A customer is asking about analytics, and are sceptical to Google.
All the alternatives I’ve seen, are way too expensive for this non-profit organization. Any hints of alternatives that are free and/or open, self hosted or not?
(Doesn’t have to be the most advanced, but some metrics of which pages are viewed the most, and maybe where people are referred from or something. This is really not my cup of tea, but I guess I could look a bit into it.)
Matomo. Most well-known FOSS alternative, I believe.
Yeah Matomo (previously called “Piwik”) is pretty good. There’s also https://umami.is/ which is lighter but has fewer features.
Just throwing https://www.awstats.org/ in the discussion. However it does not look as beautiful and feature rich as the other solutions listed here.
As @ac_fan and @Daniel said, Matomo On-Premise
Running it for three years now. Can only recommend it 
- gives me some cool insights without feeding everything to Google.
It has it’s own faults as it’s not a perfect product yet.
But check out https://www.usertrack.net/
It’s paid (one time) but it’s self-hosted and it has more expensive features like heatmaps, recordings and A/B tests (I didnt try the A/B tests yet)
Great suggestions! Thanks! 
I just installed the Matomo WP plugin for their site right now. Will dig more into it later, and probably setup my own server (one of the mentioned ones) for other sites as well.
another open source choice
CloudFlare have just announced their privacy-first analytics platform. You do not need to use CloudFlare’s DNS to utilize this, and it’s totally free:
Let’s add a link to this new Plausible Analytics topic
here: https://hostballs.com/t/how-to-self-host-plausible-analytics-guide
Thanks for recommending userTrack!
It has it’s own faults as it’s not a perfect product yet.
I agree, I have a lot of improvements planned but could you let me know what are the biggest problems you encountered so far?
I did try their Microsoft Clairty demo but their heatmaps/recordings were bugged and with a strange/hard UI. Even now, if I try to play a recording on the demo dashboard the playback is empty, it seems to be in an early alpha stage.
I wouldn’t personally recommend anyone to add a free 3rd party session tracking script, especially when it’s sending data to Microsoft. Also keep in mind that they don’t offer full analytics, only qualitative data.
Heh, I was thinking, wasn’t there a thread on this topic, searched and found that I actually started the topic 
I’ve been running both Matomo and Koko on WP (I find Motomo to be a bit heavy, otherwise both are fine).
Testing standalone self-hosted analytics at the moment, testing Umami, Plausible Analytics and Shynet. (Did also test Ackee, but that was too limited. I need multiple users and domains.)
Now my problem is that I can’t decide which one to pick. 
Maybe Umami, but Plausible has some more details. Umami is lighter. Shynet is also quite light on resources (using Django/Python, it seems).
The mentioned userTrack looks interesting. But not sure, as it’s quite an investment … (Most of my clients are non-profits and individuals, and not profitable companies.)
Being PHP maybe I could just host it in a shared environment, at MyRoot.pw, or such … 
(Do you know if that would work, @SGraf ?)
For WP installations, I install Koko for all of my clients. For anything else, Plausible is amazing 
Yes, Plausible looks nice. Not sure how to track events (plan on checking it out). Tried events in Umami, but didn’t work, it seems. 
In Umami I can create a share URL for each domain, though. That seems nice, but not sure how important it is.
One customer of mine might want to integrate analytics with Google Search Console.
Anyone tried that with any of these options?
Hi @flips,
Which pricing is too high? For the Personal license or the Agency license? What would a “fair” price be for you?
If you have WordPress, I also created a simpler, cheaper version of it, which now has a lifetime deal running as it has been recently released: https://wplytic.com
Cool. The navigation menu does not open for me on mobile by the way. Perhaps you forgot to load a script?
On WPLytic? Yeah, it’s bugged currently, there is not much there anyway (you are right that some scripts were removed). The extra links were just Docs and Roadmap.
I will probably remove the burger menu entirely instead of fixing it: Stop Using Hamburger Menus
Even Personal is a bit high for my use/customer base. But I need multiuser, så I’d need the more expensive version. And those prices not being lifetime (have to upgrade with next major version?) … Anyways, main extra over wplytic being heatmaps, A/B testing etc?
That wplytic price was more affordable, puts it within reach. Running in WP makes for easier auto-upgrades, I guess. If that version can have different users checking/administering different domain, it’s interesting.
Best arguments for wplytic vs. Umami/Plausible?