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So many choices... Anyone have any favorites?


Thanks for mentioning https://www.userTrack.net, I'm the author and still working full-time on improving it. Let me know if you have any questions/remarks about userTrack.


Hey XCSme. Your product is one of the best I have seen. Very deep insights, with a good interface.

Ps: You probably need a better name. Since your website says it is privacy respecting, 'UserTrack' doesn't exactly convey that. Just something with 'Track' not in the name.

And adblockers like uBlock Origin tend to block everything like track.domain.com.

And just a bug/overlap I noticed when hovering over the delete button - https://i.imgur.com/aBA7cpr.png


Thank you for the feedback!

I did consider changing the name, but that's a lot harder than it seems (have to rebrand, change domain, probably lose all SEO, etc.). So far I didn't encounter any issues with ad-blockers (for users userTrack is self-hosted, so you can host it on any domain, so name doesn't matter there). I also rank highly for terms like "user tracking" which I think is good, as people would stumble upon a self-hosted alternative instead of some 3rd party platform like Google Analytics. In the end, it does track stats and users on your website, but if I were to start again I would indeed choose a friendlier name.

I am aware of that visual bug, I do have a better solution in mind for it, unforunately I have to write hacky code to make it work (due to the limitations of the material-ui library used). I think that's a very minor issue though, and there are more important issues I want to fix before it, especially that it's not an easy fix.


Wow, that’s actually the first one (besides matomo which is rather enormous) that looks like a decent alternative to me with more than just bare-bones features. I’ll keep it in mind. And I really like the clear and to-the-point website.

No, XCSme did not pay me for this comment ;)


Thanks for the kind words!

To be honest, I did work a lot on it, 6-7 years as a side-project and one year full-time. I think feature-wise userTrack is pretty comparable to Matomo (including some of their premium features that cost 400eur+/year). I also recently recreated the entire front-end from spaghetti jQuery to TypeScript+React+MaterialUI and implemented an auto-updater system. This means that I can now implement new features, fix bugs and distribute the updates to users very fast.

I am really glad that you like the landing page! I probably changed it like 200 times in the last 2 months (last change was 2 minutes ago). I still want to improve it (eg. some hero video actually showcasing the product, so you don't have to spend time understanding the demo).

PS: I hope that the BTC transfer was successful and thanks again for the comment! (jk)


> am really glad that you like the landing page! I probably changed it like 200 times in the last 2 months (last change was 2 minutes ago).

Hilarious, I have changed our new home page literally hundreds of times over the last few days and having looked at yours, I see inspiration for yet another change.


https://github.com/PostHog/posthog looks great for product analytics. If you've used it, can you please share your experience?


I currently use the self-hosted version on Heroku and impressed with its functionality. It's quite similar to Heap Analytics. My favorite feature is auto-tracking. That said, there are some scaling limitations currently if you have a high traffic site. We have a couple hundred thousand users monthly so we are likely on the larger side of PostHog deployments. The team is cranking out features and improvements incredibly fast and I'd expect these to be resolved soon. Feel free to DM - happy to answer any more questions.


Thanks!


The problem with matomo (not their fault) is that Microsoft flags your site as distributing malware and you disappear from search engines. You have to fill out a bunch of forms to fix it. It’s listed in the matomo faq and is basically either from a bot falsely reporting you, or some other glitch. It’s why my blog is still invisible to bing users: if you visit in edge, you get huge menacing red warnings.


This is unfortunate. I've been using them for years and wasn't aware of this. I wonder how much it's affecting the sites I use it on...


There are a bunch of Github "awesome software" lists.

One thing I haven't seen is someone categorize open source web traffic analytics into Client Side Analytics (via javascript) and Web Server Log analytics.

Since each approach drastically changes the data collected and reported.


Are there any all-in-one-ish solutions that attempt to do both?

i.e. collects both (or one of either) server logs and client side analytics, normalize them, etc.


Matomo does provide an alternative to leverage web server log files (beyond the usual client side javascript)...using a python script: https://matomo.org/faq/log-analytics-tool/

When i first migrated (my personal sites) away from GA, i was concerned about performance, so was considering using server logs, and stumbled upon this feature of matomo. The javascript approach ended up not being the performance issue that i thought it would be...so i never ended up using the python script...So your mileage may vary, but to your question, this does exist.


Fathom started as open source, but the founders stopped supporting the open source project. It's basically abandoned at this point, with no new releases in almost two years and only updates to the README.


I’ve been using GoatCounter for a couple of months now, it’s great! Super simple interface with all the data you need.


Aye, same here. It's really good!


+1 for Plausible.

I've been using it for our name generator product Mashword (https://mashword.com) and it was really straightforward to implement. It's reasonably priced, has a clean interface and graphs, is privacy protecting and supports using your own domain for pulling in the js include.


Here is another to add to that list. They just hit 2.0 this week.

https://github.com/electerious/Ackee


> https://github.com/usefathom/fathom

Be careful of this one. It started out as OSS, but switched to proprietary once they'd achieved traction.


Did they have a reason for changing from OSS to free/pro?


money?



It’s not open source.


True, but it at least respects the privacy of your visitors by doing very minimal tracking. Basically, all you get is country, some device stats, and a time stamp. Last time I used it, it didn’t even track return visits and used no cookies iirc. It felt nice


Here's one we are working on: https://volument.com — it focuses on conversion optimization.


+1 for matomo. Very easy to set up a self-hosted instance, good documentation, and works well. NB: My site is pretty low-traffic.


Are we only looking at little ones that have their own user interface? If not, Snowplow is the prime mover of web and event tracking.

https://github.com/snowplow/snowplow


Of these, do any have a funnel tracking feature that shows what visitors went through a specific series of pages/events? Seeing how users moved about the site and seeing how many converted is a deal breaker for me.


https://volument.com might be a good pick since it focuses strictly on conversion optimization. It attempts to measure the more general conversion flow, known as the AIDA funnel (awareness, interest, desire, and action).


Pretty sure posthog does.


(PostHog founder) Yes we do! PostHog gives you full funnel capabilities + ability to see exactly what users dropped out where


Confirmed! (I'm one of the founders)


Matomo has this feature I believe (if I understand correctly from your description).


Not out of the box but snowplow does if you model the data on your own.


Any privacy oriented analytics tools not purely focused on website analytics?


https://getinsights.io has event tracking for webapps but is not open source


Thereˆs also https://ackee.electerious.com/, quite simple but a good option.


posthog is really unfortunately named


PostHog founder here. Only if you split the name ;-)


I don't get it either. Not a native speaker, though. So could someone explain it?


I believe they are referring to posting a picture of one's hog


How so?




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