It sounds like a nice product, but sadly it's not exactly why GA is so popular (being a 'nice' product, that is). It is popular, because it's free, relatively easy to implement on any website, requires no self-hosting and powerful, once running. I've checked your website for pricing, but not only there's no word about free tiers, but there isn't even anything on the pricing at all. So, when it comes to majority of GA users, it's not a competitive solution.
Plausible, Fathom [1] and Simple Analytics [2] are very similar in features. While self hosting is not supported, plausible is Open Source [3] running on Elixir and Postgre. It is also the most affordable out of three, starting at $6 only.<p>I am not sure why HN are so negative about this post, when two years ago everyone were cheering for GA alternatives.<p>Although I do agree it needs to add "Pricing" in the Navigation section.<p>[1] <a href="https://usefathom.com" rel="nofollow">https://usefathom.com</a><p>[2] <a href="https://simpleanalytics.com" rel="nofollow">https://simpleanalytics.com</a><p>[3] <a href="https://github.com/plausible-insights/plausible" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/plausible-insights/plausible</a>
Some open source alternatives:<p>- <a href="https://ackee.electerious.com/" rel="nofollow">https://ackee.electerious.com/</a> (Node.js based)<p>- <a href="https://github.com/zgoat/goatcounter" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/zgoat/goatcounter</a> (Golang) (Commercial Licensed)<p>- <a href="https://snowplowanalytics.com" rel="nofollow">https://snowplowanalytics.com</a> (Core-ware)<p>- <a href="https://count.ly" rel="nofollow">https://count.ly</a> (Core-ware)<p><a href="https://www.visitor-analytics.io" rel="nofollow">https://www.visitor-analytics.io</a> is also a great GDPR compliant alternative (Not open source).
Some pricing feedback:<p>The limitation of *K views per month only serves to introduce confusion into the buying process for me:<p>- I don't know how many thousand views per month my website gets, to begin with. This is not something I have ever had to be concerned about but with this product, suddenly I need to keep an eye on this?<p>- The first question that comes to mind is that what happens when I go over? I see you have a FAQ answer dedicated to this. (A lot of people won't bother to read the FAQ)<p>- According to the FAQ, a one time "spike" is OK, but if it happens two months in a row someone will contact me? This seems murky and introduces uncertainty. And not sure I want to sign up for a $6/mo. product where a vendor is going to be contacting me to "discuss upgrade options".<p>- That said, I don't know what "discuss upgrade options" means. Does this mean you'll contact me to force me to upgrade? Or is it just a suggestion? Is there a time frame in which I'd have to do it or will you cut off the service if a decision isn't made in a timely fashion?<p>- Your highest plan allows 1M pageviews per month. What happens if I go over that? Is there a higher, unlisted plan that I would be asked to upgrade to?<p>A lot of the above may seem silly but I'm trying to illustrate the kind of murkiness that might cause a user to think, "I don't know exactly what I'm signing up for" and move on to other solutions.
I have a hobby blog that I'm trying to run for <$5/month. I run it on Github Pages because it's a static site and GH takes care of just about everything. The only thing I don't get is analytics or server logs, I'm planning to build that myself with standard AWS components. I considered other options, but I didn't want to use GA (for many of the reasons mentioned in the blog), other tools like Plausible were outside of my budget, and the open source tools looked like more hassle to self-host than reinventing the wheel myself:<p>Browser (~3 lines of JS) -> API Gateway -> SQS Queue -> Lambda (ETLs queue into) -> Athena.<p>I was originally just going to use Postgres, but RDS/Aurora are expensive and running Postgres in EC2 is going to be at least as much work (configuring SSH, process management, backups, monitoring, logging, image building, networking, etc).<p>My custom plan is ~$3/month all-in provided I stay below ~1M requests per month, and even then it scales very cheaply. Also, this design is highly scalable, although I doubt I'll ever take advantage of it; it's mostly just icing on the cake. The main motivation is that these components are available on the free plan ("forever", not just the first 12 months) and/or the pricing model makes the charges negligible for my super-low-volume use case.<p>Note that this doesn't give me pretty dashboards; the interface is SQL. Fortunately, there are other analysis tools that I have at my disposal which can plug in to SQL.<p>Lastly, of course my $5 budget doesn't do justice to the actual value of my time; it's more of a fun challenge. If I really just wanted web analytics, I should shell out the $6/month for plausible or similar.
Yes! I've just removed GA from one of my pet projects (shameless plug <a href="https://golang.cafe" rel="nofollow">https://golang.cafe</a>) - And started using Cloudflare NS <a href="https://www.cloudflare.com/dns/" rel="nofollow">https://www.cloudflare.com/dns/</a>. Now I get users/analytics reports at DNS level. No bloated JS trackers, no privacy policies and weird stuff and I can track visits even when adblockers are enabled. This would definitely be overestimated as bots would be counted in but it seems pretty accurate so far! It also has unique users count (although this is overestimated)
Why dont they just title this "why we made plausible.io?" Make it clear up front that this is content marketing. It would still be a worthwhile read but it wouldn't be nearly as sleazy feeling as disguising an ad as a blog post type thing. I think a lot of people on this forum would enjoy reading about how the founders approached the problem and what they see as the solution, either out of curiosity about new tech being developed or to evaluate the product by reading about what the founders were trying to fix with competing solutions. This just doesnt read as an honest marketing attempt.
> These two tracking scripts combined add 45.7 KB of page weight to each and every page load.<p>Which is only true is there is no caching and I highly doubt that these files are configured not to be cached after the first load
It seems like plausible is a GA competitor (and I didn't see disclaimers, but could have missed them). It seems very clean and well thought though!
The biggest drawback to not having Google Analytics on your website is if you choose to run Google Ads for your site and you have to retarget/remarket on Google properties. Without Google Analytics you are out of luck as you can enable remarketing only in Google Analytics (and you would need Analytics linked to Google Ads). If you have a personal website or a business that grows organically without needing to use Advertising then you can go ahead with any analytics provider of your choice. But the value add provided by using Google Analytics far outweighs other negatives from a business point of view.
"Here are completely legit reasons to stop using Google Analytics."
<gains credibility>
<gains more credibility>
<gets me thinking about switching to something else><p>"Try our product instead!"<p><closes tab in disgust>
We use Simple Analytics [<a href="https://simpleanalytics.com/" rel="nofollow">https://simpleanalytics.com/</a>] as alternative to GA and it's also privacy-friendly.<p>I saw Plausible appeared after Simple Analytics launched their product. I'm glad to see GA alternatives becoming popular.
Not sure who makes Plausible, but if the "live demo" is reflective of the actual product, it's sorely lacking. The reason that GA so popular is because of the free tier, sure, but also because GA 360, the really amazingly expensive version, has features that let you really get insights about your visitors.<p>Here's a popular question these days: "when can I stop supporting IE 11?" With GA, the answer comes in a couple of clicks; revenue generated sliced by browser version. I don't even see the revenue generated section of Plausible, or really any way to associate any metadata with custom events. GA gives you this functionality without any coding.<p>If you don't want to use GA, try something like Amplitude, which has a lot more data manipulation options than Plausible.
What do people suggest if you have a website that sells something?<p>Knowing where your traffic is coming from, if your new redesign helped or hindered users in finding content, and knowing which traffic sources result in the most sales sounds business critical to me.<p>I've seen lots of situations where when we look into analytics, it becomes obvious users are having trouble finding content or don't know the content is there to be found (e.g. putting an important link behind a navigation menu was a bad idea).<p>I feel people can overly focus on the more manipulative side of A/B test, but analytics is useful for improving your UX as well. Not everyone runs a personal blog without a care for monetisation or viewership either.
Does using cloudflare counts in as well?
I've been using cloudflare for some time now, because I've wanted to save some of my static website bandwidth & it offered https setup pretty easily.
I've setup google analytics just to compare visitor statistics and this is what I've found over 1 month:<p>GA unique visitors: ~350
Cloudflare unique visitors: ~2900<p>So the difference is pretty overwhelming - I assume that cloudflare count some bot traffic as well or something?<p>Is it even a reliable source of stats (cloudflare)? If not, why?
If this is your personal website, one option to consider is dropping the analytics completely. Do you really need to know exactly (and it’s not even that exact, since people block or can’t load your analytics) how many people viewed your blog posts? Anecdotally, if you put your email at the bottom of the page you’ll get a pretty good idea just from the number of people who send you one.
Congratulations on getting your subtle advertising on the front page. I admire your restraint in only mentioning your product at the conclusion of a long article - nicely done!<p>That said, you state what many have been been saying for years - GA is overkill for most sites and gives a stupid amount of information to Google. But sites are giving up their users information to any 3rd party analytics package, not just GA.<p>Hosting your own analytics is the only ethical way to go, unless you really, really need the demographic data that GA provides (which you probably don't).<p>Having passive feedback that people are actually reading your posts is nice but a simple hit-counter would probably do the job and relieve your readers of losing another little slice of their privacy.<p>I'm going to take a leaf out of the poster's book and mention my own project in passing: <a href="https://sheep.horse/visitor_statistics.html" rel="nofollow">https://sheep.horse/visitor_statistics.html</a>
The correct proposition instead would be to stop analytics on your website, period. There's many sites that benefit greatly from the insight, but I'd argue they're a minority. Your personal blog doesn't need analytics. Let's be honest, for many people, analytics is just a way to feed their ego — my ramblings reached 100 people, so you could say I'm kind of a big deal. Google is, obviously, very well aware of this target market, and tries to feed back into this loop as well. It's not without reason you get weekly summaries and more into your inbox by default. The reality, of course, is that it's serving them while hooking you, much like social media notifications driving engagement etc.
Plausible was hovering less than 50 users on its own web site, and I wouldn't risk sending my visitors to this relatively new web service either.<p>Analytics requires a lot of trust to not screw you up. It's a third party script that you add in pretty much every page of your web site. I'm still looking for a provider that I can tame with CSP rules, and comes with the most minimal things I need to know. A pixel tracker would have suited majority of us.
"Nobody was fired for using Google Analytics" (c)
Is financial burden to change any part of your product, including GA, and 99.99% of all companies in the world don't give a damn about users of their products, so it will never happen unless some global power restructure happens and Google will fall out of grace. And even then most likely it will be simply replaced with even worse GA-2.
I really dislike the user experience of GA. I literally know 1% of the functionality it offers and I only _need_ 1% of what it offers. But I do like that it's free. Was planning to one day give <a href="https://simpleanalytics.com/" rel="nofollow">https://simpleanalytics.com/</a> a shot.
I like that they gave some alternatives.<p>With the web there are a lot of crusade like topics that while technically correct the maelstrom of finger waving blog posts really don't seem to change much and few really offer workable solutions to accomplish the goals that doing the thing they don't want you to do accomplishes.
For those interested, my own solution to this was to use AWStats with an anonymization script [1].<p>It provides high-level analytics such as unique visitors, referring sites and most viewed pages, without having to store any personal data such as IP addresses, and it's 100% server-side.<p>IP addresses are compared against a Bloom filter in order to count unique visitors, without actually permanently storing them.<p>[1] <a href="https://gitlab.com/jamieweb/web-server-log-anonymizer-bloom-filter/" rel="nofollow">https://gitlab.com/jamieweb/web-server-log-anonymizer-bloom-...</a>
>Google, the world’s largest ad-tech company, [...]<p>This is kind of snarky, especially in the light that the author is writing this post solely to sell something in competition with Google.
Their own analytics dashboard is public: <a href="https://plausible.io/plausible.io" rel="nofollow">https://plausible.io/plausible.io</a>
I liked it when you announce it's open source till I checked your Github page:<p>> At the moment we don't provide support for easily self-hosting the code. Currently, the purpose of keeping the code open-source is to be transparent with the community about how we collect and process data.<p>So basically you ask people to work for free on something only you can use? No thank you.
I wrote a blogpost about webanalytics and authentication.
<a href="https://www.mathieupassenaud.fr/webanalytics_enemy/" rel="nofollow">https://www.mathieupassenaud.fr/webanalytics_enemy/</a>
Using "authorization code grant" is not as secure as we imagine with those kind of analytics
I'm also working on an analytics & A/B testing tool (<a href="https://splitbee.io" rel="nofollow">https://splitbee.io</a>). The big difference is that it needs to pin unique users for A/B testing.
It is a mix out of mixpanel & google analytics & optimizely!
The first reason is about Google being evil. They may well be. However unless your alternative is as good, or better or has a unique selling point that GA doesn't have you will find people won't use it.<p>Don't tell me about how your competitor is bad. Tell me what you offer in comparison to your competitor.
If you have access to an AWS account, you can host your own website statistics with very little costs. That’s why I built <a href="https://ownstats.cloud/" rel="nofollow">https://ownstats.cloud/</a> Would love to get some feedback.
These posts are the trash of the internet. Why?<p>This post...<p>1 - Fails to explain until the end that they are a competitor writing a "bash" piece<p>2 - Gives conclusions based on incomplete data and comparisons (website speed is barely affected by 45kb these days, many websites have much bigger reductions on multi-mb loads)<p>3 - States giant scary click-baitish claim in bold and then in smaller print gives the real story. "It's a liability..." to "it is a potential liability"<p>4 - Gives a false sense of "many reasons" ("It's a liability" and "It uses cookies" are the same complaint)<p>5 - States opinions as facts ("It worsens the UX...") -- it might, but the vast majority of websites use cookies, and so this doesn't add anything that you wouldn't have to deal with anyway.
Those looking for more ethical alternatives to the Spyware you're using see <a href="https://switching.software" rel="nofollow">https://switching.software</a>.
Can you be penalized for not running Google Analytics? If you have a website with no analytics or non-Google analytics, will your Google ranking be worse?
Slightly off-topic, but are there any analytics for open source projects?<p>Even if they require the actual data to be public (which would actually be pretty nice)
Thanks but no thanks
And stop using this type of advertisement to your products.<p>I would rather stick to GA.<p>And, you never pay for analytics on personal website.
Looks nice. Is the account multiuser with separation between sites? If it is, it's a service I'd consider throwing into my maintenance packages as an added value. Most clients don't need the complexity of Google Analytics and with GDPR the data is increasingly out of line with reality, given we load GA based on consent.
everyone hating on this in the comments, yet it's getting upvoted. Silent support is a bit annoying. I'd also rather not be told what to do with these titles "Stop doing this, etc"<p>sigh
all of these alternatives which people are posting: simpleanalytics.com plausible.io are not free, which is the main reason people use Google Analytics
>It’s a bloated script that affects your site speed
Once I removed GA, the speed increase was surprisingly very noticeable. That alone was enough for me to keep it off.
Take this post with a pinch of salt... Out of the 10 points made, I'd argue only 2 are actually valid and another 2 are "technically correct but..."<p><pre><code> It’s owned by Google, the largest ad-tech company in the world
</code></pre>
Yes. Google provides a free service and in return gets a view into your traffic. Very fair point, but not terribly controversial IMHO<p><pre><code> It’s a bloated script that affects your site speed
</code></pre>
Um, not really. I'm a big web performance advocate but 45.7KB of JS is small for the service provided. You do not need to use Google Tag Manager either so if you care you can reduce the JS footprint to 18KB.<p><pre><code> It’s overkill for the majority of site owners
</code></pre>
Yes. I'd agree with this. You probably do not need it if you are not a business.(Given the source of this point I'm guessing they do not offer most of the features of GA)<p><pre><code> It’s a liability considering GDPR, CCPA and other privacy regulations
</code></pre>
Hard disagree. You can limit PII in GA to large degree like not gathering full IP address, and reduce logging.<p>If GA is your only reason to have a Consent option then fine, its a burden to do. However if you have any other analytics or services that use cookies its a minor check-list item to cover this.<p><pre><code> It uses cookies so you must obtain consent to store cookies
</code></pre>
They are repeating their previous claim in a different form here... skipping.<p><pre><code> It’s blocked by many plugins and browsers so the data is not very accurate
</code></pre>
Technically correct, but you don't need highly accurate data to make product decisions. GA does sampling after a certain threshold anyway.<p><pre><code> It requires an extensive privacy policy
</code></pre>
No. It does not. You should acknowledge it and talk about why you use GA and you can link to GA's privacy policy. Plenty of boilerplate text you can copy to cover this if you really care.<p><pre><code> It’s abused by referral spam that skews the data
</code></pre>
Maybe your experience if different but this is hardly a problem worth noting. Certainly not a GA specific issue.<p><pre><code> It’s a proprietary product so you need to put your trust in Google
</code></pre>
Yeah. Same with any service you use, but ok.<p><pre><code> It worsens the user experience due to the necessity for the annoying prompts
</code></pre>
Again, most 3rd-party services on your site mean you need to go this path. There are good and bad ways to do this.<p>I'm sure this service is worth trying. I would also recommend looking at Simple Analytics: <a href="https://simpleanalytics.com/" rel="nofollow">https://simpleanalytics.com/</a>
As someone who still uses GA for multiple sites, can we actually discuss the claims of the article and not the broad idea of it?<p>> " > These two tracking scripts combined add 45.7 KB of page weight to each and every page load."<p>Google makes fantastic products that are available for free (with limits) because they make most of their money from ads. I may not like it, but gmail, Drive, YouTube are all great and I would prefer people who can't pay for such products have the free option.<p>> "It’s a bloated script that affects your site speed"<p>As others have said, no? Not with caching? Anyway my websites are probably bloated by all sorts of bigger things, I am no web dev and have had no time to optimize them overmuch, and the still work fine. So guilt tripping me about GA Analytics aint gonna work.<p>> "It’s overkill for the majority of site owners"<p>I like having the flexibility ; I seriously doubt this is a good pitch for any growing company or even project.<p>> "It’s a liability considering GDPR, CCPA and other privacy regulations"<p>Is it? It's not like Google is not addressing GDPR concerns (<a href="https://www.cookiebot.com/en/google-analytics-gdpr/" rel="nofollow">https://www.cookiebot.com/en/google-analytics-gdpr/</a>)<p>> "It uses cookies so you must obtain consent to store cookies"<p>Okay, finally a good one -- nobody likes the cookie popup, so removing GA analytics would improve user experience. Then again, it's so common that people maybe are used to it?<p>> "It’s blocked by many plugins and browsers so the data is not very accurate"<p>'There’s no definite answer on how many people block Google Analytics as that depends on the audience of your site, but for a tech audience, you shouldn’t be surprised to see 50% or more of the visitors blocking Google Analytics.' Really? I kind of doubt it..........<p>> "It requires an extensive privacy policy"<p>Any analytics should have privacy disclosure, presumably.<p>> "It’s abused by referral spam that skews the data"<p>And other analytics aren't?<p>> "It’s a proprietary product so you need to put your trust in Google"<p>Fair, Open Source is preferable.<p>> "It worsens the user experience due to the necessity for the annoying prompts"<p>A repeat<p>-----------<p>So yeah. Look, I am uncomfortable with big huge giant companies like Google ruling the earth. But I also have quite limited time and money, and already use gmail and Drive. So far Google has not done anything to seriously hurt my trust and I think their products are excellent. Most of these points seem weak to me, as someone already using GA analytics.<p>Still, for someone building a new website, I could see this being enough to make the point. But, I think it would be far more effective if it was more concise and less easy to point out holes in the arguments.
GA can't really be replaced easily.<p>There is an army of web consultants ready to help you set up and track your marketing with GA, and just as many marketing consultants that can only work with GA.<p>While it's nice that someone works on alternatives—although I don't really see anything wrong with GA—it's here to stay.<p>Reminds me of Excel, people have been trying to replace Excel for 20 years now.
Great if it's not written in some sort of exotic language and just in php. Don't get me wrong I'm not a fan of php but if it's written in php it would be run anywhere but not only on your private special configured VPS.