
Ask HN: Any Alternatives to Google Analytics? - maydemir
Any alternatives to Google Analytics do you know &#x2F; use?
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rasulkireev
[https://www.indiehackers.com/post/any-alternatives-to-
google...](https://www.indiehackers.com/post/any-alternatives-to-google-
analytics-ee4fa926ef)

Thread on Indiehacker, some great answers there.

My choice is [https://plausible.io](https://plausible.io).

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malisper
I've worked in the space for over four years now and I'm currently building a
startup in the space. Google Analytics is the gold standard. It's the tool
everyone is familiar with and is often the thing someone does after setting up
a new website is install GA.

The main startup alternatives are Mixpanel, Amplitude, and Heap. All three are
unicorns or are close to being a unicorn. The main issue with GA is it's
focused on analyzing pageviews. While you are able to get a lot of information
from what pages people are viewing, very little of it is actionable. Mixpanel
pioneered the idea of "event-based tracking" where you instrument the actions
you care about and run reports over them. This let's you more complex reports
like, of after a user sign up, after N months, how many of them are still
signing in. Or, how does the conversion rate from users on the free trial
differ based on location of the user.

The main enterprise alternative is Adobe Analytics, formerly known as
Omniture. Pretty much every really large business that uses an analytics
product uses Adobe. IIRC, the minimum price you will be quoted for Adobe is
around $100k.

Besides using an end-to-end analytics solution, the other alternative is to
use multiple services together. For this approach people will use a tool for
data collection such as Segment or Freshpaint (disclaimer, I'm the founder of
Freshpaint) to instrument their website. They will send the data from their
data collection tool to a data warehouse such as Snowflake, BigQuery, or
Redshift. Then they will use a tool such as Looker or Tableau to visualize the
data in their data warehouse.

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ffpip
You can find many (too many actually) on these threads -
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24198980](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24198980)
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24198329](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24198329)

Check them out. Many are better and faster.

The best ones I found - usertrack.net , gaotcounter, plausible,

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jpalomaki
[https://matomo.org/](https://matomo.org/)

Self-hosted (PHP/MySQL) open-core product. Also hosted version available.

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NetToolKit
We just launched Gatekeeper:
[https://www.nettoolkit.com/gatekeeper/about](https://www.nettoolkit.com/gatekeeper/about)

Server-side analytics, upsell tool (script interactions on your website), and
bot protection all rolled into one.

We're happy to answer questions (see profile) and we'd love to get insight
into your decision process.

~~~
dylz
How can I self host this, and are you aware Shibboleth is a very old and
actively used, well known software? I was quite confused seeing that in the
dropdown.

~~~
NetToolKit
We currently don't offer a self-hosting option, unless it were in the context
of an enterprise agreement. If this functionality interests you and you have a
large volume of visits, please contact us and we can talk about specifics.

We were not aware of Shibboleth single sign-on before we launched, and someone
noted the name collision on our Show HN thread. If many people are confused
about this, we would certainly consider a different name. The development team
wanted a non-generic name (e.g. CAPTCHA), and naming has proved a challenge
for us, so if you have any suggestions, please let us know.

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tomkuk
I've been using Nibspace [https://nibspace.com/](https://nibspace.com/)

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XCSme
[https://www.usertrack.net](https://www.usertrack.net)

userTrack is mostly a self-hosted alternative to Google Analytics and Hotjar
(heatmaps/session recordings). It also allows for easy A/B testing.

I am the author, ask me anything :)

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dylz
Coupons and Postgres maybe? :)

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XCSme
I don't do really do coupons as the price is already very low at the moment
($99/life or $7.99/month).

I looked a bit into adding Postgres as an option, but it takes some time to
recreate the schemas and queries and maintain both DB options. Being on MySQL
also makes it a lot easier to install on DigitalOcean, using the LAMP image.

Why would you prefer to have Postgres over MySQL? Is it because you are used
to Postgres or because of performance considerations?

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dylz
I already use Postgres and have infrastructure set up to automate Postgres,
optimise it, etc. Performance is generally better (at least IME) than MySQL.
json, jsonb types, etc were a decision in choosing Postgres for the rest of my
application stacks.

I think it's fine as long as I can get it running on MariaDB 10+ and PHP 7.5
without issues.

I'm interested in a clarification on "Track unlimited websites on one
dashboard." \- does this software phone home or lock itself down? I usually
scale out rather than up, including for personal projects, so "one dashboard"
might be running across multiple machines.

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XCSme
> Track unlimited websites on one dashboard

It means that there is one overview page, where you can see last 14 days
graphs, 24hours visitors count and number of live visitors for all the
websites tracked at once.

> does this software phone home or lock itself down

I am not sure what this means. Currently there is no domain lock, so you can
install multiple dashboards on multiple servers. The only "phone home" that it
does was recently added, and it just checks the userTrack server for version
updates in order to offer one-click updates of the platform.

> usually scale out rather than up

I understand. From what I heard from existing users, performance is really
good with userTrack, there are users who get 300k+ monthly sessions on cheap
server and performance is good. That being said, the current license allows
you to install userTrack on multiple servers (that you own). The only
drawback, as mentioned in the first point, is that you will lose the ability
to easily see all stats in one place or switch between domain stats in the
dashboard.

What is the scale you are expecting to use userTrack at (1k MAU, 100K MAU, 1M+
MAU) ?

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dylz
I don't know the scale I plan on using it at yet. Matomo started breaking down
at a few million pageviews a month.

Is it possible to turn off one click updates completely? I deploy as an
immutable application container (I do the same for Wordpress; uploads are
written to object storage and database is separate, the actual underlying code
"can't change").

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XCSme
To update you have to manually go to settings (enter your license key), click
"update", confirm. So there's no risk of accidentally updating, but you will
still get the update notifications when a new version is out. I think I could
add a setting to disable the update notifications.

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scott31
Best alternative is respecting the users and not using any analytics services

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maydemir
Yes, but because we respect users, we are trying to improve their usage
experience. We can do this by analyzing user actions.

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C1sc0cat
What scale ?

For enterprise Adobe comes to mind but that's super $$$$$$$

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stakkur
I use Matomo with WordPress, and it's great:
[https://matomo.org/](https://matomo.org/)

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saluki
[https://usefathom.com/](https://usefathom.com/)

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tobiaslins
Check out splitbee.io :)

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maydemir
Thanks! This is mostly used for UX, right? :) I'll try demo.

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aglavine
amplitude

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maydemir
I'll review it! Edit: I checked and it looks useful, thanks!

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screpy
Woopra the best believe me. You must try.

