The Best 15 Free Self-hosted Google Analytics Alternatives

Running a business without a website nowadays is like trying to climb the Kilimanjaro with a pair of flip-flops, but running a website without looking g at statistics is as useful as being in a submarine without a sonar you have no idea where you are going.

Cause this, Google Analytics comes to help you steer your business in the right direction.

If you haven't heard about Google Analytics, let's see what it is?

What is Google Analytics?

Google Analytics is just a remarkable platform that allows you to track and analyze all of your website's traffic.

Traffic is just another word for the visitors to your website.

Google Analytics is a must-have tool for anyone interested in growing their website with digital marketing

Google Analytics allows you to see such as how many visitors you're getting to your website and where are they coming from, how long are they spending on your website, which pages are they clicking on.

Also including what is their age are they man or woman, what's their city or country lots of important data.

Why shouldn't you use Google Analytics?

Google Analytics doesn't have a monthly fee, but that doesn't actually mean it is free because if you think about it, why would a billion-dollar company just give something away to be nice?

Right, Google doesn't have to charge for their analytics product because they're making so much money off us already from our data and if they're not charging for their product, then you better believe that they're making money on us.

The second problem is, Google Analytics is not a beginner-friendly or easy-to-use, it requires sometime to learn and investigate hidden features. Therefore, finding a self-hosted alternative is a must.

1- Plausible

Plausible self-hosted is an open-source website analytics tool for privacy-conscious site owners to a data-grabbing machine for surveillance capitalism.

It is used by more than 4,000+ subscribers to deliver their website and business, it has many scripts that are 45 times smaller than Google Analytics that keeps your site speed fast.

It is free analytics self-hosted solution released under the AGPL-3.0 license.

Features:

1. No cookies
2. Fully compliant with GDPR, CCPA, and PECR
3. simple analytics
4. lightweight
5. privacy-friendly
6. shareable
7. Transparent and fully open-source software
8. Quick and easy to integrate
9. A powerful and flexible API
10. Email and Slack reports
11. Integrate with Search Console
12. Analyze marketing campaigns
13. Own and control your data

GitHub: https://github.com/plausible/analytics

2- Matomo

Matomo is a powerful web analytics platform, a Google Analytics alternative that keeping your business GDPR and CCPA compliant.

It is trusted by 1 million websites like NASA, Huawei, Red Bull, and more. The most features of this platform are it protects your customers' privacy from Google, which means you are the owner of your data.

Matomo was released under the GPL-3.0 license and written in PHP language.

Features:

1. Open-source
2. 100% accurate data
3. It saves your time and money
4. Customized
5. Import GA data
6. No data limitations
7. Easy to use
8. Enhanced insights
9. Tracking personal data
10. Ethical

GitHub: https://github.com/matomo-org/matomo

3- Open Web Analytics (OWA)

Open Web Analytics is an open-source tool alternative to commercial tools such as Google Analytics that help you control your data and analyze your websites and application.

It helps you to monitor analytics via the dashboard, views detailed usage of any web page, views the clickstream of anonymized user sessions, defines and track an unlimited number of custom site actions, and more.

It is licensed under GPL and written in PHP language.

Features:

1. You can run it under your domain
2. It can be as part of your web application.
3. Customizable
4. It can be as CRM Systems cause it helps you to track WordPress and MediaWiki-based websites and admin events
5. It provided Metrics, Dimensions, Reports
6. Data Access API
7. Privacy Controls
8. it helps to Optimize your SEO
   

GitHub: https://github.com/Open-Web-Analytics/Open-Web-Analytics

4- GoatCounter

GoatCounter is an open-source, hosted service for non-commercial use with no tracking of personal data. It is a web analytics platform that aims to give useful data while respecting people's privacy.

It also comes with an easy user interface, works well with any browser and assistive technology, comes with a full documentation page, and more.

GoatCounter is written in the Go programming language and licensed under the EUPL license.

Features:

1. Privacy-aware
2. Lightweight
3. Fast
4. Doesn't need a GDPR notice
5. Fine-grained control over which data is collected.
6. No cookies
7. Keep track of referring sites and campaigns
8. Accessibility
9. Own your data
10. Self-host

GitHub: https://github.com/zgoat/goatcounter

5- Analytics

Analytics is one of the best and tiny open-source analytics licensed under the MIT License for browser and node.js. It is used for tracking page views, custom events, and identify visitors.

It aims to solve the complexity, maintenance, and extra code when adding/removing analytic services to a site or application with a simple pluggable abstraction layer.

Features:

1. Extendable
2. Test and debug analytics
3. Integrations with time travel and offline mode
4. Works offline
5. Pluggable
6. Modify tracking calls with baked in lifecycle hooks
7. Lightweight
8. Queues events

GitHub: https://github.com/DavidWells/analytics

6- AWStats

The next platform we’ll look at is AWStats – this is a free, powerful and features-rich tool to get advanced statistics.

AWStats generates advanced web, streaming, FTP, or mail server statistics, graphically. It is also a log analyzer that works as a CGI, it can also work with all web hosting providers or from the command line, come with a few graphical web pages.

It is distributed under the GNU General Public License and written in Perl language.

Features:

1. Can analyze many log formats like Apache NCSA combined log files (XLF/ELF) or common (CLF), and more
2. Works from the command line and a browser
3. Unlimited log file size, support split log files
4. It has many options/filters and plugins
5. Cross-Site Scripting Attacks protection
6. Analysis database can be stored in XML format
7. Supports DNS cache files
8. Dynamic reports as CGI output
9. Country detection from IP location or domain name
10. Available on all platforms
    

GitHub: https://github.com/eldy/AWStats

7- Umami

Umami is a fast self-hosted web analytics solution that aims to provide you with a friendlier, privacy-focused alternative to Google Analytics.

It collects only the metrics that you care about on a single page and requires a server with Node.js 12 or newer, and MySQL or PostgreSQL for the database.

Umami was written in JavaScript and released under the MIT license.

Features:

1. Simple analytics
2. It can track an unlimited number of websites
3. Hosted under your own domain
4. Light-weight
5. Multiple accounts
6. Share data
7. Mobile-friendly
8. Data ownership
9. Privacy-focused
10. Open-source
    

Github: https://github.com/mikecao/umami

8- Offen

Offen is open-source web analytics that let users access their data and gain valuable insights at the same time, help you to improve your service by collecting all-important statistics.

It is also available in different languages such as English, German and French, the consent banner is customizable, shape, and font.

It is licensed under the Apache License Version 2.0 and written in JavaScript.

Features:

1. Lightweight
2. Self-hosted
3. Secure
4. User data is only stored for 6 months and then deleted
5. Easily analyze
6. Can be shared within teams
7. Has a full documentation
8. Fair and by choice

GitHub: https://github.com/offen/offen

9- GoAccess

GoAccess is an open-source web log analyzer that runs in a terminal in Linux systems or with a browser.

The core idea from it, is to quick analysis of your access log via SSH, or without needing to use your browser.

It is licensed under the MIT license and written in Clanguage.

Features:

1. Completely Real-Time
2. terminal-based
3. It provides valuable HTTP statistics for system administrators
4. Beautiful terminal and bootstrap dashboards
5. Nearly all web log formats (Apache, Nginx, Amazon S3, Elastic Load Balancing, CloudFront, Caddy, etc)
6. Track Application Response Time
7. Incremental Log Processing
8. Only one dependency
9. Minimal configuration needed
10. Color Scheme Customizable

GitHub: https://github.com/allinurl/goaccess

10- Serposcope

Serposcope is an open-source and free search engine rank checker for SEO to monitor websites ranking, discover how Google crawls your website, log file analysis, domaining, SERP Checker.

It is licensed under MIT license and written in JavaScript.

Features:

1. Unlimited keywords and websites
2. Competitor tracking
3. Local and custom search
4. User account management
5. Run-on a desktop PC or server
6. Support Proxy and Captcha
7. Easy setup
8. Cross-platform: run on Windows, Mac OSX, and Linux
9. Multithreaded: fast SERP checking
   

GitHub: https://github.com/serphacker/serposcope

11- Freshlytics

Freshlytics is an open-source self-hosted privacy-friendly analytics software. It aims to be reliable, friendly to use, and easy to deploy.

The mean goal from it is to provide a way for website owners to learn more about how the users are using their site without invading user's privacy.

It is licensed under MIT license and written with TypeScript.

Features:

1. Reliable
2. Friendly to use and easy to deploy.
3. Cookies are not used
4. Personally, identifiable information (PII) is not collected
5. Switch between multiple projects
6. Currently focuses on website page view tracking
7. Supports multiple projects
8. Users can either be Admin or normal users
   

GitHub: https://github.com/sheshbabu/freshlytics

12- Ackee

Ackee is an analytics tool, self-hosted based on Node.js, for those who care about privacy. It is run on your server which means your data will be in your hands.

It is licensed under MIT license and written in JavaScript.

Features:

1. Analyzes the traffic of your websites
2. Provides useful statistics in a minimal interface
3. Cookie-free and secure
4. Unlimited domains
5. Easy to integrate
6. It uses a multi-step process to keep tracked data anonymized
7. It is providing helpful analytics
8. The API of Ackee acts as a powerful hub
9. Perfect to collect data from a variety of sources
10. Support GraphQL API that allows you to build custom tools upon Ackee.
    

GitHub: https://github.com/electerious/Ackee

13- Countly

Countly is an analytics platform that lets the user explore behavior on an individual level of detail, engage with their customer.

Product Analytics and Innovation understand the digital customer journey across devices.

Features:

1. On-premise or private cloud
2. Extensible via plugins
3. A single dashboard
4. It helps you manage visually the complexity of running your company
5. They allow consolidating information from your organization or department
6. Instant access to critical information, in real-time
7. It helps you make the customer-driven development

GitHub: https://github.com/Countly

14- PostHog

PostHog is a single platform that provides much open-source product analytics built for developers.

Features:

1. Event-based analytics at a user level
2. Product data visualizations
3. Complete control over your data
4. Session recording
5. Automatically capture
6. Heatmaps
7. Plugins to integrate your product with other systems
8. Ready-made libraries for JS, Python, Ruby, Node, Go, Android, iOS, PHP, Flutter, React Native, Elixir + API
9. Super easy to deploy using Docker or Heroku

GitHub: https://github.com/PostHog/posthog

GitHub - PostHog/posthog: 🦔 PostHog provides open-source product analytics, session recording, feature flagging and A/B testing that you can self-host.

🦔 PostHog provides open-source product analytics, session recording, feature flagging and A/B testing that you can self-host. - PostHog/posthog

GitHubPostHog

Conclusion

We have seen in this list a good deal of good self-hosted alternatives for Google Analytics. Which one of them to choose depends on what type of features or scenarios your work is going to need.

If you have any other recommendations for this list or comments in general, we’d love to hear them below!

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