On September 4, 1998, Sergey Brin and Larry Page founded Google. At the dawn of its existence, Google was a "one-product company", and the product turned out to be so cool and cool that it quickly shook the market position of competitors. However, fast forward 23 years. Modern Google is no longer a search engine. Or rather, not only a search engine. It is a huge multinational and very effective advertising platform, a whole money-making factory using user data as raw material. But is it worth sharing that very data with this platform? There are different opinions on this matter.
As an advertising platform, the mega-corporation Google is mega-efficient. The collected user data, obtained using the search engine and the native Chrome browser, allows you to show users targeted ads that match their interests. The corporation receives a significant amount of information due to the popularity of the Android mobile platform, which, according to various estimates, occupies up to 72% of the market. But no less interesting for advertising services are information about the sites visited by users, which are collected, including using Google AdSense scripts and Google Analytics trackers. The latter can be called a truly unique toolkit for collecting bigdata about the Internet population: administrators who install these scripts on sites receive quite detailed and useful reports on the audience of their resources for free, and Google,in turn, collects and accumulates the same statistics for advertising purposes. Everyone is happy.
It is safe to say that the majority of people connected to the Internet on our planet use Google services in one way or another, which in 2020 allowed the corporation to collect revenues of about 180 billion dollars. Google earned a significant share of this amount through advertising. And if everything is more or less unambiguous with the rest of the services: since you use them, you inevitably share information with Google, then you can completely refuse Google Analytics. Fortunately, there are alternative services that can provide site owners with detailed statistics - they can be used both as a replacement for Google Analytics, and in conjunction with it. Let's consider and compare the most popular of these services.
anelbear
Website: https://panelbear.com/
Service type: Commercial with a free plan The
service provides analytics for websites in real time. At the service of users - traffic analysis (volume, sources, geography, etc.), assessment of the download speed of the site and its individual pages, the ability to track various events. In addition, the service generates and displays warnings about possible problems on the monitored Internet resource: low download speed, high number of refusals, etc. The site automatically sends reports with statistics to the administrator by e-mail at specified intervals.
Panelbear does not use cookies, and, according to the developers, it takes care of the privacy of visitors to the sites on which this metric is set. If the number of page views of the site is less than 5000 per month, you can use the free Panelbear tariff, if the number of visitors and views is greater, you must select a paid tariff that costs from $ 5.99 per month.
PostHog
Website: https://posthog.com/
Service type: MIT / Open Source with optional paid plans
This analytics system is written in Python and distributed under the MIT license. The PostHog source code is available for free download on GitHub . According to the developers, this product is used by Elon Musk's SpaceX, Tinkoff Bank, AirBaltic and many other respected customers.
With PostHog, you can collect and analyze statistics for web and mobile applications, including information about traffic sources, how users interact with a site or application - including navigation visualization, session tracking, and conversion tracking. You can deploy PostHog on your own server or in the cloud using publicly available sources, or choose one of the tariffs offered by the developers and use the analytics system as a service.
Hotjar
Website: https://www.hotjar.com/
Service type: Commercial with a free tariff
This service not only provides fairly detailed statistics about traffic sources and site visitors, but also quite interesting visualizations - a "click map" showing areas on the site or in a web application where users click the mouse most often, recording the movement of the user's mouse cursor on the site, the dynamics of page scrolling, etc. Moreover, all these activities can be viewed for different categories of visitors: for example, owners of computers, tablets, mobile devices. All statistics can be downloaded as visual reports.
This is how the map of clicks on the site looks from the Hotjar point of view
For non-commercial use, Hotjar offers a free plan with limited features, as well as a range of commercial rates for business accounts.
Matomo
Website: https://matomo.org/
Service type: Open Source with a commercial rate
One of the most popular web analytics services, formerly known as Piwik. The developers themselves position it as a free alternative to Google Analytics with a focus on the security and protection of user data. The source code for Matomo, written in PHP and licensed under the GPL 3.0 license, is available on GitHub .
Matomo provides an almost identical set of metrics to Google Analytics, except that the developers claim that when using their services, the client himself is the owner of the collected data, and they are guaranteed not to flow to the left. The service is free, but if you wish, you can use a commercial plan for 29 euros per month with the placement of the Matomo engine in the cloud.
Heap
Website: https://heap.io/
Service type: Paid with a free limited tariff
Another platform for collecting statistics for developers of mobile and web applications. Heap records user activity and allows you to analyze the data obtained to increase conversion: segment users by behavior, build sales funnels, evaluate monetization and track which marketing channels are most effective in terms of user registrations. In other words, Heap is geared towards product analytics. At the same time, the service tries to track and save the maximum number of metrics, therefore, theoretically, it allows you to analyze data retrospectively - for those events and objects that were not initially of interest to the Heap client, but one day they were suddenly needed for some reason.
To evaluate applications with 60,000 or less user sessions, you can use a free plan with a number of technical limitations; developers of more loaded applications will have to pay.
pentracker
Site: https://www.opentracker.net/
Service type: Paid A
beautiful site with a goldfish jumping out of an aquarium, apparently deciding to carry out Roskomnadzor in this way, invites us to connect to the real-time statistics system, whatever that means. Among other standard functions such as traffic analysis, the service allows you to mark users registered on the site in various ways, identify visitors by company and provider (based on IP addresses), etc. Despite the fact that the name of the service contains the word "open", it is paid, there are several tariffs to choose from. Freebies are not provided.
Foxmetrics
Website: https://foxmetrics.com
Service type: Paid
Another commercial product intended primarily for business. Foxmetrix is a fully managed enterprise data warehouse that collects and analyzes information about users and their behavior. Data can come to Foxmetrix from several sources and be processed both jointly and clustered - this is perhaps the key difference of this solution from other similar services.
The offered tools include various information processing schemes, building custom data models, segmentation of collected statistics and many different types of reports. No pricing information is provided on the site. Apparently expensive.
Screpy
Website: https://screpy.com/
Service type: Paid
Service, based, according to its creators, on artificial intelligence and machine learning technologies. Offers quite a typical set of tools: web analytics, Google Rank check, monitoring page load speed, traffic analyzer, HTML validator, site audit using Lighthouse. This pleasure costs $ 9 per month, and a free trial is offered to potential users.
The project as a whole is focused on SEO, not analytics, hence the somewhat strange set of additional features it offers, such as the selection of keywords and the search for "errors" on sites leading to its pessimization in search results. However, an assortment of similar SEO tools can be found on the Internet for free, here they are simply collected on one resource.
ontentsquare
Website: https://contentsquare.com/
Service type: Paid
Yet another statistics platform focused on product analytics and marketing. The range includes analysis of traffic sources, search queries, assessment of user behavior, conversions, the effectiveness of landing pages of the site, with a breakdown of all this by time and specified segments. Analytics are visualized in the form of beautiful reports, graphs and charts. All in all, ontentsquare offers all the tools marketers need to demonstrate their tireless activity, their own usefulness, and, on occasion, knock out an even more delicious budget from the leadership. There are no prices on the site, but there is an offer to send them upon request - apparently, the price is calculated based on your steepness and the depth of your pocket.
Woopra
Website: https://www.woopra.com/
Service type: Paid with a free plan
An analytics system offering easy integration with many popular technical solutions, services and portals: Dropbox, Google Drive, Facebook, Azure, MailChimp, WordPress / WooCommerce, and others. Allows you to track traffic sources, trends in user behavior, set up retargeting, analyze users retention, and much more. There is a free plan (up to 500,000 metrics per month with a number of other restrictions) and paid plans starting from an immodest $ 349 per month to “contact us if you want us to surprise you”.
Other services
Think these ten projects are the assortment of available Google Analytics alternatives? Nothing of the kind! Their name is legion. Here are a few more similar services to choose from:
• Clicky ( https://clicky.com/ ) - a service with an ugly site "from the 90s", paid with a free plan.
• Open Web Analytics ( http://www.openwebanalytics.com/ ) - free with open sources (GPL 2.0)
• GoingUp ( https://goingup.com/ ) - paid-free service with a focus on SEO
• Chartbeat ( https : //chartbeat.com/ ) is a real-time analytics service.
• Gaug.es ( https://get.gaug.es/ ) is another real-time analytics service.
• Indicative ( https://www.indicative.com/ ) - A web and mobile analytics tool with a focus on segmentation and visualization.
• Statcounter ( https://statcounter.com/ ) - traffic analysis for sites.
• Hitslink ( https://www.hitslink.com/ ) - Real-time analytics, social media traffic reports and dynamic segmentation.
• Parse.ly ( https://www.parse.ly/ ) is a real-time web analytics tool with a focus on content tracking.
• Loggr ( http://loggr.net/ ) - event tracking for websites and web applications.
• Rakam ( https://rakam.io/ ) is a free open source user analytics platform that allows you to create your own analytics services. Integrates with any data source (web, mobile devices, internet of things, etc.)
• Metabase ( https://www.metabase.com/ ) is another analytics system.
• LiveSession ( https://livesession.io/ ) is an analytics platform with a focus on User Experience.
• Glassbox ( https://glassboxdigital.com/) - analytics with a focus on User Experience and tracking of user actions.
• Redash ( https://redash.io/ ) - An open source platform for collecting, analyzing and visualizing data.
• Druid ( https://druid.apache.org/ ) - a database for storing analytics and statistics. Open Source.
• EDA ( https://eda.jortilles.com/en/jortilles-english/ ) - Open source analytics system
