I would posit that almost any remotely hosted analytics system (privacy oriented or not) is eventually a target for privacy centric browsers. If not now, then in the future.<p>I mean, let's be honest - the days are fast coming when anything that looks like remotely hosted javascript is going to be blocked, no matter how benign it is.<p>So could it be that the future is home grown analytics subsystems that reside in your own stack?<p>That way people who need <i>deeper</i> types of tracking can do it, while those that need shallow analytics can do it too.<p>It certainly seems to be heading in that direction.
I'm happy with <a href="https://goaccess.io/" rel="nofollow">https://goaccess.io/</a> via raw nginx logs. No additional requests for the end user.
We don’t need any of the advanced features Google Analytics offers. But when I look at the replacements, they also lack basic ones.<p>A simple one would be showing me the visitors to /blog/ and its subdirectories. And from there allow drilling down to them.<p>And from a UX perspective, none of them seem to support searching for a specific page to display the stats for. Yes, you can edit the URL, but that’s a horrible way to do it.<p>edit: To add, they are also very expensive. Above 1 million views/month (which I would say is still a pretty small commercial site) goatcounter already is in "ask us" territory and plausible wants $69/month. As the value add seems very small, we rather use our own homegrown, bare-bones analytics system for anyone who doesn’t consent to analytics.
I use Plausible, it's very nice and completely painless to get started with. Transfers 701 bytes(!) to load the js on a page, which is super impressive.
Not knocking this but I've seen what feels like dozens of script based solutions coming up on HN recently. If the goal is privacy what would this give you over something which runs on the server?
I tested Plausible a few months ago and couldn't get it up and running on my own server. The docs stated that self-hosting was possible but not supported at all. It was a real bummer, hope they worked on this in the last months.
I am now looking at <a href="https://nullitics.com" rel="nofollow">https://nullitics.com</a> (<a href="https://github.com/nullitics/nullitics" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/nullitics/nullitics</a>) to jump away from Google Analytics, and quite like it. For self-hosted option I would probably use GoAccess. In general, I like the trend that more and more alternatives appear, competition is never a bad thing.
I came across Plausible from this article on Test Double <a href="https://blog.testdouble.com/posts/2021-03-02-why-privacy-minded-analytics-can-fix-marketing/" rel="nofollow">https://blog.testdouble.com/posts/2021-03-02-why-privacy-min...</a>
I left Plausible for GoatCounter. It is better designed privacy-wise and much easier to self host (a single statically build binary, no dependencies): <a href="https://goatcounter.com/" rel="nofollow">https://goatcounter.com/</a>
Has anyone here tried out <a href="http://offen.dev" rel="nofollow">http://offen.dev</a> yet?<p>I've stumbled upon it while implementing a self-hosted matomo solution. I like the approach, which allows for a much nicer UX of their consent process (of course I would prefer to not having to have one in the first place).
Loving the Plausible paid/hosted version, just upgraded yesterday. Exactly what I need and nothing more. Totally painless. As a dev I really cant think of anything I dislike! I don't do any A/B testing or social engineering nonsense, I just want to know where people are clicking from and when.<p>Being able to create password protected links for my colleagues is really nice though!
Question for you lot: Self hosting sounds like a better pro privacy solution (if cross origin JavaScript gets blocked), but what’s stopping somebody having a server side script to funnel all that information to somebody else?<p>I don’t think it helps.<p>Perhaps tracking should be done be regulated bodies who must abide by the rules
I love Plausible and use and on mulitple sites. I like the simplicity, great UX and the fact that it's open source and self-hostable (even though I don't host it myself, knowing that it's possible is great).
Re: unlimited websites<p>Is there a way to invite clients and give them access to only their site's?<p>Effectively, I'd pay for it for myself and would add (mostly) pro-bono NPO client sites.
I use <a href="https://www.goatcounter.com/" rel="nofollow">https://www.goatcounter.com/</a> and I'm very happy with it. It's open source and can be self hosted. Since there's no user tracking, it's GDPR compliant out of the box.