
Lightweight Alternatives to Google Analytics - Tomte
https://lwn.net/SubscriberLink/822568/61d29096a4012e06/
======
bad_user
I have my own self-hosted Matomo instance [1].

Via Docker & docker-compose it's quite easy to install and keep up to date and
Matomo is open source, well maintained, very well behaved and pretty hands
off.

And I configured it on my websites with cookies turned off [2] and with IP
anonymization [3]. In such an instance you don't need consent, or even a
cookie banner, because you're not dropping cookies, or collecting personal
info. Profiling visitors is no longer possible, but you still get valuable
data on visits.

Note that if you want to self-host Matomo, you don't need more than a VPS with
1 GB of RAM (even less but let's assume significant traffic) so it's cheap to
self host too.

And I disagree with another commenter here saying Analytics is just for
vanity. That's not true — even for a personal blog analytics are useful to see
which articles are still being visited and thus need to be kept up to date, or
in case content is deprecated, the least you could do is to put up a warning.

And if you write that blog with a purpose (e.g. promoting yourself or your
projects) then you need to get a sense of how well your articles are received.
You can't do marketing without a feedback loop.

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

[2]
[https://matomo.org/faq/general/faq_157/](https://matomo.org/faq/general/faq_157/)

[3] [https://matomo.org/docs/privacy/](https://matomo.org/docs/privacy/)

~~~
chrismorgan
I self-hosted Matomo for a year and a half (and took over the AUR package for
it and improved it in the process). It was no trouble to run, but I ended up
uninstalling it late last year, for a few reasons: its interface is painfully
slow (and that’s nothing to do with my 1GB/1 vCPU VPS—I’ve interacted with a
decent-sized instance at innocraft.cloud and it was similar), and I seldom
looked at it, and I couldn’t think of any way in which anything I found in the
analytics would change my behaviour, and server-side analytics are good enough
(better on some ways, worse in others), and I value speed. So all up, I
figured: why am I slowing all my users down with this 50KB of JavaScript (of
which I frankly need less than 1KB), and why am I keeping this software going?

So now I pull out GoAccess (which reads the server logs) from time to time. I
find that my Atom feed is the vast majority of _traffic_ to my site, which
Matomo couldn’t tell me. I should implement pagination on the feed and see if
that helps. (Or limit the number of items in the feed, but conceptually I
rather like everything being accessible from the feed. Wonder how many feed
readers support pagination?)

~~~
bad_user
My websites are behind Cloudflare. If not Cloudflare then I'd use another CDN.
Therefore I don't have logs.

Also I disagree about the slowness.

The script is loaded asynchrously, it does not block the page and I measure my
loading times, which are really good actually. Just did a measurement and my
front-page loads in 271 ms and this includes all network requests, including
Matomo.

I don't think this is a real concern, but rather a premature optimization. If
GoAccess works for you, great, but that's not something I can use due to CDN.

~~~
markdown
> Just did a measurement and my front-page loads in 271 ms and this includes
> all network requests

Is your audience just the people in your locality, or the entire world?

~~~
bad_user
The test wasn't local.

------
jwr
I turned off Google Analytics, because I realized that it doesn't actually
report any useful or actionable data, just vanity metrics, and many of them of
dubious quality.

I run a SaaS and what matters for me is paid subscriptions. "Visits" (even if
by humans, which is hard to tell) really do not matter much. Yes, I do want to
increase conversion rates, and run bandit experiments, but I'm better off
doing that myself.

What also matters are search terms, but Google's search console (or tools, or
whatever it's called this week) provides that.

Turning off Google Analytics was hard to do psychologically — the Fear Of
Missing Out is strong. But it turns out I'm not missing out on anything,
except some dubious vanity data. And I'm making the web a better place in the
process.

~~~
mrweasel
> I realized that it doesn't actually report any useful or actionable data

The actionable part never occurred to me, but makes so much sense. What action
could anyone really take, based on the data presented by Google Analytics? On
top of my head I can actually think of anything you could easily get from
server logs.

~~~
TomGullen
I find time spent on page is a great way to measure performance of redesigns
on page. There are numerous actionable points.

~~~
jwr
It might be, assuming two things:

1) That you actually care about this metric. I don't, I do not get paid by the
number of minutes spent on pages, I get paid by the number of signed-up
subscribers who use my software to make their workflow easier. I can (and
prefer to) use bandit testing to measure the performance of redesigns.

2) that it can be reliably measured, which I don't think it can.

~~~
TomGullen
We are a SaaS company also, and time spent reading manual/tutorial pages is
important to us.

With regards to point two, being reliably measured sounds to me like
perfection is the enemy of adequate. Perhaps in low volumes you can't measure
certain stats like this reliabily but in large volumes I think it's useful.

------
sjwright
I run a reasonably large website and about two years ago it dawned on me that
I _never checked Google Analytics._ It was completely useless. It wasn't
telling me anything useful. I also knew that it was marginally user hostile
(or at least perceived as such) and affecting page performance, even if only
slightly.

Removing it felt momentous and insane. But in November 2018 I finally plucked
up the courage and removed it. The crazy thing is, until this article appeared
on the top of Hacker News reminded me, I had completely forgotten that I had
removed it. Far from the world ending, it turned out to be the most
inconsequential thing imaginable.

(I remember pouring over web server logs in Analog and AWStats 15+ years ago.
Now I honestly can't remember why. I think it was some combination of
vanity... and because everyone else was doing it. I suspect for most web
developers GA was just the natural evolution of that muscle memory.)

~~~
JackWritesCode
GA and AWStats are both awful products for a lot of people. For us, we check
out Fathom dashboard daily to see referrers and popular content. And vitality
(right now we can see a ton of traffic coming from HN). When I used GA, I
never checked it.

~~~
sjwright
I've looked at many reporting tools, most of them are probably great for
corporate/enterprise stuff.

I'm self-employed, so I have no boss or shareholders that need pretty reports
with bar charts. In my case my site is deeply database driven and I can build
engagement statistics directly from real data using complex SQL queries.

And while there's only a few such 'reports' that I check regularly, most of
them are temporally incongruous—I think that's how you'd describe it—in that
they look at what happened in the past contextualised by what's known in the
present. (E.g. tracking engagements from new/irregular users, while they were
new/irregular users, but which subsequently became regular users.)

~~~
JackWritesCode
Well that’s a different story then. It sounds like you measure things your own
way, so I agree that analytics are pointless in your edge case.

For us, we have generated a lot of revenue by measuring what works and what
doesn’t. That’s why analytics are worth it for a lot of people.

------
jbrooksuk
I've been happily using Fathom Analytics:
[https://usefathom.com](https://usefathom.com) and I have zero complaints.

No tracking. Privacy focused. Lightweight. You embed from your own domain.
They even do site monitoring now!

~~~
spockz
From the site:

> Our on-demand, auto-scaling servers will never slow your site down. Our
> tracker file is served via our super-fast CDN, with endpoints located around
> the world to ensure fast page loads.

This suggests that this solution is not self hosted. Is there a solution like
this which is really self hosted? This service is one small change away from
actually tracking.

Edit: Piwik/Matomo[1] appears to be the most mature one. [1]:
[https://matomo.org/](https://matomo.org/)

~~~
tutuca
Fathom is open source
[https://github.com/usefathom/fathom](https://github.com/usefathom/fathom)

~~~
tedivm
That's the old project- they have decided not to open source the new one.

The open source project is barely maintained at this point- they update the
readme and get the occasionally pull request, but it's not really being
developed.

I unfortunately switched to Fathom back when they were telling people they
were committed to open source, so now I'm looking to migrate off to something
a bit more trustworthy.

~~~
JackWritesCode
You've been saying this since last year. If I can help you migrate off of
Fathom Lite to something else, please let me know.

~~~
tedivm
Yeah, I've been busy.

------
kasbah
I recently had a discussion about the interface with the Goatcounter developer
[1]. Also put in a feature request with Posthog [2]. Hadn't heard of
Plausible, maybe that's the one for me!

[1]:
[https://github.com/zgoat/goatcounter/issues/302](https://github.com/zgoat/goatcounter/issues/302)

[2]:
[https://github.com/PostHog/posthog/issues/1020](https://github.com/PostHog/posthog/issues/1020)

~~~
Hoasi
> Hadn't heard of Plausible, maybe that's the one for me!

Plausible is pretty good, found it useful to monitor traffic and usage for
small projects.

------
AdriaanvRossum
Thanks for mentioning Simple Analytics [1]. We are at this point indeed only
cloud based. We believe we need to make a business case/profit first before
putting a lot of extra work in a open source version and maybe failing with
the business. It's a dream to make it open source, but not at this time.

We are very firm on our values. We will never sell your data. We have many
ways to get your raw data out of our system (API, download links, ...).

Our collection script [2] is open source and today we are also adding source
maps to our public scripts. Open source does not guarantee that a business
runs that same software as their cloud based option. We are looking into
services that can validate what we collect on our servers. We never collect
any IPs of personal data [3].

Great to see more products that care about privacy, I hope they will really
care and commit to their values for a long time.

[1] [https://simpleanalytics.com](https://simpleanalytics.com)

[2]
[https://github.com/simpleanalytics/scripts](https://github.com/simpleanalytics/scripts)

[3] [https://docs.simpleanalytics.com/what-we-
collect](https://docs.simpleanalytics.com/what-we-collect)

------
joppy
What kind of server-side analytics are people using today, for personal blogs
and things? Projects like GoAccess which eat an nginx log file and output some
analytics seem like a nice middle ground for those of us who want some
feedback on how people are using a website, without needing all the bells and
whistles of something more like Google Analytics (not to mention the fact that
it doesn't need any Javascript loaded or anything). Personally I've found
GoAccess pretty good, but the interface a little difficult to use and
understand, so I'm looking for projects like it.

~~~
PaulRobinson
Server side was how it was always done back in the early days of the web, and
analog[0] was state of the art.

Around 1999/2000 there was a rise of ISPs needing to install reverse proxy
caches because the growth of consumer access meant they were getting seriously
contended on upstream access. I was working at the time at a UK 0845 white
label ISP called Telinco (was behind Connect Free, Totalise, Current Bun and
other 0845 ISPs), and to my knowledge we were the first in the UK to install a
Netapps cache. It was the moment we realised (by checking the logs to see if
it was working), just how much porn our customers were accessing.

Those caches blow server side analytics to pieces, because frequently you
wouldn't even know the user had hit the page. What server side analytics was
useful for is what we'd now call Observability: they gave reasonable Latency,
Error Rate and Throughput metrics, which combined with some other system logs
might also give you a sense of Saturation.

As such, they were not too useful for marketing. Google Analytics was the
first product that allowed high fidelity analytics even if reverse proxy
caches (and even browser caches), were all over the place.

And here we are. In a World where we are tightly surveilled by corporate
entities in order to try and get us to click on things. Bit sad really.

I'd encourage people to think about what they need these analytics for.

If it's marketing, you might just as well using GA: it's the best product out
there. We just need to lobby for better regulation (at least GDPR and cookie
setting popovers give us choices on that regard now).

If you're stroking your ego, consider whether such an invasive technology is
worth the price, and if you need those numbers.

If you're making sure your infrastructure can handle the traffic, use server
side analytics alone. Parse your logs using the huge number of tools out there
able to do that in near-realtime, and leave your users' browsers free of
tracking cookies and javascript.

[0] [https://www.web42.com/analog/](https://www.web42.com/analog/)

~~~
Nextgrid
Caches are irrelevant now that the world has moved to HTTPS.

~~~
divbzero
There are no public caches with HTTPS, but there are still private browser and
CDN caches to contend with.

To ensure your origin server is hit on subsequent HTTPS requests, you would
still need to configure response headers for cache validation [1] to be

    
    
      Cache-Control: no-cache
    

instead of

    
    
      Cache-Control: private
    

[1]: [https://developer.mozilla.org/en-
US/docs/Web/HTTP/Headers/Ca...](https://developer.mozilla.org/en-
US/docs/Web/HTTP/Headers/Cache-Control)

~~~
Nextgrid
Yes, but those are caches that you control, so when it comes to analytics you
would get the logs off them too in order to get accurate metrics.

------
srg0
TIL about European Union Public License:

[https://joinup.ec.europa.eu/collection/eupl/introduction-
eup...](https://joinup.ec.europa.eu/collection/eupl/introduction-eupl-licence)

OSI-certified, copyleft, non-viral, GPL-compatible, SaaS-aware, multilingual

~~~
swyx
how can it be both copyleft and non viral? isn't vitality a definitive feature
of copy left?

~~~
contravariant
> it has no "viral effect" in case of linking

~~~
sc11
Neither does the GPL or any other licence under European laws.

~~~
icebraining
That's surprising, considering the virality is part of the license text, not
the law; does the law prohibit that clause?

~~~
sc11
Here's a good explanation:
[https://joinup.ec.europa.eu/collection/eupl/news/why-
viral-l...](https://joinup.ec.europa.eu/collection/eupl/news/why-viral-
licensing-ghost)

The short answer is that there are certain protections that ensure
interoperability, and that linking to software does not make it a derivative
work.

~~~
twic
That's an interesting analysis.

That directive is usually understood to be about reverse engineering in order
to build compatible software: "to obtain the necessary information to achieve
the interoperability of an independently created program with other programs"
being a key bit.

It's not immediately clear to me - a programmer but not a lawyer - that this
has any bearing on whether linking creates a derivative work.

Have any other experts, or courts, weighed in on whether this analysis is
sound?

------
huhtenberg
If you decide to migrate off GA, there's very little reason to not use self-
hosted analytics.

The only case when you'd get better analytics from a _service_ is exactly a
GA-like setup that can track people as they go from one website to another.
That is, the real value of an analytics service is derived directly from its
ability to invade people privacy, at scale.

Granted, migrating to another service is usually simpler, but it offers NO
insights into the traffic that you can't get from parsing server logs and in-
page pingbacks. You do however get a 3rd party dependency and a subscription
fee.

~~~
bttrfl
Server logs only tell you about things that happen on your server. If you are
using JavaScript it's likely there are plenty of events that might be valuable
to you that never leave a trace in your logs.

For example, if you validate forms with JS you might want to track form
submissions and validation errors.

~~~
huhtenberg
_... and in-page pingbacks_

------
dclusin
I use GoAccess. It's an offline access.log analytics engine. One feature it
has is to generate static site from its db. I have an hourly cron script that
picks up the last hours logs and generates a static site. You can see it in
action at
[https://www.clusin.com/analytics/](https://www.clusin.com/analytics/)

1 -
[https://github.com/allinurl/goaccess](https://github.com/allinurl/goaccess)

~~~
mimimi31
I've tried GoAccess in the past, but I remember the documentation not being
very thorough on certain topics like the databse, websocket connection, or log
syntax. So it was a bit of a pain to set up.

It also had some weird quirks like generating duplicate entries or randomly
failing to parse some log lines (you seem to have quite a few of those "failed
requests" yourelf by the way).

There also doesn't seem to be a good way to display statistics for multiple
virtual hosts. Even if you change your log format to include the host, you
just get an additional table in the dashboard, but still can't look at the
other metrics for each host separately. You'd have to run multiple GoAccess
instances to achieve that.

~~~
dclusin
Yeah I definitely had to open some issues to understand how it works. I have
multiple virtual servers as well and wasn’t able to get it to break out links
by virtual server.

I figured it’s fine for my needs since I literally have nothing on my domains.
I could see it being frustrating for power users.

------
netcan
Tangential but...

"Analytics" is rarely useful or unuseful because of the tool. These tools need
to be treated as data collection, not reporting.

If your goal is to inform certain decisions, track success or identify
problems... a spreadsheet (or napkin) is usually where that happens.

Say you do analysis systematically, make a list of questions and use your
tools to answer them... usually you find that the tool itself doesn't matter
much, and GA doesn't answer most of your questions out-of-the-box anyway.

Say you want a "funnel." That usually consists of a handful of data points. GA
usually doesn't have them by default, without tinkering configuration, etc.
Decide what they are beforehand. Understand them. Use GA (or whatever) to get
the data.

Finding the tool for the job is much easier once you know what the job _is_.
GA is extremely noisy, bombarding users with half-accurate, half-understood
reports.

------
Cenk
I’ve been pretty happy with Matomo (formerly Piwik), especially their non-
cookie mode. But the interface is ugly, confusing, and makes finding
information much more difficult than Google Analytics does.

Edit: One major thing I am unhappy with in Matomo is event tracking. GA makes
it much easier (in my experience) to track conversions and events, and
presents the data in a better way.

~~~
VadimPR
I found the Matomo interface to be a breath of fresh air compared to Google
Analytics! As a non-power user, GA was too heavy and enterprise-like. Matomo
is much cleaner, simpler, and more efficient for me to work with.

~~~
Cenk
I’m surprised to hear that! Are you using a different theme?

~~~
VadimPR
I don't think so - just the default. The light version of
[https://themes.matomo.org/DarkTheme#preview](https://themes.matomo.org/DarkTheme#preview).

~~~
Cenk
Thanks – I’ll give it a try

------
neilsimp1
Off topic, but I used to run a website that had Google Analytics. This site
and domain are now 100% down and have been for over a year.

I _still_ get monthly emails from Google about the analytics for this website.
Apparently it's getting 200-300 visitors per month still. I have replied back
to Google vie email about this several times but never heard any reply. I
wonder what site they are tracking?

~~~
TomAnthony
It is quite possible to take a GA tracking code for one site and put it on
another site. This has happened to me quite a lot where people have lifted
content or copied code from my site. You can see the hostnames in GA (you have
to dig for it), which could explain this.

------
devalnor
I use Ackee, also a simple and open source alternative
[https://ackee.electerious.com/](https://ackee.electerious.com/)

~~~
jboynyc
Another alternative not listed in the article:
[https://www.offen.dev/](https://www.offen.dev/)

------
ilovefood
I've recently whipped up my own self-hosted analytics solution [0] based on
SQLite, Bash and Metabase. It's all self hosted, easy to install and very
flexible with regards to the queries you can write and display. Metabase comes
with a lot of cool features for display, live reload and other cool stuff. :)

[0]: [https://funnybretzel.com/self-hosted-analytics-using-
sqlite-...](https://funnybretzel.com/self-hosted-analytics-using-sqlite-and-
metabase/)

~~~
zubspace
Thanks for the tutorial. Looks interesting.

I'm a fan of GoAccess. Unfortunately the queries are pre-made and there are
nearly no options whatsoever. You can't (yet) filter by date for example.

One thing I realized is, that on small sites, like my blog, an overwhelming
amount of traffic comes from search engines or bots which are looking for
vulnerabilities. Filtering them out takes a lot of time in any self-hosted or
self-made solution.

~~~
leephillips
I use GoAccess too. If I want to filter by date (for example) I just run the
log file through sed before feeding it to GoAccess.

------
nuccy
I'm honestly curious, are all the analytics tools, which rely on making third
party queries, still efficient with extensive use of adblocking these days?

If not, then logs of webservers are the only 100% reliable place (if available
of course), so old-style tools like awstats, Webalizer, etc [1] should have a
rise in popularity again.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_web_analytics_software](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_web_analytics_software)

~~~
JackWritesCode
Server side Analytics are far from reliable. Go and try Netlify, then you’ll
see how unreliable they really are.

For us nerds, we can always block things using DNS level blocking but Fathom’s
custom domain feature has done really well for the majority:
[https://usefathom.com/blog/custom-domains-embed-
code](https://usefathom.com/blog/custom-domains-embed-code)

~~~
pkalinowski
Good adblockers do DNS lookup to see if subdomain points to tracking server
anyway.

Only completely self-hosted (your domain, your tracking server) solutions are
resilient to adblocking

~~~
nuccy
Interesting, then as a workaround trackers may create an image with pseudo-
random src pointing to pageXXXwebsiteYYYclientZZZ.ad.yoursite.com
(yoursite.com is the site which serves the actual content), while asking the
owner to point NS record for ad.yoursite.com to IP of their DNS server. So
HTTP/S request or DNS request can reach them anyway. Obviously DNS caching
will prevent them from knowing how many times this particular page was
accessed by this particular client, but at least they will know that it was
accessed at least once.

------
tannhaeuser
I really hope an analytic genius can come up with a technique (like
differential privacy, but I'm no expert here) that would give advertisers what
they want (unique visitor counts, and very few other metrics) to place ads on
sites, yet doesn't give away too much privacy, nor leads to enslavement under
a single central entity. I guess if something like that doesn't come along,
then only old school content-based ads (site sponsoring) without any tracking
can be considered ethical (or no-ads of course). The argument against content-
based ads was always that it doesn't suffice to finance even web hosting let
alone content production. But with ad prices going to the bottom, I wonder if
the figures still add up in favour of targetted ads today.

~~~
lmkg
Apple/Webkit already has a proposal along those lines.

[https://webkit.org/blog/8943/privacy-preserving-ad-click-
att...](https://webkit.org/blog/8943/privacy-preserving-ad-click-attribution-
for-the-web/)

------
ckotso
Snowplow is also an option. It’s an open-source data collection solution that,
unlike GA, gives you full ownership of your event-level data and the freedom
to define your own data structures. Not exactly what you’d call ‘lightweight’
but quite a few Snowplow users/customers have come from GA for the level of
flexibility and control they can have over their data sets.

(Full disclosure: I work for Snowplow Analytics)

\-
[https://github.com/snowplow/snowplow](https://github.com/snowplow/snowplow)

\- [https://snowplowanalytics.com/](https://snowplowanalytics.com/)

~~~
ValentineC
I've setup the Snowplow collector and tracker on some of my sites because that
part is _very_ straightforward (and the tutorial on the wiki is great), but
I've never gotten past those steps to analyse the data collected.

Is there a highly-opinionated tutorial that shows how one can get some vanity
metrics out from Snowplow?

------
TomGullen
I still can't see any solid reasons why a site owner would not use GA.

Other products:

\- Objectively lack features

\- Potentially incur extra costs in money/time

\- May be a small barrier in m&a

\- May carry additional risks/attack vectors if self hosted

Trying to ween off big tech is commendable, but likely detrimental to a
business.

Relatively high risk, low reward.

I'm happy to have my mind changed. I can see a case for user hostility, but
most sites I imagine don't have an audience sensitive to this at the moment
anyway.

From an idealogical standpoint, other cloud stat tracking services would only
function if not many people used them. And I would also imagine feature creep
would be inevitable and lead them to becoming an inferior version of GA.

~~~
elondaits
GDPR compliance.

GDPR is the European privacy law. It protects European citizens so it applies
not only to European companies but any company that does business in Europe
(having offices or advertising/selling there).

Google does not give much assurance regarding their GDPR compliance... their
text on that subject is mostly CYA and then they make it your responsibility
to decide how to use it in compliance (if at all possible).

The GDPR gives you a small window to count visitors through cookies as long as
all private information (even IP) is anonymized... OR you can go do a more
traditional tracking with their explicit agreement. This last use case is
completely useless in terms of visitor statistics, but analytics companies
sometimes dare suggest it (as in "this is the way to do things right... so our
product is compliant and it's not our responsibility if you break the law").

That aside, I run international non-profit sites and GA is a bad look... and
with good reason: Using social network sharing buttons, GA, CDNs, etc. gives
too much power to track people to a few companies.

~~~
tannhaeuser
> _GA is a bad look_

Totally agree, but are there "acceptable" CDNs, like unpkg? What about Google
Fonts?

> _The GDPR gives you a small window to count visitors through cookies as long
> as all private information (even IP) is anonymized._

If it's not too much to ask, could you expand on that a bit, or share a link?
I guess you mean it's ok to send a browser fingerprint for unique visitor
stats without having to ask for permission, but I'm not aware of any legal
debate let alone court decision with respect to that.

Edit: obviously I can't read ("through cookies"), but cookies for unique
visitor counts aren't "functional" are they, so my interpretation is that
those cookies need consent; I'd love to hear otherwise though

------
gorkemcetin
Countly [1] is another open source alternative to Google Analytics - suggest
you try it on Digital Ocean [2] or deploy on your own [3].

It is self hosted, has support for desktop apps, mobile apps and web apps at
the same time.

[1] [https://count.ly](https://count.ly)

[2] [https://marketplace.digitalocean.com/apps/countly-
analytics](https://marketplace.digitalocean.com/apps/countly-analytics)

[3] [https://github.com/countly/countly-
server](https://github.com/countly/countly-server)

~~~
scoutt
Interesting. Thanks. But I am not so sure about disabling SELinux:

> Disable SELinux on Red Hat or CentOS if it has been enabled. Countly may not
> work on a server where SELinux is enabled. In order to disable SELinux, run
> "setenforce 0".

[https://support.count.ly/hc/en-
us/articles/360036862332-Inst...](https://support.count.ly/hc/en-
us/articles/360036862332-Installing-Countly-server#disable-selinux)

~~~
snuxoll
Unfortunately common on projects like these. Instead of guiding admins on how
to properly configure SELinux it’s easiest to just throw your hands up and say
“disable it”.

------
mhw
If your app is already built with Rails, adding
[https://github.com/ankane/ahoy](https://github.com/ankane/ahoy) is pretty
simple. Combine with
[https://github.com/ankane/blazer](https://github.com/ankane/blazer) and you
can build a reasonable set of reports as well.

It's pretty simple to extend too: I've added basic client-side (JavaScript)
error reporting on top of it, and I'm thinking about using it for Content
Security Policy reporting too.

~~~
etewiah
Yeah, ahoy is pretty awesome! In fact everything by ankane is inkanely great -
I have no idea how he manages to be so productive....

------
ksec
Is nice to see Plausible gaining traction. Here is an blog post [1] about how
they were asked for using it on site with tens or hundreds of million page
view.

I am wondering if HN is interested in hosting analytics like plausible that is
open for us to see. Sometimes I do wonder how many page view do HN get per
day, where are we all from etc. For example the plausible demo site. 35% are
using macOS. But only 15% uses Safari.

[1]
[https://plausible.io/blog/april-2020-recap](https://plausible.io/blog/april-2020-recap)

------
epoch_100
It’s great to see more alternatives to GA, and to see those alternatives
getting attention.

For those interested, one other FOSS analytics tool is Shynet [0]. Modern,
privacy-friendly, and detailed web analytics that works without cookies or JS.
It also looks pretty slick. Disclosure: I’m a maintainer.

[0] [https://github.com/milesmcc/shynet](https://github.com/milesmcc/shynet)

------
Kjeldahl
I was recently looking for a good tool that supports both web site analytics
and app analytics (custom events, typically pushed by SPAs). I looked at GA,
Amplitude and finally Matomo (which I ended up with). GA and Amplitude either
did not offer or made it hard to work down to the micro level, essentially
tracking known individual users down to the singular event level. Matomo makes
this easy, although it certainly looks a bit dated compared to the
competition. And the free parts are somewhat limited (you need to buy stuff or
hosting).

I would have though that there would be several decent packages offering www +
app analytics by now, but as I wrote, options were quite limited. Some of the
options mentioned in the subject here looks like good options for just website
analytics, but I'm not seeing much as far as "app analytics" (custom events)
goes.

~~~
JackWritesCode
Less companies are focusing on user level tracking, as it’s an invasion of
privacy and compliance doesn’t allow it

~~~
srrr
Less companies are focusing on user level tracking because one single user is
not a meaningful statistical group.

Companies focusing on user level tracking today provide a different set of
tools one might be used to and that can of course be compliant, see
[https://www.hotjar.com/](https://www.hotjar.com/).

------
r3trohack3r
We launched [https://everytwoyears.org](https://everytwoyears.org) today. It
was my first project where I felt analytics was necessary, but also a moral
quandary. For personal reasons, I'm very against PII big data. For project
reasons, the project is literally about stopping mass surveillance so shipping
a tool like Google Analytics was firmly off the table.

I went with [https://app.usefathom.com](https://app.usefathom.com) which
tracks _aggregate anonymized_ data.

They have the option to self host, but I'm sending them money to support the
project. With today's launch, I'm really happy with the product. Will continue
using it.

~~~
JackWritesCode
We really appreciate people like you, thank you. And on a personal level, I
respect your "BREAKING THROUGH TWO PARTY POLITICS" tagline.

~~~
r3trohack3r
<3

------
XCSme
I can also add mine, even though more complex, it's still lightweight:
[https://usertrack.net](https://usertrack.net)

I tried bringing together the most useful analytics features (user segments,
heatmaps, session recordings, tags/events) in a self-hosted platform with
simple UI. A/B testing feature is also coming soon. I built the platform with
the optimal use-case being improving conversion rates on landing pages.

My goal now is to prove and teach (even to non-technical users) that self-
hosting is easy nowadays when you can create a VPS running your desired
software in just a few clicks.

I would love to hear some criticism or why you wouldn't want to try something
like this.

------
yagodragon
I'd like to ditch google analytics for a new small side project I'm building.
I live in a small country in Europe and for me the most important feature of
these alternatives is the cookieless tracking and the lightweight scripts.
However, the pricing is too steep for a project that won't gain more than
thousands users.

Fathom analytics and simple analytics cost ~100$/year.

Plausible costs ~50$

I really liked and almost settled with plausible but I just saw goatcounter
right now. It's free for personal / open source projects. That's so nice for
small projects like many people here are building.

~~~
sleepyhead
Fathom and Plausible are both open source:

[https://github.com/usefathom/fathom](https://github.com/usefathom/fathom)
[https://github.com/plausible/analytics](https://github.com/plausible/analytics)

------
Fileformat
I have been using GA for my side projects but have been unhappy with the
Google's direction on privacy, so started researching others. There are just
_so_ many: I think a lot of developers (including myself) think it is easy to
do & start rolling their own & then try to productize it.

Here is my research: [https://til.marcuse.info/webmaster/alt-
analytics.html](https://til.marcuse.info/webmaster/alt-analytics.html)

I ended up going with GoatCounter.

------
cpuguy83
Maybe stop spying on people?

EU be like you have to put up this banner to tell them you are spying... it
super annoying and everyone hates it... and you be like "sure, I love me some
spying".

~~~
Carpetsmoker
Counting how many people come in to your store and how many of them actually
but something is not "spying".

~~~
cpuguy83
You also don't need client side spyware to track this information.

~~~
Carpetsmoker
You don't _need_ anything, but it's a useful way to do it without any
significant drawbacks. In many cases, it's more or less the only option.

~~~
cpuguy83
It is a significant drawback! It is literally not the only option to the
situation you described.

Spying is the only solution for spying, yes. Spying is the only solution to
over-eager people wanting mostly useless metrics.

It's not much different than me checking my Twitter "likes" constantly.

------
xrd
Has anyone used any of these with a proxy to avoid ad blocker blocking? What I
mean is, I installed matomo and then saw my ad blocker blocked it. Is there a
way to make any of these work by proxying through the same domain as the site,
so those analytics requests look just like all other ajax requests?

I was surprised matomo wasn't listed here. Does anyone know if that was
intentional? Seems like it fits the criteria of the post and the goals of open
source.

~~~
Carpetsmoker
> I was surprised matomo wasn't listed here. Does anyone know if that was
> intentional? Seems like it fits the criteria of the post and the goals of
> open source.

Yes, this was intentional as this article was focused on "light-weight"
analytics. I think they'll do an article about Matomo at some point in the
future as well.

------
mgreenleaf
Another shameless plug, if you are just using it for finding out where
visitors are coming from and page hits, I wrote [https://geo-
yak.com](https://geo-yak.com) for that. Doubles as an ip geolocation API.

I'm putting the finishing touches on a `tag=XXX` parameter that allows you to
record a tag (like a pageid), and then filter the maps by it (not publicly
documented yet, but will be in the next couple weeks).

------
dsalzman
I switched to GoatCounter for my personal blog and it's more than capable. All
I want is pageviews with timestamps per page and referrer info.

------
ent101
A lot of people may not care about this, but Google Analytics (and another 3rd
party, hosted analytics platforms) are very important when trying to sell your
website. Basically, it allows the buyer to access reliable historical data
about your website which in turn makes it easier to arrive at a valuation.

------
pcmaffey
You can always roll your own basic analytics, eg
[https://www.pcmaffey.com/roll-your-own-
analytics](https://www.pcmaffey.com/roll-your-own-analytics)

Doing so is extremely helpful to understanding what events and data you
actually need for your use case.

------
nofunsir
Here's the most lightweight alternative to Google Analytics:

Don't use analytics. You really don't need it. No. You really don't. No, No. I
promise you. Just stop.

All tracking is evil. All ads (except those inside a store for a product
inside the same store) are evil.

------
FalconSensei
Didn't know about GoatCounter. I think its the only free hosted alternative
that I saw.

Having a small static blog hosted on GithubPages, GA was the only option for
me. (Not going to pay for analytics while my blog has like, 10 visits a week)

~~~
abelaer
I just installed goatcounter on my githubPages Jekyll page. 2 minutes of work,
works great.

~~~
earthboundkid
Similar experience. I switched my blog off of GA to Goat. I don’t think I’ll
switch back. I prefer how simple Goat is.

For work though, we use GA and I can’t really imagine switching. We actually
use the event stuff, so it would be hard to switch away.

------
djsumdog
I briefly tried Matomo, but didn't want the Javascript component and really
just wanted log analysis. It's okay at log analysis, but it doesn't really
shine unless you do javascript live tracking.

So I disabled it and went back to awstats. I've been using awstats for over a
decade, and for my personal site and projects, it pretty much gives me the
majority of the data I really care about.

I might look at shipping more complex nginx json logs to logstash/elastic
search, but then I'd need to visualize them in Kibana and that just seems like
a lot of heavy weight containers to run for stats I don't really need.

------
nelaboras
Can I ask why any private website even needs analytics? I just don't see the
point. Is it just vanity, or making sure anyone actually reads the
articles/content, or trying to adapt to audience preferences/search
queries/...?

I get the point for any commercial venture but for most sides I simply don't
see the added value. If you want to know whether people like your work add a
comment section or a newsletter signup - why do you need to spy on your users
with intrusive tools, send their data around the globe to kraken like google,
just to have a few statistics?

~~~
XCSme
What do you mean by private?

I assume many people have sites for their small businesses. Imagine you have a
restaurant, you want to be able to know how many people reach your site, how
they reach it, why they don't contact you (do they leave after seeing the
menu? or the opening times? or the location? or photos?), are your contact
forms properly working, is your website loading fast enough, etc.

------
Clex
Google Analytics has a "bot filtering" option that works pretty well (even
though it's not perfect). Do the alternatives also have similar features?
There is a lot of automated traffic on the internet.

~~~
dx034
Matomo has the same, works pretty well. Via plugin they can also track bots to
show that separately but they're filtered by default.

~~~
VadimPR
I'm not sure if it's actually filtered - I think they're just tracked and
classified. At least that's what I'm seeing in my instance.

------
darekkay
Related submissions:

\-
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19883876](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19883876)

\-
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21890027](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21890027)

\-
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22813168](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22813168)

\-
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23411047](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23411047)

------
h4kor
If you only need page views, for example for a personal blog, try goaccess
([https://goaccess.io/](https://goaccess.io/)).

It uses your server logs for simple analytics.

~~~
FalconSensei
But then you can't use it on Github Pages, right?

~~~
benhoyt
I actually use GoAccess on my personal site, which runs on GitHub Pages.
Obviously you don't get the actual web server logs (only GitHub has those),
but I have a few lines of JavaScript that hits a 1x1 image on CloudFront with
the page and referrer information, and then I download the CloudFront logs and
use those with GoAccess. Read more here:
[https://benhoyt.com/writings/replacing-google-
analytics/](https://benhoyt.com/writings/replacing-google-analytics/)

~~~
FalconSensei
seems like... way too much work.

Ive changed to Goat Counter, but thanks

------
dynamite-ready
I often read posts stating a great deal of discouragement for self developed
analytic solutions. I've recently developed a home rolled solution for a
product I'll hopefully launch soon.

There's no UI for my signals application, but it should give me raw access to
all the GA metrics people typically look for (pages, referrers, user agents,
etc). Storage could be pain point. Compute might also turn out to be, but if
that ever becomes a problem, then I'll probably have much more to think
about...

What am I missing here?

~~~
JackWritesCode
Opportunity cost. Hacker News has some of the best developers in the world
reading it. $100-500 / hourly rates. Why would they spend their time building
& maintaining something when they could pay $140 / year for a top tier,
privacy-focused analytics product like Fathom, where both founders work full
time on it?

Then you have redundancy of data. How are they backing up historical data? Are
they running with failovers? How will their analytics do in the event that
they get a hug of death from Hacker News or Reddit? There are so many factors
to consider.

I don't think we should discourage people from rolling their own if they enjoy
it. Heck, I've built things that existed. That's how we get better. I'm just
sharing why a lot of developers won't roll their own.

------
css
I have always used AWStats [0] and never thought I needed more information
than that.

[0]: [https://www.awstats.org/](https://www.awstats.org/)

~~~
acidburnNSA
Same. Plus I have 15 years of continuous browsable data now. I check it all
the time and it tells me what I want to know.

------
Bogdanp
Shameless plug: I wrote and use nemea[0] for all my stuff.

[0]: [https://github.com/Bogdanp/nemea](https://github.com/Bogdanp/nemea)

------
franky47
I'm working on an end-to-end encrypted analytics SaaS, to try and solve the
"putting your eggs in someone else's basket" problem, while offering something
simpler than self-hosting.

I'm collecting feedback and looking to open it for beta in the next couple of
weeks, but there's already a preview signup link in the newsletter, where I
share my progress on building the platform on a weekly basis.

[https://chiffre.io](https://chiffre.io)

~~~
m90
Out of interest, if you say you honor DNT, how exactly do you handle browsers
that do not allow setting this as a user preference anymore (Firefox, Safari)?

~~~
franky47
Firefox's settings (as of v77) still allow you to set (or unset) DNT, and I
honor that. For Safari unfortunately, Apple chose to remove this feature
because it could be used for fingerprinting, so there is not much to be done
here.

~~~
m90
Interesting, did Firefox revert their decision towards DNT? I remember being
confronted with the behavior of it sending DNT headers no matter what, which
must have been something around spring 2019.

~~~
franky47
Possibly, I'm not using the DNT header though, because of the encryption, I
need to know about DNT before the analytics data is even sent. I use
navigator.doNotTrack, and where it's set I only encrypt and send a minimal
visit count event.

~~~
m90
I tried to do the exact same thing and had to stop considering DNT as it would
essentially collect Chrome only back then. Good thing they have reverted this
I guess. DNT makes a lot of sense as a concept still.

~~~
Carpetsmoker
IMO it's pretty much useless (and possibly even harmful) and a failed
experiment. GoatCounter intentionally ignores it. Context:
[https://www.arp242.net/dnt.html](https://www.arp242.net/dnt.html)

------
rickette
[https://count.ly](https://count.ly) also looks pretty neat as a self hosted
solution. Anyone experience with that?

------
pantulis
Of course you can now do Google Analytics server-side with GTM:
[https://www.optimics.cz/what-is-gtm-server-side-tracking-
and...](https://www.optimics.cz/what-is-gtm-server-side-tracking-and-why-do-
you-need-it/)

Have GCP? Hit this button and you get your docker container in your Kubernetes
cluster doing all the stuff for you, pretty awesome.

------
jgillich
I recently started using Kindmetrics, a very simple analytics tool written in
Crystal. Looks very similar to Plausible actually, it may have been inspired
by it.

[https://kindmetrics.io/](https://kindmetrics.io/)

[https://github.com/kindmetrics/kindmetrics](https://github.com/kindmetrics/kindmetrics)

------
krlx
I too wished for a simpler, less invasive but still Javascript based,
esthetically pleasing and free analytics solution (I am a cheap student) :
[https://github.com/Karalix/feu-analytics](https://github.com/Karalix/feu-
analytics)

The Firebase free tier seemed perfect for my use case. It is far from being
perfect, but Good Enough For Me™

------
PStamatiou
Been using Fathom for a few months now (after migrating away from Gaug.es
which I've had for at least 6-7 years prior but they got acquired by some
random companies that has zero support and makes no improvements) and have
been loving it so far. They're really responsive and always improving things.
I like that I can cname the tracking script to my domain

~~~
paulcpederson
Also using fathom and really like it! Not having to put up a GPDR tracking
popup is very nice, I find those quite annoying.

------
severak_cz
I have my own solution inspired by plausible.io and Simple analytics. See
[https://tildegit.org/severak/millions](https://tildegit.org/severak/millions)

I used Matomo before, but simple dashboard in style of plausible.io is more
useful for me. I have a little traffic on my sites.

------
pier25
In my blog I started using Netlify's analytics which are server based and cost
$9 per month (up to a number of views) and I gotta say they are extremely
basic and lackluster. I paid for the subscription for one month but I don't
think I will keep on paying.

Edit:

Also it doesn't seem to be tracking referrers correctly.

~~~
JackWritesCode
Yes, Netlify Analytics are bad. Try Fathom.

~~~
pier25
I'm sure it's a better service but at $14 per month (or $140 per year) for a
low traffic blog it's too expensive. I don't need anything that fancy.

I moved to Netlify analytics from Goat counter because I liked the idea of
having server side analytics, but at $9 per month these are extremely
overpriced.

I think I will just go back to Goat counter.

------
ahstilde
The best alternative to Google Analytics is Parse.ly [1]. It's privacy-
conscious, reliable, and user-friendly. Most importantly, it gives you
important engagement metrics instead of vanity metrics.

[1][https://parse.ly/overview](https://parse.ly/overview)

~~~
XCSme
If you are related to parse.ly: it's really confusing that clicking "pricing"
doesn't show the pricing first.

------
tobilg
If you have an AWS account and want a lightweight, cheap and privacy-friendly
alternative, you can have a look at
[https://github.com/ownstats/ownstats](https://github.com/ownstats/ownstats)
as well.

~~~
dan15
I guess this isn't usable outside of AWS? It's unfortunate that it's tightly
coupled to one particular provider.

------
runxel
Still no real alternative when on a Github page, or am I missing something?

It's not that I really _need_ statistics, but sometimes it would be nice to
know if there is even _anything_ going on or you're just screaming into a
void.

But I refuse to spam visitors of my pages with GA.

~~~
zoomablemind
The GH pages are still in a repo, so the repo's Insights: Traffic can show
some stats on visits.

[https://github.blog/2014-01-07-introducing-github-traffic-
an...](https://github.blog/2014-01-07-introducing-github-traffic-analytics/)

------
steviedotboston
Until one of these alternatives is completely free like Google Analytics is I
don't see a massive shift happening. I'm a web developer and there's no way
I'd convince my clients to pay $20/month for something that Google offers for
free.

~~~
JackWritesCode
There’s a huge shift happening. People are realizing that Google Analytics
isn’t “free”. You’re sending data to a company that has a huge amount of
privacy scandals.

We have lots of agencies who use us, and their clients may differ from yours,
but here’s what’s helped them:
[https://usefathom.com/blog/switch](https://usefathom.com/blog/switch)

~~~
FalconSensei
> There’s a huge shift happening. People are realizing that Google Analytics
> isn’t “free”.

Just be aware that, while that is true for HN, and some subreddits, that still
doesn't apply to most people. It's the same as saying, based on comments on
HN, that people are moving away from Chrome when its market share is not going
down.

~~~
JackWritesCode
I mean outside of HN :) HN makes up < 1% of our customers

------
marvinblum
Does anyone have experience with passive fingerprinting? I thought about
implementing it into our Go backend as a middleware of some kind and track
that way. I haven't found anything like it so far, but it would be ideal to
track without cookies.

~~~
Carpetsmoker
I did a write-up of solutions that I'm aware of here:
[https://github.com/zgoat/goatcounter/blob/master/docs/sessio...](https://github.com/zgoat/goatcounter/blob/master/docs/sessions.markdown)
– happy to add more if anyone knows of any.

~~~
JackWritesCode
The Fathom one isn’t accurate and references an old article. I’ll submit a PR
in a few weeks if I remember :)

------
mobilio
Analytics isn't count a pageviews.

GA also counts - social interaction, events, Ecommerce and many more.

------
winrid
I've been building Watch.ly, which can provide you reporting like this (this
is the daily email, mine in this case)

[http://imgur.com/gallery/EP8jNTk](http://imgur.com/gallery/EP8jNTk)

------
Ataraxy
All of these web tracker alternatives but what I've really been itching for is
a very low barrier to entry, no hassle to scale, easy/fast to query adhoc
event tracker. Something like a self hosted amplitude or keen.

~~~
XCSme
Hmm, depends on what you mean by "easy/fast to query". Is something with a
GraphQL API easy/fast to query? Or should it have some UI to do it?

I wonder if it's easy to just send events to something like Firebase and then
query that DB.

~~~
Ataraxy
Fast adhoc aggregations over firestore isn't a reasonable possibility.

A graphql api or not doesn't really matter since that's just an abstraction
for querying a service or database.

I really mean something like an open source Amplitude or Keen where you can
dump events into it and then aggregate/group them in any way you like on
demand.

------
gramakri
We have been using a self-hosted matomo for our company site for years now
(back from when it was called piwik). Highly recommend it! The satisfaction
you get out of not using any google product is unsurpassed.

------
pachico
We run our own analytics solution based on a js library, a small go app and
ClickHouse for data aggregation. With a very cheap and small setup you can
handle hundreds of millions of events per day.

------
bvrlt
What are alternatives to Google Analytics for mobile? We'd just like to
collect basic events (eg. this feature has been used), number of active users,
OS usage… nothing fancy.

------
dougblackjr
Engauge Analytics is a good alternative, and privacy focused:
[https://engaugeanalytics.com/](https://engaugeanalytics.com/)

------
komali2
Goat counter's been good and doesn't fingerprint.

~~~
JackWritesCode
Yes it does -
[https://github.com/zgoat/goatcounter/blob/master/docs/sessio...](https://github.com/zgoat/goatcounter/blob/master/docs/sessions.markdown#goatcounters-
solution)

------
limeblack
For static web pages I like [https://disqus.com](https://disqus.com) Has
comment and minor analytics support.

------
est
Are there any good HeapAnalytics-like frontend widget that can do auto-
tracing? The collect-everything retrospective analytics is great tool.

------
jeremiahlee
I have been a happy Plausible subscriber for the last 3 months. It's handled
100k+ unique visitors a month with no problem.

------
juanre
I stick to GA because I fear that removing it could impact my site's ranking.
Is it an unfounded fear, anyone knows?

~~~
pauljarvis
We actually looked into this:

[https://usefathom.com/blog/google-analytics-
seo](https://usefathom.com/blog/google-analytics-seo)

Funny as it sounds, using Fathom instead of GA could increase your SEO
rankings :)

~~~
juanre
Thank you! I'll give it a shot.

------
cfitz
If you're using Ruby on Rails, perhaps consider the "Ahoy Matey" AKA "Ahoy"
free and open source gem created by Instacart [1].

I've used it in my personal projects and have never had any issues. It's great
to have no vendor lock-in and full ownership of user metric data. If you go
this route, please be responsible with the data and follow all relevant
regulations & guidelines (ex: GDPR) regarding its storage and usage.

[1]: [https://github.com/ankane/ahoy](https://github.com/ankane/ahoy)

------
buro9
I've recently been pondering whether to create a log receiver that will
produce Prometheus metrics as well as logs for Loki.

Why?

Because there are several open source projects that if joined up in a
relatively simple way would provide a full RUM / Analytics solution.

For collecting the analytics: Akamai Boomerang, which is a descendant of Yahoo
tooling
[https://github.com/akamai/boomerang](https://github.com/akamai/boomerang) and
BSD licensed

Then insert a collector that will produce Prometheus metrics and write log
lines. The metrics will provide the timing information and in many ways will
be richer than Google Analytics, and the log lines will provide the
potentially high cardinality of string based data like user agents, URIs, etc
and Grafana supports PromQL queries against logs such that you can gain
metrics from the log lines too.

Then add in a free Grafana Cloud
[https://grafana.com/products/cloud/](https://grafana.com/products/cloud/) and
configure Prometheus to scrape from the collector, and Loki to consume the
logs.

This is an end-to-end cloud hosted RUM / Analytics solution that for a single
user would be free and one can even add alerting.

The missing link is that collector, to consume the Boomerang output and
produce Prometheus metrics and log lines for Loki.

All of this is open source and can be self hosted, the only piece you would
have to host today would be that custom collector to receive the Boomerang
requests.

------
mauserng
Piwik PRO is also worth checking out. Our functionality matches GA. Our
analytics is more focused on user privacy and is inline with privacy laws like
GDPR, CCPA or industry regulations like HIPAA or EBA guidelines.

Check out a comprehensive comparison of GA, GA360 & Piwik PRO at:
[https://piwik.pro/blog/piwik-pro-vs-google-analytics-
compreh...](https://piwik.pro/blog/piwik-pro-vs-google-analytics-
comprehensive-comparison/)

~~~
mauserng
Actually I meant sharing this link to the comparison table:
[https://piwik.pro/piwik-pro-vs-google-analytics-vs-
ga360/](https://piwik.pro/piwik-pro-vs-google-analytics-vs-ga360/)

------
wprapido
A happy Matomo user

------
JackWritesCode
Thanks for all the kind words about
[https://usefathom.com](https://usefathom.com). We’ve been in business since
2018 and both founders now work full time on it.

We’re fully bootstrapped, actively rejecting millions of dollars in venture
capital, and we are sustainable. That is the key. We are priced fairly, and at
a level that allows us to ensure the longevity of our business.

We are used by governments, small businesses, multi billion dollar companies
and individuals. Everyone cares about privacy and legal teams love us.

We are fully GDPR compliant and use zero cookies. A lot of people have read
our article on cookie-free tracking, but that article is outdated now. We’re
also launching a new method over the next few weeks which is game changing,
which we’ll blog about.

Our infrastructure is highly available and runs across multiple servers. We
don’t run our services from a single VPS, and have availability in multiple
availability zones for everything. We pay premiums for our infrastructure
because we take our customers data very seriously.

We allow you to set-up a custom domain in less than 2 minutes, comfortably
passing ad-blockers. Or if that’s not your cup of tea, you can enable honor-
DNT and respect ad-blockers.

We are built to handle billions of pageviews a month, we’ve poured hundreds
(thousands?) of hours into refining our aggregation script, and we’re the
leading solution on the market.

Don’t forget, we also offer unlimited uptime monitoring as part of your plan,
sending alerts by SMS, Telegram, email and Slack.

Finally, we run a popular podcast called Above Board, where we talk about
business & privacy.

If you haven’t already checked us out, you should.

~~~
PhilippGille
> We are fully GDPR compliant and use zero cookies.

From the GitHub repo [1]:

> At present, Fathom Analytics Lite is not PECR compliant due to the fact that
> it uses an anonymous cookie. Our PRO version is PECR compliant, and we'll be
> making changes to this codebase some time in the future to make it
> compliant.

The open source version seems to be lacking behind and might generally be
treated without much love, given that their website doesn't even link to it
(which is understandable from a business point of view, but doesn't inspire
much confidence in its future maintenance).

[1]:
[https://github.com/usefathom/fathom/blob/69baac5c4a4d96880a2...](https://github.com/usefathom/fathom/blob/69baac5c4a4d96880a28be1c82a519b43deda3b9/README.md)

~~~
JackWritesCode
Our goal is long term sustainability of privacy-focused analytics. We're
achieving that. We tried to do it with the OS codebase, and the original tech
guy left the project. The MRR was around $1,300 between 2 people after many
months.

When we focused on building a business, we were able to become a much more
viable competitor to Google Analytics.

The reason we haven't written off Fathom Lite is because we've always had
plans to come back to it this year and put out an update. Will we be launching
new features? No. Will we be fixing bugs and ensuring it's a solid product for
individuals? Absolutely.

------
johannes1813
This is super helpful! I posted an article here a few weeks about trying to
build my own minimal alternative to GA, but I had no idea all of these existed
and would happily have used one of these instead of doing it myself:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23351323](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23351323)

