Best 20+ Open source Free Self-hosted Web Analytics
Bloggers and web content creators need to know about their visitors, content usage, page views, referrals, Search engine search keywords which the visitors used. Google Analytics is a cloud-based service by Google that allows users to get this information, However, some users may require their own self-hosted solution to be in control of their data, some others need a small direct clear statistics, or to manage their visitor's data on their own in terms of privacy and security.
We created this list to help to find the open-source web analytics solution that fits for your need. Some of them may require advanced system skills to be installed and managed, some of them are fairly new but quite promising.
There are 2 types of Web analytics software we have listed here, cloud-based web analytics which uses tracking JavaScript software installed in the websites it tracks, and Server logs analytics which does not require tracking software but parses the server logs files and return the required data like visitors, page views, countries, IPs and referrals.
Server logs analytics software is very useful when the JavaScript tracking method is not usable or the website/ web project in question has to comply with strict security policies or strict end-user privacy regulations.
1- OWA (Open Web Analytics): GDPR complaint self-hosted open-source web analytics
Open Web Analytics (OWA) is self-hosted open-source web analytics solution, Its completely Libre software, and the only GDPR complaint solution on this list. Open Web Analytics is a developer-friendly written in PHP and offers developers different options for extending and implementing it through flexible powerful API.
Open Web Analytics is supported by many shared servers, It's easy to install, configure and use. Open Web Analytics provides official support to WordPress and MediaWiki with plugins easy to install/ integrate.
Open Web Analytics is not just an analytics solution, its complete web analytics platform that supports developers to make extensions, and integrate it with their websites. It provides several trackers as well including custom action tracking script, browser-friendly JavaScript tracker, campaign tracker, eCommerce tracker, and conversion tracker.
If you are looking for something powerful similar to Web Analytics services like Google Analytics, Open Web Analytics (OWA) is the right choice.
2- Matomo: Self-hosted, Open-source web analytics Solution
Matomo, was formerly known as Piwik, is a free open source & self-hosted web analytics solution, I can be considered a real Google Analytics alternative, It was chosen by many enterprise and companies around the world for their analytics.
I have been using Matomo (the community edition) for many projects for years, It proved to be reliable, highly customizable and secure, but easier to get insights to make decisions for improving the website, and help to choose the incoming articles.
Matomo has real-time analytics option and set of analytic features which come with colorful meaningful visualizations, It tracks visitors, user behaviors, page visits flow, visits location visualized with an interactive map and real-time geo-tracking. It provides insights about visitors languages, computers, and browsers.
Matomo's analytics includes insights about how much time the user stays on the page and bounce rate. one of the features I like about Matomo is highly customizable dashboard(s), which may look similar to Google Analytics but with far more control, The user can create a dashboard, select the layout, choose the widgets to display in this dashboard and organize/ customize them.
Matomo is a featured rich analytics platform, but it's also a modular system with rich ecosystem: a marketplace for themes and plugins/ extensions to extend the functionalities of Matomo, many extensions are free and some are commercial / enterprise-grade extensions, but they mostly come with affordable prices.
3- AWStats
AWStats is a log analyzer for websites, FTP, mail servers, It generates graphical analytical reports from the server logs. AWStats provides graphical reports and statistics about visits, referrals, search engine referrals, search engines search keywords, visits time, most visited pages, visits durations, browsers (agents), platforms, screen size, HTTP errors, and countries. It has several plugins provided by the core developers and by the community.
AWStats is accessible from command-line terminals or through its web port which uses CGI, is released under GPL Licenase. It has been around for years but still getting frequent updates.
4- GoAccess: Terminal based log analyzer
GoAccess is an open source real-time web log analyzer and interactive viewer that runs in a terminal in *nix systems or through your browser.
GoAccess is a log analyzer, that runs from the terminal, unlike many other cloud-based projects in this list, It does not require complex installation or database. GoAccess is written in C so expect the best performance and speed.
GoAccess supports all known weblogs format like Apache, Nginx, Amazon S3, Elastic Load Balancing, and CloudFront, It displays real-time analytics for the server, visitors, requests, hits, bandwidth, static resources' usage, IPs, browsers, platforms, referrals, geolocations, virtual hosts metrics, and Google's search keywords.
5- W3Perl: Libre (Open source) logs analyzer
W3Perl is a true libre (Open source) server logs analyzer software that supports many logfiles types including web servers, FTP, SSH, Mail, Squid, and DHCP. W3Perl as its a logfile analyzer it does not require JavaScript tracking software installed at the websites it needs to track.
W3Perl is fast and comes with nifty clean user-interface even though it may look old comparing to the current web design standards. It has plugins to extend its features like geolocation analysis, visitor screen sizes. It provides rich reporting tools with export and notification options (email). It's easy to install as it supports many platforms (RPM/Debian package available for Unix, binary files for Windows (IIS/Apache/Abyss/Local), pkg for macOS).
W3Perl is written in Perl and does not require any other dependencies, It was translated into many languages
6-Fathom - Self-hosted website analytics
Fathom is a simple yet powerful self-hosted & fast open source website analytics. It was built using Go and React. It has been around for a few years but it's not that famous. It has simple usable user-interface with direct to the point statistics, It displays visitor statistics, page viewers, average time on site, and bounce rate.
It provides a date-based query for the statistics, which includes top pages, and top referrers with its views and unique views. It supports multiple site tracking and docker setup.
Fathom is released under MIT license, and was written using Go language, so expect smooth performance.
7- Frequency Analytics - Open-source private web analytics server
Frequency Analytics is a self-hosted open-source web analytics system. It was written in Go language, and it can run without the need to browser cookies. It displays the site's statistics in real-time including current visitors, active pages. It includes daily visitors, unique views, referral analysis, platforms, visitors locations. Frequency Analytics is built and managed by a hosting company that created it and released it as an open source. It's specialized in hosting open-source cloud applications.
- Frequency Analytics's GitHub's repo.
8- Ackee: Self-hosted real-time web analytics
Ackee is an open-source free web analytics, It uses NodeJS and MongoDB. Ackee is a lightweight solution, it does not consume so much server resources for the backend code, as for the database MongoDB can be hosted on a remote server/ service for practical backup and management.
The API option in Ackee will make developers happy, as it features a powerful REST-API. The developers have access through secure tokens to domains (websites), records, and views. The endpoints may be simple, but it's enough.
Ackee is a privacy-aware solution as it does not require cookies or uses unique user tracker. Ackee is in active development.
- Ackee analytics on GitHub
9- Signal: Self-hosted privacy-aware Web analytics.
Signal is a privacy-focused open source self-hosted web analytics, It's introduced by its developer as Google Analytics alternative. Signal is built using NodeJs. It's fairly easy to install and developer-friendly for NodeJs developers. Signal offers 2 licenses one open-source license AGPL v3.0 / Apache v2.0 for libraries, and a commercial license in-case of the user requested it for legal reasons.
Signal is developed by Bloom.sh a company that created several open-source software projects, and provide continuous maintenance/ updates to their products.
- Signal's project page
10- Visitors, lightweight fast web log analyzer
Visitors is a free open source (GPL licensed) web log analyzer, It's a tiny script but with powerful capability, as it " can process up to 150,000 lines of log entries per second " and perform real-time analytics with Visitors Stream Mode. Visitors Analyzer is a lightweight script that is written in C. It can be compiled and installed easily in servers, and the developers have provided a Windows binaries.
Visitors script generates detailed portable HTML report as one file, that does not have external CSS files or images which makes it easy to share, send by email. The HTML report displays visits statistics, requested pages and images, unique visitors, bot and crawler access, visits from search engines, user's navigation patterns inside the website, search engine keywords, browsers (user agents), operating systems, and error pages.
- Visitors script website
11- Webqlizer (Log Analyzer)
Webqlizer is an open source server log analyzer, It has been around for years, and being used by system admins all over the world. Webqalizer is written in C language which ensures high performance and speed, It supports many logs format including compressed logs with gzip (.gz) and bzip2 ( .bz2).
Webqalizer generates visualized reports which can be easily configured. It comes with multi-lingual support > 20 languages. It's released under GPL.
- Webqalizer website
12- Pimp my Log: PHP server log analyzer
Pimp my Log is a PHP solution to parse and display server logs, It is released as an open-source project under GPL v3.0, and it has been selected by many companies and open-source projects to "Pimp their logs".
13- FireStats: Free Open source Self-hosted Web analytics
FireStats is a free open-source for non-commercial use, It provides simple analytics for the website traffic, visitors and searches queries. The analytics report includes referrers, search terms, recent popular pages, browsers, operating systems, countries.
FireStats is simple but it's easy to use and maybe what does some websites require. FireStats has PHP-API for PHP developers which makes it easy to customize, integrate and extend.
For commercial usage, FireStats license costs $25 per install, which makes it affordable.
- FireStats website
14- Trackingco.de
Trackingco.de is fairly new analytics/ tracking open source software, It's built on top of Go language, leveraging the features of Go like speed and concurrency, CouchDB, Redis, and PostgreSQL.
The trakingco.de's installation requires system-admin skills or experience in Linux ( intermediate or advanced ).
- Trackingco.de on Github
15- Insightful: self-hosted web analytics
Insightful is an open source self-hosted web analytics platform, It supports multi-sites monitoring and multi-users management. Insightful is written using Django and uses JavaScript for tracking website. However, the project has not been updated for a few years.
- Insightful code
16- Crumby: Lightweight self-hosted web analytics
Crumby is a lightweight python-flask project to provide a quick analytic package for websites, It aimed for developers with experience with Python-Flask. it offers tracking JavaScript script and reporting module to report and display the collected statistics. It comes with a simple handy command-line tool that provides user-manager, update the GeoIP database.
- Crumby's project repo.
17- Hummingbird: Open-source NodeJS-based analytics
Hummingbird is a NodeJS-based web analytics platform, It has not been updated for years, but it gained popularity among NodeJS developers as it has been stared about 3000 times and forked about 350 times.
18- Ahoy: Web analytics for Ruby/ Rails
Ahoy is an open-source web analytics for Rails framework, It aims for developers to add web analytics to their Rails-based products. Ahoy has been used by many rails developers, and it's getting regular updates from the project developers and maintainers. Ahoy project has been stared +2500 times and its repository was forked +250 times.
Ahoy's developers have released another analytic project to track emails (Ahoy Email)
19- MotionTracker: ASP.NET analytics for ASP.NET projects
MotionTracker is an ASP.NET-based web analytics software, It's the only one on this list that built by Microsoft technologies. It's built to track ASP. NET-based application usage, visitors, server requests, and provide real-time analytics for it. It uses Microsoft SQL Server as a database.
20- PicoStats: self-hosted web analytics
PicoStats is an open-source web analytics system built by Go language, It aims to provide a self-hosted Google Analytics alternative with a much simpler output. Though the project has been released a few years ago, it does not have enough information about the usage, as it didn't publish any installation instruction or enough documentation so far.
21- Go Web Analytics
Go is a simple web analytic program written in Go language, It provides analytics about visits, platforms, pages, referrals, and browsers. It uses PostgreSQL and JavaScript tracking script to submit tracking events.
22- PiwikR: Matomo (Piwik) with R
If you are using Matomo and interested to use R statistical language to perform analytics on your data, this project is for you. It's easy to install, use for R coders, and it comes with a set of analytic functions to provide detailed analytics about users, visitors, platforms, page views, referrals and traffic sources.
PiwikR can be good opportunity to use for learning and practicing R language on real data, I do use R language/ RStudio frequently I see the main value of this project is the web analytics integration for R as it facilitates reporting and improves the web analytics through data exploration. The only downside of this project is there is not enough documentation for it, and it requires sufficient knowledge of R language and R Studio.
23- Logstalgia: Nifty visual log analyzer
Logstalgia is a real-time server log visualization tool, it's designed to monitor server log stream in and display it with nifty visualized animation. Logstalgia requires OpenGL for data visualization and supports playback.
Language-specific Web Analytics plugins:
- Django tracking (Python- Django): Django analytics app/ module for Django projects.
- Impressionist (Ruby-Rails): Lightweight web analytics plugins for Rails projects
- NodeJS - Express: Web analytics package for NodeJS projects
