Google Analytics is undoubtedly one of the most popular web analytics platforms available. It provides insightful data about website and app performance, but its use comes at a cost — especially when it comes to user privacy and transparency.
That’s why many people are now considering alternatives to Google Analytics in order to remain compliant with data privacy laws and move away from the big tech giants.
Why A Google Analytics Alternative?
One reason to consider using a Google Analytics alternative is its simplicity of use. While Google Analytics offers a wide range of features, it can be intimidating for non-experienced users. Most alternatives are much easier to set up and use, with user-friendly dashboards and clear instructions that make it stress-free to get up and running quickly.
Secondly, using an alternative to Google Analytics gives you more control over your data privacy. Various tools out there offer the ability to store your data locally or have servers located in specific regions depending on your needs – giving you peace of mind should questions arise about who has access to the collected data. This makes them ideal for those who might not want their information stored in servers overseas or shared with companies they may not trust – something that’s difficult (if not impossible) when dealing with the world’s largest search engine giant.
As a result, many people are now looking for alternatives to complement or even replace Google Analytics altogether in order to get clear and accurate look at their website traffic data.
Key Features of a Web Analytics Platform
When choosing a Google Analytics alternative, it's important to know what you need to track and how the data is presented to you.
Below is a list of key features that everyone should look for when using a website analytics platform:
- Privacy-focus: do not store or steal user data (IP address, location, etc.) and better if not using cookies.
- Metrics: page views, unique visitors, popular pages, source of traffic, bounce rate, devices, countries, and languages
- Campaign (UTM) and event tracking
- Easy-to-understand dashboard
Optional features might include:
- Real-time reporting
- Heatmap
- Goals
Free Cloud Google Analytics Alternatives
Cloud solutions allows you to see website traffic without installing a software on your server. All you need is registering a free account, adding a snippet to your site and start tracking.
Using a cloud solution has some pros:
- You don't have to manage your servers, including installation, security, updates, etc.
- Using it is easy, e.g. simply copy the tracking code and put it on your website
- You have support from these platforms
However, it has some cons:
- Some platforms limit your usage by number of websites or number of page views
- You don't own your data: data is stored on their servers and you only have access to it within some days (normally 30 days)
- Some platforms limits the features for free users
- As the snippet comes from another domain, it might affect your website performance
Below are some of the best alternatives to Google Analytics that you should check out:
Beam Analytics
Beam Analytics is the most affordable GDPR compliant, cookie-free Google Analytics alternative on the market. And it comes with funnel analysis and custom events.
The best part of Beam Analytics is that its generous free tier which allows you to host unlimited websites for up to 100k page views per month.
Beam has nice list of features, such as:
- Privacy focused: no cookies, GDPR/CCPA/PERC compliant
- Supports UTM trackings, funnel analysis & custom events
- Supports cohort retention
- Nice and clean interface
Pricing: is free for up to 100k page views per month for unlimited websites.
Umami
Umami is an open-source, cookie-free, GDPR-compliant tracking service that keeps track of website usage without identifying individual users. It anonymizes all data collected to ensure user privacy and reassure compliance with ever-changing global privacy laws.
Using Umami comes with useful features such as a mobile-friendly interface, so you can view stats anywhere on your phone without having to worry about ad blockers like you would with Google Analytics.
Unlike other analytics services, Umami allows you to host it directly on your domain so ad-blockers won't interfere with your use of the product.
Pricing: Umami has two version:
- The cloud version: is free for 10k monthly events and up to 3 websites with 6 month data retention.
- The open-source version: which can be installed on your server and there's no limits of sites or events.
Cabin
Cabin is built on privacy-by-design principles. Visitor data is 100% anonymous and compliant with every single privacy law around the world. The service never stores IP addresses, unique identifiers or browser fingerprints.
Cabin doesn't use cookies at all and doesn't share data with any ad networks. The tracking script is very small, light and doesn't affect the website loading speed.
Cabin has a beautiful dashboard where you can track basic metrics like page views, unique visitors, bounce rate, source or campaigns.
Pricing: Cabin is free for one website with 30 day data retention.
CloudFlare Web Analytics
Cloudflare Web Analytics is an excellent web analytics solution for those who are already using its content delivery network (CDN) service. The setup is simple - just authorize the web analytics and you’re good to go! You can add up to 10 websites for free, and there's no need for a cookie banner due to the non-collection of personal data.
In addition to tracking essential metrics such as page views, visits, load times, bandwidth and more, Cloudflare has also incorporated Core Web Vitals metrics that measure performance levels across your monitored websites.
You can receive weekly updates via email so you’ll always know your website performance status with ease. Because it’s proxied through the Cloudflare CDN, it has a light impact on page loading speed as well as mitigate any privacy issues associated with website analytics.
Pricing: CloudFlare Web Analytics is 100% free with up to 10 websites.
Microsoft Clarity
Microsoft Clarity is a popular web analytics tool that helps businesses to gain insight into how their websites are performing. It utilizes data points generated from user interactions with the website to give valuable insights and information.
Clarity provides helpful summary information in its convenient dashboard such as session count, total views, pageviews, bounce rate, and conversion rates.
Clarity also has free heatmap which offers interesting metrics such as rage clicks and excessive scrolling which could potentially indicate user frustration. Having this information available can help website owners identify areas where site usability can be improved, better engage potential customers or provide targeting content when necessary.
Additionally, Clarity provides further segmentation capabilities which allow for advanced analysis and presentation of user behavior in different scenarios for deeper understanding.
Pricing: Clarify is 100% free.
Piwik PRO
Piwik PRO (don't confuse it with Piwik, which was rebranded as Matomo and is described below) is a powerful and privacy-orientated alternative to Google Analytics. It was created with data privacy in mind, offering an easy to use and secure platform for analyzing, tracking, and optimizing websites.
Piwik PRO works in a similar way to other web analytics tools by providing detailed reports about visitors, engagement, traffic sources, keyword rankings and more.
However, Piwik PRO stands out from the pack because it does not store users' personal data for advertising or marketing purposes. It does store anonymous visitor ids but they are anonymized very quickly so they can't be traced or used for any purpose without your knowledge.
The main difference between Piwik PRO and other solutions is its ease of use. It features a drag-and-drop interface that makes building custom reports quick and simple.
Pricing: Piwik PRO core plan is free for web analytics, and it has:
- 3 modules: Analytics, Tag Manager & Consent Manager
- 500,000 monthly actions
- 14-month data retention
Clicky
Clicky is a privacy-friendly website analytics. It not only offers real-time traffic analytics, but also detailed heatmap tracking, allowing users to visualize how users are interacting with their web pages. This graphical representation gives insight into which areas of the page are getting the most attention from visitors and where it might need improvement.
Clicky can provide other key metrics like page views, unique visits, bounce rates, time on site duration and more which can help website owners optimize their online presence.
Aside from its impressive feature set, Clicky has an outdated website design that belies the sophisticated tool that it actually is.
Pricing: Clicky is free for one website with up to 3000 page views / month. However, the free plan doesn't include the heatmap feature.
Free Open Source Google Analytics Alternatives
Open source alternatives to Google Analytics are free softwares that you can use to track the website traffic. The main difference between these solutions with Google Analytics or cloud services is that you have to install them on your server. In other words, these are self-hosted solutions.
Using a self-hosted solution has some pros:
- You own your data.
- You can use for as many websites as you want, and there is no limits on tracked page views.
However, it has some cons:
- You have to manage your own server, including installation, maintanance, updates, etc.
- While the software is free (open source), you have to pay for your server.
If you feel comfortable with installing and managing your server, then check out some open source alternatives to Google Analytics below:
Plausible
Plausible Analytics is an excellent choice for website owners who are looking for a privacy-friendly alternative to Google Analytics.
Plausible is incredibly intuitive and easy-to-use for those unfamiliar with analytics tools. All reports are presented on a single page featuring a clean and simple design so that users can quickly access comprehensive data.
Since its code snippet is really small (< 1 KB), Plausible also has minimal impact on your website’s loading time. These features make it the top choice for small businesses and individuals looking to track their site’s performance without digging too deep into analytics lingo or worrying about data breaches.
What really sets Plausible apart from other analytics solutions is that it doesn't rely on cookies or collect any personal information, so it's compliant with many privacy regulations such as GDPR and CCPA. This makes it a great option for businesses wanting to ensure they are operating within the law when collecting data from their visitors.
Pricing: Plausible has two versions:
- Cloud version which is available on their website, which starts at $9 / month.
- Open source version: which you can self-host on your server to access to all features and use it for unlimited websites.
Matomo (Formerly Piwik)
Matomo is an open-source web analytics platform that provides powerful insights and is renowned for its focus on privacy. It enables users to track traffic, visits, user behaviors, and general website analytics truly objectively.
As it has gained popularity in the market – currently boasting usage from over 1.4 million websites worldwide spanning 190 different countries – Matomo has come to offer additional features like heatmaps, session recordings, SEO keyword analysis, and A/B testing.
Unlike most traditional web analytics platforms, Matomo prides itself in its adherence to major privacy laws such as the GDPR and the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA). Its security measures even go so far as ensuring users do not have to provide customers with any disclosures or obtain consent for use of the platform whatsoever. This commitment to privacy makes Matomo invaluable for all types of businesses operating within these laws’ respective jurisdictions.
Pricing: Matomo has two versions:
- Matomo On-Premise: which is a self-hosted version. You can install it on your server and use all features.
- Matomo Cloud: is a cloud version which starts from $19 / month.
Open Web Analytics
Open Web Analytics (OWA) is an open source alternative to Google Analytics. This software allows you to stay in control of the data you collect about the user of your websites or applications.
A nice thing about OWA is it has a WordPress plugin, so it's easy to connect a WordPress website to an OWA server. OWA also works with other type of applications, not just websites.
Features:
- Track visitors, pageviews, e-commerce transactions, and configurable actions
- Reporting Dashboard/Portral
- View and customize all reports
- Heatmaps
- Session recordings
- Geolocation of visitors
- REST API for administration and data access
- Multi user reporting interface
WordPress Alternatives to Google Analytics
If you're using WordPress, then there are WordPress plugins that provide similar functionality to Google Analytics. These plugins can be installed within the WordPress dashboard in a few clicks and provide detailed information about your page views or user behavior.
Using a WordPress plugin for website analytics has some pros:
- Easy to install
- Integrated within WordPress dashboard, so users (or clients) don't have to navigate to another site to view the statistics
- You own your data
However, it has some cons:
- The data is stored in the same WordPress database, which will increase over time. That might cause the performance issue when the database is large.
- When traffic to your websites grow, the tracking script will create a high load to your website, which might also be a performance issue.
Below are the best WordPress plugins alternatives to Google Analytics:
WP Statistics
WP Statistics is a simple yet powerful tool to know your website statistics. With WP Statistics you can know your website statistics without any need to send your users’ data anywhere. You can know how many people visit your personal or business website, where they’re coming from, what browsers and search engines they use, and which of your contents, categories, tags and users get more visits.
All these data are recorded in your server, and YES! WP Statistics is GDPR compliant.
Features:
- Metrics: IP, Referral, Browser, Search Engine, OS, Country and City
- Statistics on Contents based on Categories, Tags, and Writers
- Widget Support for showing Statistics
- Data Export in TSV, XML, and CSV formats
- Statistical Reporting Emails
- Statistical of pages with query strings and UTM parameters
- Stunning Graphs and Visual Statistics
Burst Statistics
Burst Statistics is a great alternative to Google Analytics for WordPress users. It provides detailed insights into visitors' behaviour with a privacy-friendly analytics dashboard.
What we like about this plugin is the clean and easy-to-use dashboard. It shows essentials metrics on the same page, giving you a quick overview of your website traffic.
Features:
- Essential Metrics: Pageviews, Visitors, Sessions, Time on Page and Referrers.
- Privacy-friendly: Locally hosted, and anonymized data in collaboration with Complianz.
- Cookieless Tracking: Get data based on anonymous parameters without storing data in browsers.
Independent Analytics
Independent Analytics is another Google Analytics alternative for WordPress users. It's fast, lightweight and comes with important GDPR compliance features, making it easy to stay compliant with the latest privacy laws while also gathering analytics data on your website.
The main advantage of using this plugin is its deep integration with WordPress. Rather than simply displaying a list of URLs like some other software programs do, Independent Analytics drills down into your post data, allowing you to view additional metrics such as authors, publish dates and views alongside them. This comprehensive information lets you get a better understanding of how well your content is performing.
This is a free plugin and doesn’t require you to create an account on another site. All features outlined below are included in the free plugin:
- Shows your most popular posts and pages
- Lists your top traffic sources
- Geodata with interactive world map
- GDPR compliant
Koko Analytics
Koko Analytics is a powerful WordPress plugin designed to provide website owners with valuable insights into their site's performance and visitor statistics. Built with privacy in mind, Koko Analytics offers an excellent alternative to traditional analytics tools that often rely on invasive data collection practices.
With Koko Analytics, you can gather essential information about your website's traffic, including the number of visitors, page views, popular content, and referral sources, all while respecting the privacy of your users.
Additionally, Koko Analytics uses a simple and intuitive interface, making it easy for WordPress users of all skill levels to access and interpret their website's analytics.
Statify
Statify is a simple WordPress alternative for Google Analytics, which provides a straightforward and compact access to the number of site views. It is privacy-friendly as it uses neither cookies nor a third party.
An interactive chart is followed by lists of the most common reference sources and target pages. The period of statistics and length of lists can be set directly in the dashboard widget.
Comparing to ther plugins, Statify is simpler because it counts only page views and doesn't provide data about users like time on site or bounce rate. That makes the plugin lightweight and useful for users who don't need much.
Jetpack Stats
Jetpack is a popular plugin from Automattic with a lot of features. One of them is Jetpack Stats, which shows you advanced site stats and analytics to help you understand your audience.
Jetpack allows you to see your top performing posts & pages and track data in real-time. Other metrics like traffic source or countries are also available.
However, the biggest disadvantage of Jetpack is that it requires a connection to wordpress.com, the hosted platform by Automattic. The connection will offload your data to wordpress.com's server, thus your database doesn't have to store the stats data.
Choose the Google Analytics Alternative That's Right for You
Choosing an alternative to Google Analytics can be daunting. With so many options available, it may feel overwhelming to find the right analytics tool for your unique needs. But with the right research and due diligence, you can find an ideal solution that fits your budget.
If you don't want to manage your own server or not experienced with installing software on a server, then it's best to go with a cloud solution. However, if you want to fully control and own your data and don't want to be limited by the number of sites or page views, then an open source solution is better for you.
And if you are using WordPress, and want a built-in solution that gives you insights about your traffic, then a WordPress plugin is best.
While chooing a Google Analytics alternative, pay attention to the dashboard design, the metrics they provide and also the limitations you might have.