10 Top Open Source Privacy-First Web Analytics
Google Analytics is a free web analytics service offered by Google that tracks and reports website traffic, allowing website owners to gain insights into the behavior of their users. It provides various tools and metrics to measure website performance, such as the number of visitors, their demographics, the pages they visit, and the time they spend on the site. This information can help website owners make informed decisions about their content and marketing strategies, and improve user experience.
However, many users and content creators are concerned about Google collecting data on them. As a result, open-source self-hosted alternatives have emerged.
How can Website Visitor Analytics Help Content creators?
Website visitor analytics is a way of tracking the behavior of visitors to a website. It provides information on how many visitors a site receives, where they come from, what pages they visit, and how long they stay on the site. This information is useful for understanding user behavior, identifying areas for improvement, and optimizing content and marketing strategies.
For bloggers and content creators, visitor analytics can provide valuable insights into the effectiveness of their content and marketing strategies. By tracking user behavior, they can identify which types of content are most popular, which channels are driving the most traffic, and what keywords and phrases are bringing visitors to the site.
This information can be used to optimize content and marketing strategies, and increase engagement and conversion rates. Additionally, visitor analytics can help bloggers and content creators understand their audience better, including their demographics, interests, and needs, which can inform future content creation and marketing efforts.
What is a free open source visitor analytics?
A free open source visitor analytics is a web analytics tool that is free to use and provides users with access to the source code, allowing them to customize and modify the tool to suit their specific needs.
Privacy-friendly analytics is a set of methods for collecting, measuring, and analyzing data in a way that respects individual privacy rights and delivers relevant insights. These methods enable data-driven decision-making while still giving individuals control over their personal data.
This type of tool is often used by organizations that require greater control over their analytics data or have specific privacy or security requirements, particularly in order to comply with certain privacy regulations such as GDPR, HIPAA, and CCPA.
In this article we will focus primarily on privacy-focused Google Analytics alternatives.
1. Swetrix
Swetrix is an open-source web analytics tool that offers a rich marketplace, better privacy, and is compliant with GDPR, HIPAA, and CCPA. It adheres to the PCI DSS payment data security standard and supports custom events and user flow/journey. It is a great alternative to Google Analytics and is easy to integrate with other systems and web apps.
2. Offen: Fair Web Analytics
Offen is a self-hosted, open-source web analytics tool that is compliant with GDPR and operates exclusively in opt-in mode. It is secure by default, as all usage data is encrypted with strong end-to-end encryption.
offen3. Pirsch
Pirsch is a privacy-focused tracking solution for Go. It runs on the server side, uses no cookies, and can be easily integrated into a Go application to track HTTP traffic without invading the privacy of your visitors. Note that the visualization of the data (dashboard) is not included in this project.
Pirsch generates a unique fingerprint for each visitor, which is a hash of their IP address, User-Agent, date, and a salt. It is released as an open-source project under the GNU AGPLv3 license.
pirsch-analytics4. Aurora
Aurora is a free, privacy-first, cookies-free web analytics tool designed to help you collect anonymous private data. It is written in JavaScript and TypeScript. Unfortunately, for now, it can only be installed from source, as it does not have any Docker support.
askides5. piratepx
piratepx is a small, privacy-focused counter pixel that works for websites, mobile apps, server-side APIs, CLIs, and more. It's only 35 bytes and doesn't rely on cookies or JavaScript.
The backend is a JSON REST API made with Node.js, Fastify, and Objection.js. It saves data in a PostgreSQL database. The frontend is a single-page app created with Vue.js and Tailwind CSS.
piratepx6. Freshlytics
Freshlytics is an open-source, privacy-friendly analytics software that aims to be reliable, user-friendly, and easy to deploy. It does not use cookies or collect any personally identifiable information (PII).
sheshbabu7. Shynet
Shynet is a modern, lightweight, privacy-friendly, and detailed web analytics tool that works without cookies or JavaScript. It supports multiple projects (websites) and offers seamless support for multiple users and admins.
milesmcc8. Kindmetrics
Kindmetrics is a privacy-focused web analytics tool for your website. It is built on Crystal, making it very small (~10MB) and exceptionally fast, even faster than Elixir, Rails, or Java. It uses minimal CPU and memory and can be deployed on older machines running Linux. Kindmetrics is simple, GDPR-compliant, and does not use cookies to collect information.
kindmetrics9. Ackee
Ackee is a Node.js-based analytics tool that respects user privacy. It can analyze website traffic and provide statistics through a simple interface. Unlike other tools, Ackee doesn't track all user information, but still gives useful insights by anonymizing data. It's ideal for those who don't require a full-featured marketing analytics platform like Google Analytics or Matomo. Ackee also doesn't use cookies to collect data and supports custom events such as tracking links, newsletter subscriptions, and button clicks.
Hamza Mousa
10. Plausible Analytics
Plausible Analytics is an open-source (AGPL-3.0) simple, lightweight (< 1 KB), open source and privacy-friendly alternative to Google Analytics. It doesn’t use cookies and is fully compliant with GDPR, CCPA and PECR. You can self-host or have us run Plausible for you in the cloud.
plausibleIf you know of any other open-source similar solution, that we did not mention here, let us know in the comments.
