While I do like GoAccess and I like owning my own data, there's still a huge difference between what tools like GoAccess offer and what the elephant in the room, Google Analytics, offers.<p>It's not just the data available by default, it's also the very advanced user interface allowing even somewhat non-technical people to produce their own reports and dashboards.<p>Yes, you only co-own the data together with Google, but at least you <i>have</i> the data compared to using a home-grown solution which will either not provide your product managers with what they need or which will consume all of your life as you slowly re-implement your own Google Analytics which will never be as good and/or featureful as the original.<p>Of course, if it's just about your personal blog and if you're willing to spend some time on the tooling itself, then yes, tools like these don't have the privacy issues otherwise accompanying third-party analytics.
If you're hosting a static site on shared infrastructure (e.g. github pages, S3) where access logs are hard to come by, you can achieve some level of statistics gathering using a 1x1 pixel GIF and putting a CDN in front of it, then putting the CDN logs through GoAccess.<p>EDIT: this was a blog I loosely followed <a href="https://benhoyt.com/writings/replacing-google-analytics/" rel="nofollow">https://benhoyt.com/writings/replacing-google-analytics/</a> - one detail I forgot to mention is you have to do some post processing on the log files to get them into a format amenable for use by GoAccess etc, but it's not too difficult
I personally run Fathom[0] for my very simple needs and it's pretty good as well. Not quite as simple to deploy as GoAccess, but it's got a nice UI as well.<p>I used to use Matomo[1] (which is a lot closer to a full analytics suite) but stopped using it since it felt heavier than what I needed.<p>[0]: <a href="https://github.com/usefathom/fathom" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/usefathom/fathom</a><p>[1]: <a href="https://matomo.org/" rel="nofollow">https://matomo.org/</a>
Like the other solutions I've seen, this assumes you have access to your web-server's logfiles. For many (most?) low-end web-hosting this is likely not true afaik. I suspect that this is precisely the window-of-opportunity that enabled the dominance of Google Analytics and similar solutions.
GoAccess is great and all, but static log analyzation =/= Google Analytics. You can only get so much data via log analysis, and if you have a SPA, or even just alot of client side stuff, static log analyzation just cannot provide you with the same type of data you get from client side.<p>If you really want to replace Google Analytics and have the same level of features and tracking you need a client side system - Matomo is the closest I've seen to that.<p>All that being said, I've used GoAccess, I like it, but I haven't quite mastered the log format to enable my more robust AWStats logs with GoAccess. I have a bunch of subdomains all as VHosts, and I loved the feature in GoAccess that rolls it all up into a VHost table/chart. However I haven't figured out the log parser settings to get both AWstats and GoAccess to like it with the %v_host field in the logs. Any thoughts/help there?
Does anyone else work on a relatively large internal web project in a global corp where GA for obvious reasons is forbidden to use internally? How do you do statistics? Which statistics do you capture and why?
Yeah, good luck integrating this with Adwords, YouTube, Facebook, etc. I understand why this is good for personal projects, but if you are spending lots of money on advertising (which probably goes mostly toward Google anyway), Google Analytics is the way to go.
This looks awesome for a personal/portfolio site. I use matomo for mine and it’s sort of overkill. You have to set up your own lamp/lemp stack just to get analytics and I use maybe 1% of the features.