Top 13 Free Self-hosted Website Analytics in 2024 That Respect Your Visitors Privacy
What is a web analytic app?
A self-hosted web analytics tool is a software that you host on your own servers, rather than relying on a third-party service. This allows for greater control over your data, as well as enhanced privacy since user data doesn't leave your servers.
Why do you need a Google Alternative?
Having a Google Analytics alternative is beneficial for a number of reasons. Google Analytics, while powerful, collects a vast amount of user data, raising potential privacy concerns.
Alternatives, particularly self-hosted ones, can offer more privacy-friendly options, often complying with stricter data protection regulations. Furthermore, self-hosted alternatives provide more control over your data and how it's processed and stored.
In this list, we offer you the best open-source self-hosted web analytics solution that you can use instead of Google Analytics.
1. PoeticMetric
PoeticMetric is a privacy-focused, open-source alternative to Google Analytics. It is fast, does not use cookies or collect personal data, and complies with GDPR, CCPA, PECR, and KVKK data privacy regulations.
Features
- Responsive user-friendly customizable dashboards
- Privacy-focused, open-source alternative to Google Analytics
- Fast and doesn't use cookies or collect personal data
- Complies with GDPR, CCPA, PECR, and KVKK data privacy regulations
- Comprehensive and user-friendly analytics
- Easy integration with your website or application
- Supports single page applications built with tools like React.js, Vue.js, and Angular
- Simple, clear, and easy to understand reports
- 100% data ownership
- API and data exporting capabilities
- Enables collaboration with team-ready features
- Allows publicly sharable reports
2. Tianji
Tianji is a free and open-source application that can handle website analytics, uptime monitoring, server status checking, problem notification, telemetry, and open API.
This would be particularly beneficial for users with lightweight needs, as it would be more convenient and easier to use than installing multiple specialized services.
3. Vince
Vince is a high-performance, API-only, distributed, in-memory alternative to Google Analytics. It scales horizontally using raft, is extremely fast due to its use of Apache Arrow for fast vectorized in-memory computation, and has zero runtime dependencies, shipping as a single binary.
Features
- High Performance: Provides extremely fast analytics relative to competitors due to its use of Apache Arrow for fast vectorized in-memory computation.
- API-Only: Exposes a simple HTTP API, making it compatible with any language and tooling.
- Distributed: Scales horizontally using raft.
- Zero Runtime Dependency: Ships as a single binary with everything in it.
- High Events Ingestion Rate: Features non-blocking ingestion, allowing deployment for very popular sites without worries.
- Fast Query API: Uses in-memory Apache Arrow for fast vectorized query computation.
- Easy to Operate: Requires only one line command-line flags with environment variables.
- Unlimited Sites: No limit on how many sites you can manage.
- Lightweight: Features a script of less than 1Kb, resulting in zero overhead on your website.
- Privacy-Friendly: Does not use cookies and is fully compliant with GDPR, CCPA, and PECR.
- Real-Time Visitor Stats: Allows you to find who is currently visiting your site.
- Aggregate Statistics: Provides aggregate stats by bounce rate, events, pageviews, views per visit, visit duration, and visits over a time period.
- Timeseries Data: Offers time series data for reporting, breaking down by various metrics.
- Breakdown Metrics: Supports gaining deeper insight by breaking down metrics by properties, supporting multiple properties in a single query.
- Status and events API
Supported Metrics
- Bounce Rate
- Current Visitors
- Time on Page
- Total Pageviews
- Unique Visitors
- Views Per Visit
- Visit Duration
- Total Visits
4. Swetrix
Swetrix is a free, self-hosted, open-source alternative to Google Analytics, focusing on privacy and feature-richness.
5. Dashflare
Dashflare is a privacy-first analytics solution for monitoring websites, requiring self-hosting and Cloudflare usage. It scales according to needs and works with Grafana for data visualization and Grafana Loki for data persistence. It can be install easily using Docker and Docker Compose.
6. Open Web Analytics
Open Web Analytics (OWA) is an open-source alternative to commercial web analytics tools. It includes a server and a Javascript tracking client for easy integration into web pages.
It can be added to WordPress websites through an integration plugin or to any PHP application using the OWA PHP SDK. OWA allows tracking of visitors, pageviews, e-commerce transactions, and configurable actions.
Features
- Track visitors, pageviews, e-commerce transactions, and configurable actions
- Track unlimited number of websites using a single instance of OWA Server
- First party Javascript tracker client
- Reporting Dashboard/Portral
- View and customize all reports
- Generate Heatmaps
- Generate "Domstream" session recordings
- Geolocation of visitors
- REST API for administration and data access
- Multi user reporting interface
- Extensible framework via custom modules
7. Umami
Umami is a simple, fast, privacy-focused alternative to Google Analytics.
Features
- Simple, fast, privacy-focused
- Easy to collect, analyze, and understand web data
- Maintains visitor privacy and data ownership
- Collects key metrics
- Provides detailed information about visitors (device, browser, OS, location)
- Tracks page views and bounce rate
- Identifies traffic sources
- Allows secure sharing of stats
- Supports data filtering (country, browser, URL)
- Provides location data (city, region, country)
- Identifies popular languages among visitors
- Offers real-time data
- Tracks custom events
- Supports custom data properties
- UTM tracking for campaign effectiveness
- Allows team sharing of website access
- Provides out of the box reporting
- Tracks visitor return rate (Retention)
- Tracks conversion and drop-off rate (Funnel)
- Ensures data privacy and compliance with GDPR & CCPA
- Anonymizes all visitor data
- Does not use cookies
- Ensures data ownership
- Cloud solution available
- Fully managed Cloud solution
- High-performance Cloud solution
- Supports data import and export
8. Offen Fair Analytics
Offen Fair Web Analytics is a secure, free, and self-hosted web analytics tool that complies with GDPR guidelines and uses first-party cookies only. It operates on an opt-in basis, requiring users to actively consent to data collection, and allows users full access to their data.
Users are tasked with hosting the tool while protecting user data, integrating the code snippet into pages they want to track, and making users aware of their data access.
9. Freshlytics
Freshlytics is an open-source, privacy-friendly analytics software that doesn't use cookies or collect personally identifiable information. It features a dashboard that allows users to switch between projects, analyze data within a date range, and view pageviews in various dimensions like page URLs, referrers, and browsers.
10. Ballcone
Ballcone is a fast and lightweight server-side Web analytics solution. It requires no JavaScript on your website.
Features
- No JavaScript snippets required
- GeoIP mapping with the GeoLite2 database
- Extraction of platform and browser information from User-Agent
11. Matomo
Matomo is a free, open analytics platform that serves as an alternative to Google Analytics. It's a PHP MySQL software that users install on their own servers, and it's currently used on over 1.4 million websites. Privacy is a built-in feature of Matomo.
12. Plausible
Plausible is a free, self-hosted web analytics software that prioritizes user privacy and compliance with EU privacy standards. It offers a user-friendly alternative to Google Analytics, providing website administrators, content creators, and marketers with greater control over their data.
13. GoAccess
GoAccess is an open-source, real-time web log analyzer and interactive viewer that can run in a terminal on *nix systems or through a browser. It provides quick and valuable HTTP statistics for system administrators needing on-the-fly visual server reports.
Features
- Real-Time: All panels and metrics update every 200 ms on the terminal and every second on the HTML output.
- Minimal Configuration: Easily run against your access log file and let GoAccess parse and show stats.
- Application Response Time Tracking: Track the time taken to serve requests to identify slow pages.
- Supports Nearly All Web Log Formats: Allows any custom log format string with predefined options for Apache, Nginx, Amazon S3, Elastic Load Balancing, CloudFront, and more.
- Incremental Log Processing: Offers on-disk persistence options for processing logs incrementally.
- Only One Dependency: Only requires ncurses to run and even features its own Web Socket server.
- Visitor Metrics: Determine the amount of hits, visitors, bandwidth, and metrics for slowest running requests by hour or date.
- Metrics per Virtual Host: Displays which virtual host is consuming most of the web server resources.
- ASN (Autonomous System Number) Mapping: Useful for detecting and blocking malicious traffic patterns.
- Color Scheme Customizable: Tailor GoAccess to your own color schemes on the terminal or by applying the stylesheet on the HTML output.
- Support for Large Datasets: Optimized in-memory hash tables enable parsing of large logs with good memory usage and performance.
- Docker Support: Build GoAccess' Docker image from upstream and fully configure it.
13. ShyNet
Shynet is a modern, privacy-friendly, and cookie-free web analytics tool. Unlike many other web analytics tools, Shynet doesn't require handing visitor information to a third-party company, doesn't use cookies to track visitors across sessions, and doesn't collect excessive personal data.
It's open-source, intended to be self-hosted, and may be easier to use than many alternatives. The data collected by Shynet belongs to the host, making it a respectful and privacy-conscious choice for web analytics.
Features
- Privacy-friendly and cookie-free
- Open-source and intended to be self-hosted
- Doesn't require handing visitor information to a third-party company
- Lightweight tracking script
- Can run on a single machine or across a Kubernetes cluster
- Built using Django
- Supports multiple users and sites
- Tracks hits, sessions, page load time, bounce rate, duration, referrers, locations, operating systems, browsers, geographic location, and device type
- Allows primary-key integration to associate visitors with their user accounts
- Collaboration built-in
- Fully featured account management workflow