alternative to Google Analytics. You can use it for a small fee via their own cloud version, or self-host the open source community version for free.
Plausible has a modern design and offers just enough functionality: you can see how many people visit your different pages, filter by date or time period, and even track campaigns and define simple goals.
You can’t follow visitor behaviour at user level. That’s because Plausible doesn’t do user tracking, so it doesn’t need to place a cookie either. The great thing about this is that you don’t have to ask your visitors for consent. That’s one less annoying banner.
Everything is basic, but in many cases more than enough. Because you can also ask yourself whether collecting too much data about your visitors is actually useful. Web statistics are often subject to all kinds of external factors you have little control over. The weather or a random viral moment on TikTok, for example, can have a significant effect on your visitor numbers, without you being able to steer it or learn anything from it (read more about vanity metrics vs actionable metrics). Perhaps those basic figures are more than enough.
A nice feature of Plausible is that you can publish your web statistics publicly. Fun and nicely transparent. That’s also one of the reasons we use it ourselves at PublicSpaces. Take a look here, for example.
Swetrix
Want to go a step further and use your analytics package to structurally improve your website, service or product? Swetrix has some neat options for replaying visitor sessions step by step, so you can really dig into what someone experiences when using your site, or for A/B testing, for example to test different design variants in practice.
These features aren’t quite as easy to deploy as with Google Tag Manager, but a web developer who wants to run detailed measurements or experiments should be able to figure it out.
Swetrix was developed on the edge of the EU (in the UK and Ukraine). The cloud version is hosted within the EU, and you can also self-host the open source edition in a data centre of your choice.
Offen
Offen, from Germany, does things just a little bit differently from the examples above. Offen’s unique feature is that it only collects statistics when a visitor has explicitly given consent. Truly opt-in, then.
Visitors who want to help your organisation can consciously choose to accept a tracking cookie. That also lets you measure returning visits properly. As a reward for taking part, people get access to a personal page where they can view, or delete, their own browsing behaviour on your website.
GoatCounter
Looking for something super simple, and don’t even feel like hosting anything yourself? Then you can get started with GoatCounter right away. Under a kind of fair-use arrangement, the developer of this simple tool lets you collect statistics via his server. The developer, who is from Austria and supported by a grant from the NGI0 fund, deliberately chose to keep his software and service free, so that there’s nothing standing in the way of using it instead of Google Analytics. Rather sympathetic, if you ask us.
To wrap up
Web analytics tools come in all shapes and sizes. Which one you choose depends heavily on what you want to achieve with it. Do you use it to learn from, or to really improve your website? Then tools like these can be very helpful. But often, the figures only end up in the annual report and don’t actually say all that much. So keep it simple and only measure what you’ll actually use. That’s not only good for your website visitors’ privacy, it also saves energy and scarce space in data centres.
At PublicSpaces, we believe that as an organisation, you shouldn’t have to depend on a handful of big tech companies to understand how your own website is being used. You can read about the values we use to assess alternatives in our manifesto.
